Eighty-seven years ago today the world watched as Jewish homes, shops and synagogues were burnt across Germany and Austria.
Windows were smashed, Torah scrolls set alight, hundreds of synagogues destroyed, 91 Jews murdered and tens of thousands imprisoned. Families who had considered themselves part of the fabric of European life were humiliated and beaten in the streets. It became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
It was not yet the Holocaust, but it was the moment the unthinkable began to feel possible. Years of boycotts, hatred, caricatures and conspiracy had prepared the ground for what many see as the beginning of the long, twisted road that led to the Holocaust. When the attacks came, neighbours turned away, pretending not to see what was happening to their friends and those they had lived alongside for generations. Many look back today and ask: how could the Holocaust have happened in what was one of the most civilised societies in the world?
Kristallnacht offers an uncomfortable answer. It happens when words of hate are tolerated, when lies are given a platform and when silence becomes easier than speaking out. By the time the glass breaks, the silence has already done its work. It is already too late. And that sounds all too familiar to us today across the West, in Europe and here in Britain.
My great-grandmother Lily Ebert, a survivor of Auschwitz, used to remind schoolchildren that the Holocaust didn’t start with the gas chambers. “It started with words,” she said. “With small acts of hatred that people ignored.”
She survived the concentration camp, built a new life in London and spent decades teaching others where hatred leads when it goes unchallenged. She used to say that it didn’t matter what religion, race, or ethnicity we were “when you cut us, it hurts, and we all bleed the same colour: red”.
Today, nearly nine decades after Kristallnacht, her warning feels painfully alive and her message too often ignored. Across Europe, and even here in Britain, Jewish schools and synagogues are protected by police and security, and stand behind security fences with barbed wire. Jewish students are harassed on university campuses, shouted down and told that their pain is “political”.
On social media, antisemitic conspiracies spread faster than truth. Our NHS has doctors who share antisemitic posts, our arts world has pushed Jews to the margins and some parliamentarians even use their privileged positions to launder ideas about Jews that once belonged on the fringes: that Jewish safety is conditional; that Jews are legitimate targets; that Britain belongs more to the mob than to the law. Hate doesn’t disappear - it merely changes its face.
The liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 did not mark the end of the hatred that led to it. What once came from the far right is now found on parts of the far left, who have jumped into bed with Islamist extremists. What once hid behind swastikas now hides behind slogans of “resistance”. Each generation finds new excuses for the same old hatred. And yet, despite everything, there is hope.
After all she endured my great-grandmother refused to lose faith in people. That was her defiance - not revenge or bitterness, but life itself. And I, too, still believe in the British people: in their decency, in their courage to say enough is enough, and to stand with their Jewish neighbours and colleagues against this resurgence of the world’s oldest hatred. In the silent majority that we, the Jewish community, are always told stands with us, I still have faith.
Remembering Kristallnacht is not only about the past. It is about refusing to repeat its patterns in our own time. Eighty-seven years ago, hundreds of synagogues burnt. Yet the Jewish people endured. Our task is not just to remember the glass that shattered - but to make sure the silence that allowed it never returns.