Remembering Kristallnacht: Witness says night of terror risks being a lesson not learned

BERLIN -- George Shefi was just 6 years old on Nov. 9, 1938, when his mother kept him home for three days. When he was finally allowed to go out again, his Jewish school inside a Berlin synagogue had been burned down, the Jewish hat store opposite his home had been looted, and the windows of the stationery shop next door had been smashed.The Jewish shop owner “was trying to clean this thing up, and there were, I don’t know, a lot of people, 30, 40, 50, or something, jeering and yelling and saying nasty things,” Shefi recalled during a recent visit to his childhood home in Berlin's Schoeneberg district.Shefi, now 94 and a resident of Jerusalem, was describing Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass” — when Nazis, among them many ordinary Germans, terrorized Jews throughout Germany and Austria. At least 91 people died and 7,500 Jewish businesses were vandalized. More than 1,400 synagogues were targeted by arsonists, according to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.Shefi returned to the German capital 88 years later as one of the last living witnesses of Kristallnacht to share his memories at a time when antisemitism is on the rise again, not only in Germany but in many other co...