Mônica Bergamo: Jewish Museum of SP will leave lights on in memory of the Crystal Night

The Jewish Museum of São Paulo will leave its lights on throughout the night of this Wednesday (9) and the dawn of Thursday (10) in memory of the episode of the Holocaust that became known as Kristallnacht or Night of Crystals.

The initiative is part of a worldwide campaign entitled “Let There Be Light”.

Occurred from November 9 to 10, 1938, the Nazi attack left around a hundred Jews dead, more than a thousand synagogues destroyed, thousands of Jewish cemeteries, homes and schools vandalized in Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

Thirty thousand Jews were detained, most taken to concentration camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. The attackers were often neighbors or acquaintances of the victims.

It was the Nazis themselves who named the massacre Crystal Night, due to the immense amount of shop windows that were left on the sidewalks. In doing so, they blamed the German Jewish community for the damage, imposing a collective fine equivalent to $400 million (in 1938 rates, $7.2 billion today), according to the Holocaust Museum.

If before they were already obliged to wear the Star of David, by the end of that year Jews would be banned from attending schools and most public places, a situation that progressively worsened as the regime implemented the Final Solution.

_{with BIANKA VIEIRA, KARINA MATIAS and MANOELLA SMITH}