Welcome to My Kristallnacht

I was born on November 16, 1946 in Boyle Heights, Northeast of Chinatown. Jews from everywhere in Europe and the States settled in this little ghetto they affectionately called “The Heights.” It was one of the only neighborhoods with no deed restrictions we could settle in. The original Canter Brothers Delicatessen with kosher salamis hanging in the front window and oak barrels filled with sour pickles out in front was located on Brooklyn Avenue (now Cesar Chavez Boulevard) with other Jewish shops. I experienced overt in-your-face- antisemitism only once: a playmate from Mott Street called me a kike. His parents must have hated the Jews. My parent’s generation played it real cool, they liked to Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye. Gentiles were able to keep us out, they were not able to keep us down. Life was a ball until the White Fence gang drove us out.

In 1946, German cities were in rubble like Gaza’s cities are now. Evil has to be obliterated. DP camps in Europe were chockablock with lost souls searching for shards of shattered lives. Some survivors were living in the camps, preserving them as evidence. “Gleaners” were sifting through the crematoria ash pits for gold teeth and jewelry the Nazis overlooked. The darkness of genocide had not lifted, no place felt sure.

By tradition, my mother was supposed to have named me after my paternal grandfather, Nochum. But terrifying stories of Nazi atrocities — outdone by Palestinian terrorists on October 7 — were reported daily over radio broadcasts by Lowell Thomas and Walter Winchell. Emaciated corpses stacked like matchsticks in the camps appeared on jaunty Movietone news reels in smokefilled theaters. My mother played it safe and gave me the gentile moniker, Noel.

The world before my birth was described by Susan Warsinger, a Jewish citizen of Bad Krueznach. As she  testified to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on November 10, 1938—the second night of Kristallnacht:

”…. All of a sudden some bricks and rocks were being thrown through our window …. And [my little brother] went to the window to check to see what was going on. And he told me that it was the people… our neighbors. The people of our town were throwing bricks and rocks through the window. And he told me that the civil policeman in our town was standing on the edge of the crowd and he didn’t do anything about it. So we became very frightened.  …. Some of the people had uprooted a telephone pole and smashed the front door down. … [My family and I hid in the attic and] remained in that attic for three days.”

Nearly 80 years later,  on October 25, 2023, Jake Novak, a past media director for the Israeli Consulate in New York, posted the following message on Twitter:

“My sources tell me several Jewish students  @Cooperunion [a university in New York City] are currently locked in the school library as a pro- Hamas rally outside of the Cooper Union building learnt  the Jews were afraid and sitting in the library, then brought the protest inside and are barricading all exits.  Police have been called for 40 minutes and are afraid to get involved. Security locked the students in as they are worried, they cannot protect the Jews.”

The policeman in Bad Krueznach had been ordered by Heinrich Himmler, Director of all German police, to stand down. The New York City police, once the world’s premier police department, was afraid to act. So afraid NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell told reporters, “There were no direct threats.” Denial of truth is a symptom of tyranny.

On October 6, my place in Los Angeles, the United States, and the world felt secure. Following October 7, and the tempest of hatred for the Jews that followed, an old feeling of doubt about our place in the world came back to me.

I believe we are at another beginning, another Kristallnacht. We are watching injustice metastasize on our iPhones. But for the support of a thin and demographically challenged majority of the Democratic Party in alliance with Republicans, America might withdraw her support of Israel and let the Islamic butchers and rapists have their way with the Israelis and their land of milk and honey. As the Israelis mount their counteroffensive there is a cry for a ceasefire along with handwringing about how much longer “the world” will support Israel’s fight for survival. To those who worry I ask, Where was the world when box cars packed with the living dead clacked down tracks to death camp crematoria spewing ash that covered the land in a silent shroud of the vanquished?

As I watched our two-year-old granddaughter play on the first night of Chanukah, I imagined how her life will be in decades to come. Our public spaces have been cleansed of God. It is forbidden to display the Ten Commandments in school classrooms. Grade school boys and girls are taught their choices about gender and sexual behavior, but they are not allowed to see commandments like “Thou Shall Not Murder.” We have lost the will to choose between Good and Evil. I fear that no matter how much wealth we create or how powerful our weapons become, my granddaughter’s future will be dangerous if we do not find our way back to God.

Noel Anenberg is the author of “The Dog Boy,” about life in Boyle Heights after WWII.