At Kristallnacht remembrance, Holocaust survivors share stories, film screening shares hope
Alexander Kuechel, a 98-yearold Holocaust survivor from Berlin, remembers watching his father being taken by Nazi soldiers and forced into a concentration camp, during Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass in 1938.
It was the last time Kuechel saw his father, who was one of the of six million Jews killed by the Nazi regime in the targeted killing of Jews before World War II. Kuechel, who spent time in seven camps, is still pained when talking about the memories of those lost in the Holocaust.
The same is true for Stephen “Pista” Nasser, a 91-year-old Hungarian who was the lone member of his family to survive the Holocaust. The family was held at Auschwitz-birkenau in Nazi-occupired Poland around 1943, where several of his relatives were killed — including his brother, who Nasser said died in his arms.
Both Kuechel and Nasser were in attendance Wednesday for the local Jewish community’s remembrance of Kristallnacht. On Nov. 9-10, 1938, Nazi soldiers carried out a pogrom against Jews, destroying thousands of synagogues, and Jewish business, schools and hospitals across Germany and Austria in what many in consider the start of the Holocaust. Thousands of Jewish men, including Kuechel’s dad, were arrested and sent to camps that day.
“Before my brother died, I remember he said, ‘If you would like to keep us happy, keep a smile on your face (for) the rest of your life. As long as you’re smiling, we’ll be smiling with you,’” Nasser said Wednesday during the event at the King David Memorial Chapel and Cemetery. “And I (have) kept it up. And I just feel (them).”
The remembrance included the first of two screenings of “The Essential Link: The Story of Wilfrid Israel,” a 71-minute documentary released in 2017. Another free screening is 7:30 p.m. today at Congregation Ner Tamid in Henderson, where Rabbi Sanford Akselrad will have a pre-screening discussion with the film’s director Yonatan Nir after the 6:15 p.m. services.
Israel was a Jewish man who owned Berlin’s largest department store in the 1930s and saved “tens of thousands of Jews during WWII,” according to a news release from Congregation Ner Tamid.
Israel helped his Jewish employees emigrate, negotiated for the freedom of Jewish and anti-nazi prisoners from German concentration camps, and “played a key role in the Kindertransport operation that saved the lives of nearly 10,000 unac
companied Jewish children who were brought to Britain.”
While the commemoration of Kristallnacht can be considered a sad event, it also presents “an opportunity for (Jews) to remember,” Nir said.
“We don’t want to only remember the concentration camps and ghettos,” Nir said. “We also want to remember the people that were trying, in sometimes the most difficult situations, to do good.”
The screening comes at a time when “antisemitic incidents reached an all-time high in the United States,” according to the Anti-defamation League (ADL). A total of 2,717 incidents were reported in 2021 to the ADL, including assault, harassment, and vandalism of Jewish institutions.
This number was the “highest number of incidents on record since ADL began tracking” in 1979, with an average of more than seven incidents per day and an increase of 34% year over year, the ADL said in a news release earlier this year.
The United States is home to over 7 million Jewish people, 79,800 of which live in Nevada, according to a 2022 survey done by the Jewish Virtual Library.
The ADL has recorded nine incidents of antisemitism in Nevada between 2019 and 2022.
“I’m not only speaking about antisemitism, I’m speaking about human values,” Nir said. “Like, seeing the other — even if (they’re) different from you — as equal to you, as someone that has the same rights like you … to not be persecuted for the color of your skin, for your religion or beliefs.”
Some recent antisemitic incidents in recent weeks have been more prominent.
The rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, made discriminatory social media posts about Jewish people to his millions of followers on social media. And Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving tweeted a link to a film containing antisemitic material.
Nir equated antisemitism to “racism” and said he saw it as a “sickness” that “we have to get out of society anywhere.”
Although he made no specific mentions of recent antisemitic incidents, he believes it is “very stupid” that people — especially those who have suffered from discrimination before — would spread hatred toward others.
Gard Jameson, chairman of the Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada, helped facilitate the movie screenings and Nir appearances, saying in a statement that the credo of interfaith relations is rising up together in unity to discover our diversity.
“This documentary sheds new light on a rarely documented subject of how Jews also put themselves at risk to save their fellow Jews,” Akselrad said in a statement. “This is a fascinating story of courage and heroism.”