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In her final letter to her husband, in 1942, Salomea wished Nathan a cheerful birthday and hoped they’d have fun “future birthdays with pleasure.”
![In a black and white photo, two men walk past a broken shop window.](https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/montrealgazette/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/f-kristallnacht_bh__u86062.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=288&h=216&sig=JUhjd5-TcUemp7UfXdnD6Q)
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The Montreal Holocaust Museum will commemorate the eighty fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht on Thursday in an occasion together with musical items and dramatic readings of poignant letters from a younger spouse and mom within the Warsaw Ghetto to her husband in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
On Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, all through Germany in addition to Austria and the Sudetenland, which had been annexed by Nazi Germany, 1000’s of Jewish companies had been vandalized and lots of of synagogues broken and burned. Jewish households had been terrorized in their very own houses and 30,000 Jewish males had been arrested and despatched to focus camps.
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In accordance with america Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kristallnacht (the phrase is German for Evening of Damaged Glass, a mirrored image of the sounds of home windows being shattered) represented probably the most necessary turning factors within the antisemitic coverage of the Nazi regime.
The desecration of synagogues strikes a nerve for a lot of Montreal Jews. Police mentioned Tuesday that they’d launched an investigation after what seemed to be firebombs had been thrown in opposition to the entrance door of Congregation Beth Tikvah, a Dollard-des-Ormeaux synagogue, in a single day Monday. Earlier this yr, the entrance of the historic Bagg Road Synagogue in Plateau-Mont-Royal was defaced with swastikas.
“Historians have famous that after the pogrom, anti-Jewish coverage was concentrated increasingly concretely into the arms of the SS,” mentioned the Holocaust Memorial Museum of Kristallnacht. SS members had been the self-described “political troopers” of the Nazi get together. “Furthermore, the passivity with which most German civilians responded to the violence signalled to the Nazi regime that the German public was ready for extra radical measures.”
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Thousands and thousands of Jews turned the targets of additional persecution and genocide.
Nathan Cytryn and Salomea Kazimierska had been married in 1928 in Poland and their son, Jakob, was born in 1929. Quickly after the invasion of Poland by Germany on Sept. 1, 1939, Nathan, who was an officer within the Polish military, was captured by the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany; he was held all through the struggle in a German military prisoner-of-war camp for Polish military officers, Oflag VII-A Murnau.
Between 1939 and 1942, Salomea, by then dwelling in Warsaw, and Nathan exchanged lots of of letters in what was their solely type of communication.
In November 1940, Salomea, her son and her mother and father had been compelled into the Warsaw Ghetto, the biggest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. At its top, as many as 460,000 Jews had been imprisoned within the 1.3-square-mile space. The ghetto was sealed to the skin by the Nazis on Nov. 15. A ten-foot wall round it was topped with barbed wire and anybody caught attempting to flee was shot on sight. Overcrowding and meals shortages meant that, by August 1941, greater than 5,000 folks a month had been dying of hunger and illness.
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Salomea’s father died within the ghetto in April 1941. In the summertime of 1942, Salomea, her son and her mom had been deported in trains to the Treblinka demise camp 80 kilometres northeast of Warsaw, the place they perished. They had been amongst 1000’s of Jews transported to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto between July and September 1942.
In her final letter to her husband, dated July 8, 1942, Salomea wished Nathan a cheerful birthday and expressed the want that they’d be capable of have fun “future birthdays with pleasure” collectively.
Oflag VII-A Murnau was liberated on April 29, 1945 by troops of the U.S. twelfth Armoured Division; Nathan Cytryn immigrated to Canada in 1947 and joined household in Montreal. He remarried and constructed a life.
Salomea’s letters, donated by the Cytryn household to the Montreal Holocaust Museum, had been translated just lately by the Montreal-based Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in Canada, with help from the Convention on Jewish Materials Claims In opposition to Germany and supported by the Basis Remembrance, Duty and Future, a German federal group, and the federal Ministry of Finance in Germany.
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“We’re profoundly grateful for the claims convention’s help, which allowed us to translate Salomea’s letters, uncovering their creator’s experiences dwelling within the Warsaw Ghetto for 2 years,” mentioned Daniel Amar, the museum’s govt director.
Assist from the organizations has additionally allowed for conservation work to be carried out on 40 objects within the museum’s assortment, he mentioned, preserving and digitizing tales to allow future generations to find and analysis the Holocaust via major sources.
Thursday’s commemoration will function readings of letters from Salomea to Nathan by performers with the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre, the resident theatre firm of the Segal Centre for Performing Arts. Musical items might be carried out by Berta Rosenohl and Luis Grinhauz of Musica Camerata Montréal and by Cantor Adam Stotland of Shaare Zion Beth-El Congregation.
Ula Madej-Krupitski, an assistant professor within the division of Jewish research at McGill College, will furnish background on letter-writing from and throughout the ghetto, describe typical options of those letters that she will determine in Salomea’s letters and supply biographical details about the Cytryn household.
The occasion begins Thursday at 7 p.m. on the Montreal Holocaust Museum, 5151 Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd. Though admission is free and open to all, advance registration is inspired at bit.ly/3QvOqMs.
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sschwartz@postmedia.com
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