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Kristallnacht—The Night of Broken Glass

I tell my son he must not make a sound.
I whisper, “Karl, this attic is our haven.
Don’t cry! Don’t let the brown shirts know we’re here!”
Alfrida’s shaking. I must act much braver
Than what I feel. What if they burn the shop?
I hear them smash our windows. I see flames
From Auguststrasse, from our synagogue.
On this day starts the war against the Jews.
.
I hear them scatter my whole inventory—
The coffee beans I peddle to Berlin.
But never more. I dare not show despair.
My pulse is racing. Why are we despised?
Why do they hate us so, why must my Karl
Be raised to think he’s less than other men?
We’re loathed though we have always been good Germans!
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That crashing noise…! The acrid smell of smoke…!
The Polizei look on but do not help.
Sharp shards of broken glass fill up the street
And one day may well lend this day its name.
The wireless is on but very low.
The BBC reports the shattering
.
Of windows owned by Jews—our homes, our shops—
Throughout all Germany and Austria;
And synagogues are burning by the hundreds.
Alfrida grips my hand when we hear news
That they are now arresting Jewish men
.
And sending them to concentration camps.
They say the murders number in the hundreds
As SS men direct the Hitler Youth
To laugh and hoot, to catcall, sneer and spit
.
While learning how to burn and burn and burn.
As brownshirts mob the Platz at Brandenburg,
Alfrida, Karl and I dream of Amerika.
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The floorboards creak. I shake. We hold our breath.
Eyes closed, I whisper “God in Heaven, when
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Will it be safe so that we can come out?”
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Poet’s Note

Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—was a pogrom carried out against the Jews of Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938 by the Nazi SA and SS paramilitary forces with participation by Hitler Youth and many German civilians. The name comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom (sic) Rath  by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jew living in Paris.
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Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers and torches. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews were murdered. When post-arrest trauma and suicides were factored in, reports put the figure close to 650. Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
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Brian Yapko is a retired lawyer whose poetry has appeared in over fifty journals.  He is the winner of the 2023 SCP International Poetry Competition. Brian is also the author of several short stories, the science fiction novel El Nuevo Mundo and the gothic archaeological novel  Bleeding Stone.  He lives in Wimauma, Florida.

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29 Responses

  2. Michael Pietrack

    Nice job of capturing the fear of the moment and the injustice of the situation. I love the narrative nature of the poem that put us right inside the action. Gripping from the go! I must admit, though, that as the brownshirts were searching, I was searching for a rhyme scheme.

    Reply
    • Brian A. Yapko

      Thank you so much, Michael! This is one of those poems where I felt rhyme would actually be intrusive because of the urgency of the situation. I get that blank verse can sometimes be disappointing for its lack of rhyme, but in this case I felt the risk was necessary.

      Reply
  3. Roy Eugene Peterson

    This story not only is a poignant reminder of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis, but a foreshadowing of what could happen again given the unabated hate in the world engendered by the political left. This story was told almost as if the author were there and is done in brilliant detail with haunting scenes reflected in our history books for those who have studied history and absorbed the meaning of historical facts. I note the fascinating reduction from verse to verse in the number of lines that make an indelible impact and imprint on the mind. For once I have ignored the lack of rhyme of a blank verse poem, since the intention and intensity are so profound.

    Reply
    • Brian A. Yapko

      Thank you so much for reading and commenting, Roy. I was hoping you would read this even though I know that blank verse is not your favorite style of poetry. I’m grateful that you stuck with it, accurately read my intent and understood my feelings about why it was necessary in this case. As you note, this is not only a historical piece but a cautionary one which hopes to spark the shock of recognition in current events. This is one of those rare cases where urgency could not wait for rhyme to catch up.

      Reply
  4. Mark Stellinga

    Brian, this is one of the most painful-to-read pieces I’ve ever confronted. With it you deftly resuscitate what we must never allow to expire – our knowledge of just how incredibly inhuman man can be. A very tough piece to read – and write – without tears. Bravo. 🙁

    Reply
    • Brian A. Yapko

      Thank you very much, Mark, for your emotional reaction to the piece. It is so sadly true — “how incredibly inhuman man can be.” At the time of writing this, the anti-Israel/antisemitic encampments had token over all of the universities, including my alma mater U.C.L.A. I worried that as the months passed, this piece would lose relevancy. I am horrified to see that this was not something I needed to worry about. Pro-terrorist camps are back, antisemitism is rampant and one can only imagine what horrors will take place under a Harris presidency as Iran is coddled, and Israel and the Jewish people even more vilified than now.

