Eighty-seven years after surviving the terror of Kristallnacht, a 101-year-old Holocaust survivor says the world today feels alarmingly similar to Nazi Germany in 1938.
Walter Bingham was 14 years old when Nazis and other Germans attacked Jewish businesses, stores, homes and places of worship.
During Kristallnacht, commonly referred to as the “Night of Broken Glass,” Nazis burned more than 1,400 synagogues, vandalized thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, broke into Jewish people’s apartments and homes, and desecrated Jewish religious objects, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Roughly 26,000 men were also arrested and placed in concentration camps because they were Jewish.
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Bingham, 101, told The Associated Press that the current climate against Jews and the rising instances of antisemitism in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war are reminiscent of those dark times.
“We live in an era equivalent to 1938, where synagogues are burned, and people in the street are attacked,” he said.
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A synagogue in Manchester was the target of a deadly terrorist attack on Yom Kippur in October when a man rammed a car into worshippers and stabbed victims outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, killing two Jewish men.
A synagogue in Melbourne, Australia, was also set ablaze last year in an act that was condemned as an antisemitic attack by the country’s prime minister.
In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the United States — a 5% increase from 2023, a 344% increase over the past five years, and an 893% increase over the past decade.
“Antisemitism, I don’t think, will ever fully disappear because it’s the panacea for all ills of the world,” Bingham told The Associated Press.
He said living in today’s climate feels eerily similar to Germany before the war, but he sees one important distinction.
“In those days, the Jewish mentality was apologetic,” Bingham explained. “Please don’t do anything to me, I won’t do anything to you.”
“Today, we have, thank God, the state of Israel, a very strong state,” he said. “And whereas antisemitism is still on the increase, the one thing that will not happen would be a Holocaust, because the state will see to it” that doesn’t happen.