The dreadful word

Only mushrooms sprout unexpectedly, but it takes water and humidity. In the dry season, very few mushrooms break through the soil and surface to the light. The horrors of that night, called “Kristallnacht”, had been carefully prepared, with the water of anti-Semitism, of Hitler’s propaganda, in the violence of consciences. The progress of Nazism through the heart of Europe was doomed to be incessant: on August 17 1938, Jews were forced to take the name of Sarah or Israel; in October of the same year the “J” of ‘Jude’ had to be stamped on all Jewish passports. The situation was falling into a chasm, and the night of November 9, it flared up, chiefly on the part of the Nazi SA. On November 11, the manifest aftermath: on “Kristallnacht” (the Night of Broken Glass), – that refers to the broken windows of houses and shops – 36 Jews were murdered, 36 were seriously injured, 815 stores were ransacked, 29 warehouses, 171 homes and 191 synagogues were set to fire, some 20thousand Jews were arrested. The windows of some 7500 Jewish stores were shattered. In his prayer book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer underlined psalm 74: “They have burned up all the Synagogues of God in the land”, and added a note: “11.9.38”. Teresa Benedict of the Cross, Patron Saint of Europe, was already a Carmelite nun at the time, and was the first to learn of the tragic circumstance at her monastery in Cologne, since in that period she gave shelter to all those who went knocking on the doors of the Carmelites for refuge. Thus recalls a friend of the nuns: «On November 9 1938 in Euskirchen, I witnessed the Nazi rage against the home of the Jews and the burning of the synagogue. On the same day I went to the Servant of God at the Carmel and referred what I had seen. As I stood at the revolving door, I was unable to see her face, but I noticed she was growing increasingly silent and sad. She did not bewail; she said that the Lord would have avenged His people’.How? We ask ourselves today. With a kind of revenge that is far-off from our human revenges. It is the ever-merciful and compassionate act of God in history and in people’s hearts. Today, the German pope revealed to us that since then he is pained, since that tragic night his heart was imprinted with the terrifying word ‘Shoah’. It exploded in his homeland, Germany, amidst his people who had rich cultural and humanitarian traditions.It is a pain that his own person, that is that of a priest consecrated to God for the good of mankind, macerated in the historical and theological reflection, as also in oration and oblation.Since then, that young man bears a scar steeped in the semicircular map of the Shoah extending anticlockwise from Norway to Romania, in whose centre was Auschwitz: it’s the certainty that the Shoah is the extermination conveyed by Nazi insanity, the contaminating profanation of the very concept of man. The expression of this pain isn’t blatant or high-sounding; it isn’t aimed at winning public attention or at economic gains. Rather, it indicates the path leading to salvation developed in dignity. And which today offers to all of Europe and to the world as a whole, the main lines of the resolution.That young man, Joseph, today Benedict XVI, didn’t remove or erase the memory of that tragic night. He sees it for what is truly was: a horror. It must never happen again, and thus all forms and germs of “anti-Semitism and discrimination” must be foiled. The pope addressed his words to the youth, to those people who still have the power to shape hearts and minds and who may concretely change those social structures imbued with the mystery of inequality which never wins, even when it seems to prevail, second-last of the successful ultimate realities: “respect and reception”, openness to the others, towards all individuals or communities that do not practice their religion, and “solidarity” to Israel, People of God.