      Reply
  5. Joseph S. Salemi

    Yes, it would have been inappropriate to use rhyme in such a poem. It would have taken away from the immediacy and urgency of the speaker’s terror. And while I understand LTC Peterson’s point about the reduction of the number of lines in each successive section, I do think that the spaces between sections 5 and 6 (and also 7 and 8) could be omitted, thus giving a greater tightness to the poem. Too much line spacing throws you into free-verse territory.

    I’m not saying that you have to finish every section with an end-stopped line. If we can enjamb between separate quatrains in a traditional rhymed poem, it can also be done with blank verse in this case. But as a general rule I think that a typographical layout should never distract the reader, or call attention to itself. With this poem, on such a momentously serious subject, the rule is very important.

    Reply
    • Brian A. Yapko

      Joe, thank you so much for reading and commenting and for making a very sharp observation regarding how this poem appears to approach free verse. From my standpoint, I thought I was borrowing the structure of this poem from “shape” poetry (which, to my surprise, I note is actually an SCP recognized category of poem!) But by doing so I violated one of my own personal rules regarding poetry, which is: if the effect you are seeking cannot be organically read and understood by a blind person, it isn’t worth doing. I think of poetry as a primarily oral tradition with Homer as its patriarch. And, of course, I think of Milton who would probably have no patience with what I usually think of as a “performance art” feature of contemporary poetry — using the stunt of a shape to create “meaning” where none really exists. So 99% of the time I’m with you on your criticism.

      But what I was going for here was a visual corollary to the speaker’s increasing claustrophobia and loss of choice, along with a sense of the gradual loss of life and liberty to parallel the loss of life and liberty that Jews encountered under the Third Reich. You see the speaker being backed into a corner in which there are no options left. One by one freedoms are lost. One by one, friends are taken and either killed or imprisoned. One by one by one by one. The language may have suffered a little because of the strict, regular diminution in number of lines per stanza, but that steady sense of loss was what I was going for. Alas, perhaps without full success. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s alright. I had a point to make and I think I made it. That being said, it’s not a form I’m wont to repeat.

      Reply
  6. Margaret Coats

    Kristallnacht is a famed event that I first heard of, I believe, when I was in high school. Later saw pictures like the one above. Brian, what you’ve managed to do here is concentrate very, very much in 36 lines. It’s an inauspicious number in itself (6 x 6), and the descending size of sections looks narrowly on to nothing. This poem is not just the imagined emotions of one family man. It is a concise memorial poem, in which emotions are important, but so are the many facts reported as if by a journalist-historian. The man hiding in his attic that very night would not have had all this information.

    Several lines, beginning with line 8, let the reader hear what could be a radio broadcast–but the best informed newsman would have neither all this material, nor the analysis. The identity of the speaker as an historical memorialist shows in lines 8, then 12-15, then 19, and then this sort of speech act overwhelms the poem, down to where “Alfrida, Karl, and I dream of Amerika.” Only the last three lines return to the attic, expressing fearful anticipation of a non-disclosed future for this little family.

    It’s a magnificent strategy, Brian, for a memorial poem that needs to include so much, and one that could well make it into an appropriate anthology. And as others have expressed, today there is a possibility of a similar occurrence. The pretext you note for Kristallnacht is individual crime of a kind that might trigger riots, especially should there exist coordinated groups planning to take advantage of such a thing.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      The coordinated support groups are already there, as was shown in the violent riots and mayhem that occurred in recent years all over the nation. Just ask that poisonous toad, George Soros, who funds them through his Open Society Foundation.

      Reply
      • Brian A. Yapko

        Joe, I couldn’t agree with you more. George Soros believes in nothing but himself and his woke anarchistic causes. The villains we see in James Bond movies could take a page or two out of his vile playbook. He is responsible for more damage to Western civilization than almost anyone else I can think of. I’ve thought of writing a dramatic monologue in his nasty voice but my psychological well being and my desire to stay clear of litigation hold me back.

    • Brian A. Yapko

      Thank you so much, Margaret, for this appreciative comment! I would be so honored to have this poem picked up for an anthology focused on history or Judaica.

