There are only two disappointments in Gerald Schwab’s The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan.
One is the zong-I’m-blind! DayGlo op art cover. I mean, really. For god’s sake this is a $117 book, and Herschel Grynszpan was a gorgeous guy. Apparently the French police didn’t take enough pictures after they arrested him, for not many of those snapshots have seen the light of day. The least the publisher could do is slap one of the few extant images on the cover instead of that ghastly red text.
The other regret is that Schwab didn’t say much about himself. A few sketchy sentences in the preface describe how his father was arrested with thousands of others during Kristallnacht and sent to Dachau; how Gerald joined the Kindertransport and lived on a Swiss farm until reunited with his parents, how the family emigrated to the U.S. in 1940 when he was 15; how he returned as a combat soldier several years later, then remained in Germany to serve as a translator during the Nuremberg trials at only 20 years of age. It was during the trials that he met a clerk who’d been on duty the fateful day Grynszpan went to the embassy armed with a 6.35 gauge revolver and a box of 25 bullets.
But otherwise the author said little about his own life, and I was forced to go to the U.S. Holocaust Museum for even the barest facts. These events certainly merit their own book, and at 86 he might not have much longer to pen them, assuming he’s still alive.
Just printing this book was eventful, as the State Department prohibited its publication until all text unflattering to the French foreign minister was removed, since he was then serving in the National Assembly. Schwab was thus forced to shelve the project for some 20 years. Thankfully, he never lost interest in the subject, and continued collecting evidence on the case in the meantime.
Sadly, it’s a story skimped over in many public schools. A friend on Twitter told me she’d never even heard of Herschel Grynszpan or his part in Kristallnacht until I brought it to her attention. That’s like teaching the history of World War I but omitting Gavrilo Princip. Just as Princip incited the first World War when he assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, Herschel Grynszpan ignited the Holocaust, although in his case it was unintentional. In his own words, as reported in Le Temps on November 10, 1938:
It was not with hatred or for vengeance against any particular person that I acted, but because of love for my parents and for my people who were unjustly subjected to outrageous treatment. Nevertheless, this act was distasteful to me and I deeply regret it. However, I had no other means of demonstrating my feelings. It was the constantly gnawing idea of the suffering of my race which obsessed me. For 28 years my parents resided in Hanover. They had set up a modest business which was destroyed overnight. They were stripped of everything and expelled. It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish. I am not a dog. I have the right to live. My people have a right to exist on this earth. And yet everywhere they are hunted down like animals.
In October of 1938 the Grynszpan family had been deported from Germany to Poland along with 17,000 other Jews. The Polish government refused to accept the refugees, so they were detained on the border in a kind of no man’s land, with no food, no homes, no money. Herschel’s sister sent him a postcard begging for assistance, but what could he do for them when he was stranded in Paris? Frustrated and upset, he wandered aimlessly down the Rue du Faubourg St. Martin one evening until he chanced upon a small weapons shop with an impressive display of revolvers in the window. According to his testimony, it was then that a thought cemented in his conscious which would have horrific consequences for millions of Jews.
The next morning he purchased a small caliber handgun and headed to the German embassy with a view toward assassinating the ambassador, but the ambassador wasn’t in. Instead, Grynszpan was shown into the office of the Legationsskretär, the Secretary of Legation Ernst vom Rath, and asked to have a seat. There, he blasted the diplomat five times in the hope of drawing world attention to Nazi atrocities and succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. The German government used vom Rath’s death as the justification for launching the greatest pogrom against the Jews up to that time, the horror known as Crystal Night, which history has named the official beginning of the holocaust.
In the saddest of all ironies, Grynszpan quite probably killed one of his own, for vom Rath was apparently a half-hearted Nazi at best. In the early thirties he’d embraced the party line, but as the message became more and more vitriolic, vom Rath lost faith in the government he’d once so avidly supported. Hitler used his death to gather this lost sheep back into the Nazi fold, and gave vom Rath the state funeral he himself would have liked to have.
Gerald Schwab brilliantly and engagingly traces Grynszpan’s steps that day as he purchased the weapon and embraced destiny. Remarkably, one comes away feeling sympathy for Grynszpan, pity for vom Rath, admiration for the French and an understanding of Nazi propaganda.
Most historians assume that Grynszpan was executed by the Nazis sometime between 1942 and 1945. Schwab suggests a possible moment, and possible last words, as Herschel himself believed a transport ordered on January 28, 1945 had been sent to ferry him to his death. According to a fellow prisoner at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he bid fellow prisoners farewell with the words, “The time has come; they want to kill me.” It is known that on the night of January 28/29, some 686 political prisoners were shot at Sonnenburg by an SS execution squad. Was Grynszpan among them?
We may never know for certain; but unless new evidence comes to light, there will definitely never be a more comprehensive or compelling account than Gerald Schwab’s.
