NORTH ANDOVER — When Werner Salinger was 6 years old, his parents told him they were going on a “big adventure.”
Salinger, now 91, remembers watching from his family’s second-floor home in the middle of Berlin as glass was shattered throughout the streets, bodies were on the ground, and stores were ransacked on Nov. 9, 1938, which later became known as Kristallnacht.
For two days, Nazis pillaged over 7,000 Jewish-owned schools, homes, hospitals and synagogues. More than 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Today, historians view Kristallnacht, or the “night of broken glass,” as a prelude to what was to come throughout the Holocaust.
Just two months later Salinger’s family fled. They had a visa for the United States starting in the middle of February 1938. Salinger’s parents, however, “felt they had to get out as quickly as they could,” he said. In January, the Salingers moved to London before traveling overseas.
“I had a very normal childhood in Berlin until Hitler came to power,” Salinger said during a Zoom presentation hosted by the Lappin Foundation Thursday night. “Absent that (visa), I probably would have gone up in smoke like the other 6 million.”
Salinger, who lives in Wayland today, spoke ahead of the commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is annually observed Jan. 27. He now speaks with groups, including classrooms, about his life and the Holocaust.
“The message to kids when I talk to schools is to be upstanders. Don’t be bystanders,” Salinger said. “Bystanders allow these kinds of dreadful things to happen that must never happen again.
And this is why Holocaust education is important, according to Patricia Fontaine, a professor in the UMass Lowell School of Education.
“I think it’s important and timely,” Fontaine said. “The Holocaust is not just an event.”
Fontaine teaches undergraduates as they prepare to become kindergarten through 12th grade teachers. There is nothing in the Massachusetts course framework, however, for these aspiring educators to teach about the Holocaust in middle school, Fontaine said.
“For high school, it is required and some schools teach it as a course,” Fontaine said. “But often schools teach it as a point in history.”
Fontaine said about 90% of her students had “heard about” the Holocaust prior to her freshman and sophomore classes.
“But that’s about it,” she said, adding that the Holocaust is taught within the World War II context and not given the space, explanation and commemoration it deserves.
This leads to Fontaine’s “worry” that the stories, like Salinger’s, will be forgotten. She said the Holocaust and other historical events need to be looked at as a “story of individuals” rather than as fact.
“They can’t tell fact from fiction (on social media),” Fontaine said, “and that’s why we need to teach it over and over again.”
If they are not discussed properly or deniers infiltrate the media, Fontaine said it will cause great damage, especially now as the Israeli-Hamas war has forged on for almost four months.
The crisis in the Middle East has raised a lot of debate throughout the Merrimack Valley and beyond. The Anti-Defamation League has tracked a surge in incidents against the Jewish community since the Hamas attacks on Israel. The League announced earlier this month that there has been a 360% jump in antisemitic incidents between Oct. 7 and Jan. 7, compared to the same period a year earlier.
“The American Jewish community is facing a threat level that’s now unprecedented in modern history,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “It’s shocking that we’ve recorded more antisemitic acts in three months than we usually would in an entire year.”
The ADL’s report documented 3,283 antisemitic incidents in those three months. At least 628 were reported against Jewish institutions, and 505 occurred on college campuses.
Fontaine said proper education could help curb these incidents.
“Of course, all over the world, they do happen. Genocides take place in other countries,” Salinger said. “But the goal is never again.”
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