      You have accurately looked “behind the curtain” at how I wrote this poem. Of course it’s a fictionalized account — although I admit that my German Lutheran maternal grandfather was the proprietor of a coffee shop in Konigsberg before the War and that this is where I got the idea for a profession for my specifically unnamed speaker. But the whole business with listening to the B.B.C. is pure fiction. The information conveyed within the context of this poem was reported by the B.B.C. the following morning and there’s no way reporters would have been on the ground in Hitler’s Reich reporting adversely on the SS and gestapo in real time. This is where poetic license, I believe, comes in. A quote I recently read from an old critic says: “every poet has the right to evade the prosaic minutiae of fact.” Without the data, mine would have been a much shorter poem simply describing terror. I felt I could do better than that.

      I appreciate your attention to numerology, which in a poem such as this often has interesting resonance, whether as a product of the conscious or the subconsious. In this case, the number 6 can indeed be one of evil portent as we approach the mark of the beast — certainly something to consider when dealing with Nazis. But the number 36 in Jewish lore has some very positive meaning. In the Jewish Midrash it is believed that 36 represents the number of hours of the day before the fourth day of creation when God created the Sun, the Moon and the stars. The number 18 means life (“chai” in Hebrew) and so 36 is lucky as a sign of double life. But most pertinent to my poem, is how 36 applies to the Jewish celebration of freedom associated with Hanukkahh. A total of 36 candles are lit during the 8 days of Hanukkah (not including the “shamash” candle used to light the others.) They are lit with an increase of one additional candle (1 + 2+ 3+ 4+5+6+7+8 = 36) each night until fullness of light is achieved on that last night. In my poem, the reverse takes place until almost nothing is left and freedom is lost.

      Reply
  7. Stephen M. Dickey

    To avoid a diminished authenticity in your German words, I would recommend adopting the German capitalization of Polizei and Platz (this is standard in English style). Maybe if you have a syllable of wiggle room (since the synagogue was located in the Auguststraße), an article is ordinarily used before German street names (and of other languages such as French), perhaps because the source language uses articles with them.

    Reply
    • Brian A. Yapko

      Thank you so much for this, Stephen. I always want to make my poems the best they can be and so I am going to follow your suggestions of capitalizing the nouns. I don’t have the wiggle-room on Auguststrasse, so I’m going to leave that as is. I’ve heard German place names in English contexts used without an article (I’m recalling Friedrichstrasse being mentioned in “Grand Hotel” and “Unter den Linden” in some other context.) Sometimes proper German usage just doesn’t translate well. When referring to Victor Frankenstein, for example, it would be cumbersome for Mary Shelley (or anyone!) to refer to him as Herr Doktor Frankenstein even though it would be good usage. So I guess — at least for me — it depends on the context, how important it is, and what it adds or detracts from the work. In my Krystallnacht poem I don’t feel it adds enough to justify the revision. But thanks for giving me something to consider and for the possibility in the future.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        The Germans are truly obsessed when it comes to titles and official ranks. It is actually possible for a German academic, if he happens to have two doctoral degrees, to be called Herr Professor Doktor Doktor Schmidt.

  8. Paul A. Freeman

    ‘Kristallnacht—The Night of Broken Glass’ highlights how the lives of a minority can change overnight when simmering, propaganda-fuelled hatred erupts into violence, and the hatred and violence become normalised leading to crimes beyond imagination.

    This poem is a timely warning. Thanks for this, Brian.

    Reply
    • Brian A. Yapko

      Thank you very much indeed, Paul. Hatred and violence against an innocent minority doesn’t belong anywhere at any time. I’m glad it is being received as intended — a cautionary piece with contemporary implications.

      Reply
  9. Michael Vanyukov

    Brian, this is one of the best I’ve ever read on the topic. It most certainly creates the unfolding and anticipation of the horror to happen, but also allows drawing parallels with what we have been seeing lately. Replace “Jews” with “Zionists,” as per the KGB recipe, and the rest will be easy to translate into the present. No, there are no concentration camps, but Hamas thinks, right in its charter, that Israel, transmogrified from the safe haven into its antithesis, is the place that facilitates the quick disposal of the entirety of the Jews. There is no difference between the horror in the poem and the nightmare that is still ongoing. During the San Francisco 2020 BLM pogrom, the Jewish stores and synagogues were attacked under “Free Palestine!” slogan, the progressives’ euphemism for “Kill the Jews!” The Kristallnacht has never ended.

