Posted by
Billy email MADBillyD@aol.com on Monday, November 10, 2008 1:26:16 PM
The night the rifle butts pounded against his family's door, 16-year-old Joe Boin knew life as he knew it was over.
Soldiers dragged him from the house, knocking his screaming mother and sisters away. The soldiers took him to a marketplace in his hometown of Cottbus, Germany. There, they viciously beat Boin and dozens of other Jewish men. A mob spit on the men, hurled stones and insults at them, urged the soldiers on.
The crowd cheered and Boin watched helplessly as the soldiers pushed old men into a synagogue, then set it afire.
That night, 70 years ago on Nov. 9, the world began to shatter for Boin and millions of other European Jews. Soldiers and civilians torched thousands of synagogues, demolished Jewish homes, beat thousands of people, murdered 91 Jews, and hauled Jewish men away to Nazi concentration camps. The night of state-sanctioned anti-Jewish riots came to be known as "Kristallnacht," or "The Night of Broken Glass."
It was a foreshadowing of the Holocaust that was to come.
Boin, 85, and Bea Karp, 76, are among of a handful of Omahans still living who witnessed Kristallnacht. They are part of a dwindling number, about 35, of Holocaust survivors left in Omaha, once home to nearly 200 survivors.
(We must never forget what happened to our Jewish friends. The evil that was done to them should remind all of us that it is a big fat lie that people are good for the most part and we must do all we can to keep another Holocaust from taking please. Read more of the story above
right here.)