Only to the very young does the reach of 70 years seem  so far away as to be, essentially, beyond time. But even we who were born in the second half of the last century well understood by the occasional tears in our parents’ eyes, that sometimes even 70 years could seem as yesterday, so fresh are the unhealed and unhealable wounds of memory.

Thus, it is with what for most of us is an entry in the history books but for some is still yesterday’s horror: the memory of the frenzied pogrom of rioting, looting, hatred and murder by the Nazis against the Jews of Germany and Austria on Nov. 10, 1938.

In one ugly, horrific night, 267 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 stores were ransacked, 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps and 91 Jews were killed.

Above the screams of terrified men, women and children, and the derisive laughter and taunting of the Nazi thugs, and the constant crackling of cinders from the bonfires of the pagan burning of holy books and other personal possessions of the humiliated Jews, one could hear throughout Germany the crash and splinter of the ubiquitous shattering of glass.   

The Nazis themselves called that nightmarish night Kristallnacht, the night of shattered glass. Renowned historian Martin Gilbert has written of that name: “For the perpetrators of the destruction the name reflected their sense both of triumph and contempt: triumph at what they had destroyed, laugher at the thought of the sound of breaking glass.” It is an unsavoury oddity of history that the name we use today to speak and write about that night is the one given to it by the howling, sadistic Nazis themselves.

Two days after the pogrom, Hitler fined all of German Jewry the sum of 1 billion Reichmarks for the damage caused to the state by the Nov. 10 disturbances. The money was collected, as Gilbert also wrote, “by the compulsory confiscation of 20 per cent of the property of every German Jew.”

Three days later, Jewish children were prohibited from attending German schools.

The Nazi “excesses” of Nov. 10 and the ensuing decrees against the Jews finally opened the eyes of the international world to the violent, racist, xenophobic nature of the Nazis.

But even with eyes wide open, the world did not fully see and truly comprehend. That is why we recall that day 70 years ago as if it were yesterday. Because we do remember.