    Reply
    • Brian A. Yapko

      Michael, I’m so glad to see you here and especially appreciative of your reading and commenting on this poem. First, thank you for the praise. When the Holocaust is the subject of a poem it requires a lot of effort to get the tone right so that it doesn’t come off as vulgar or, in the other direction, unbearable. You saw exactly where I was going with this — Kristallnacht is taking place today. It never ended. “Free Palestine” signs and “From the River to the Sea” are merely codes for annihilation of the Jews, in Israel and beyond. Most non-Jews (and many leftist Jews) have not recognized this yet because they are not the ones who are threatened. But they will be. Once the terrorists are done with Israel and the Jews, there will be new enemies who they will seek to hate and destroy. A free America is one of them.

      Reply
      • Michael Vanyukov

        Thank you, Brian, very much. Our species is known for having
        very poor capacity to learn from the past and on the mistakes of others. This leaves me very skeptical about the future of freedom in this country. Its evolution, or rather devolving, seems rampant and leading to what you are afraid of, without even external enemies’ direct attacks but from inside, facilitated by electing progressives, if not this time then the next. Elections by themselves, whatever the outcome, are an indicator of where this country is going, with open communists and antisemites not just tolerated but becoming mainstream. There is no principled difference between totalitarians’ flavors. Stalin died just before he was to accomplish genocide of the Jews in the USSR. He has his successors here in the US – to do away with the Jews and freedom.

  10. David Whippman

    Brian, this poem is what might be called horribly topical. It seems the only way things have changed is that many of today’s brownshirts call themselves liberals, while supporting groups that espouse theocratic, genocidal tyranny.
    I take your point about rhyme, there would have been a danger of the poem appearing trite, and the subject is far too serious for that.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Left-liberals are the ones who are pushing for a totalitarian, one-world, bureaucratically regulated planet under the control of an elite composed of themselves and their toadies. There isn’t an aspect of life that they do not wish to control and manage, in complete disregard of the wishes of the populace.

      In that sense they are very much the new Nazi Party, for the Nazis also demanded that every single facet of life in Germany be “coordinated” to be in accord with Nazi policy and tenets. You couldn’t even have a chess club or a stamp-collectors’ society unless it was consciously Nazified.

      A new Kristallnacht is now in the works, consciously abetted by a Democrat Party that is desperate to keep Muslim voters in Michigan happy.

      Reply
      • Brian Yapko

        Thank you for this additional insightful comment, Joe. I think you are right about them being the new Nazi party. And how they seem to revel in it. As for the Democrats, I have the feeling this is about more than Michigan. It seems to be the inevitable result of their woke, critical race theory policies. I think they’re relieved that the masks and girdles have come off and they can now spout hate against Jews and be praised for it. It’s sick and it’s sickening.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        Yes, I agree with that, all the way. I think a good way to gauge how someone would have acted in Nazi Germany is to see how he reacts to the horrors of the Democratic Party today.

    • Brian Yapko

      Thank you, David, for a comment that is painful to read but so appreciated. I’m glad that you grasped the contemporary implications of the piece and am deeply saddened that such observations are needed. The UK, as I understand it, is more antisemitic now than it has ever been before (although much of the U.S. is not far behind.) The cause on both of the pond seems to be those groups that espouse theocratic, genocidal tyranny joined by ignorant but passionate ideologues on the left. What Lord-of-the Flies children they are. People now have a great deal of trouble recognizing who the monsters are. How hard is it? Too identify those who would destroy rather than create? Who would manufacture grievances and then kill for them? Who would bully and then call the victims the bulliers? And why are so many eager to believe the side of injustice purportedly in the name of justice? The moral inversions are horrific and the lack of moral clarity truly damning.

      Reply
  11. Joshua C. Frank

    Brian, I’ve waited to comment on this one because I can’t think of anything to say given that what you’ve portrayed of that time is so horrific… but I guess that in itself is a sign of how powerful the poem is. Well done.

    Reply
    • Brian A. Yapko

      Josh, thank you so much for reading and commenting on this poem. As Israel is now facing serious attack from Iran while our so-called “leaders” dither and let our closest ally go it alone, this poem now has special meaning. The genocide of the Jews (and not by them) is always on the table. And with this horror taking place, I too find myself unable to think of more to say. Other than that your support is greatly appreciated.

      Reply

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