REVIEW

NOVEMBER 7, 1938. A moody looking teenager walked into the German Embassy in Paris, which was proudly flying its swastika flag. In the boy’s pocket was a small pistol he’d bought earlier.

He asked to speak to an official and was sent in to talk to a young lawyer called Ernst vom Rath. Seated behind his desk, vom Rath greeted the boy politely. The boy sat down awkwardly and then, shouting out that he was acting on behalf of the persecuted Jews, he pulled out the gun and fired.

His aiming was “atrocious”, as it commonly is among those not properly practiced in the use of guns. Three of his five bullets missed vom Rath entirely, one passed through him and did no harm, but the other damaged his spleen, pancreas and stomach. Vom Rath was doomed: he took two days to die from his gunshot wounds.

Stephen Koch provides a gripping book and narrative which tells the whole story of the 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, who made history by being the first Jew to take up arms against the Nazi regime.

Yet the assassination and its tragic aftermath are full of bitter ironies. For one thing, poor Ernst vom Rath was, in fact, no Nazi, but rather a vociferous critic of the government he was serving: Grynszpan “very likely shot the one man in the embassy who secretly agreed with him”.

It’s seductive to imagine Herschel Grynszpan’s act as one of supreme defiance on behalf of his people – as a heroic, youthful stand against Fascism, while dithering politicians were kowtowing, appeasing and making “peace at any price”.

THE immediate and devastating effect of the shooting, though, was an even more terrible persecution of the Jews. For the Nazis used it as an excuse to unleash Kristallnacht, the pogrom that many consider to be an initiating event of the Holocaust.

Just hours after the death of vom Rath was announced, Synagogues across Germany were burned to the ground, Jewish shops and businesses were looted and destroyed and some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, stripped of their property and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen – prison camps, not yet death camps.

Elsewhere on that fatal night, more than 100 Jews were murdered by knifing, burning or brutal beating.

Herschel Grynszpan, pacing in his French prison cell, was in agony on hearing the news. “At night,” he wrote to a friend, “I dream about the ghetto, about Jewish women and children running away . . . God, oh my God! I didn’t want that.”

The funeral of vom Rath was an absurdly grandiose affair, staged in a huge hall in Dusseldorf. The dead man was hailed as “the first martyr to fall for the Third Reich” and his coffin was illuminated by huge spotlights “a la 20th Century Fox”.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ evil genius of propaganda, was given space to broadcast the party’s official interpretation of the assassination. “The Jew Grynszpan represents world Jewry.” He added: “The shooting in Paris was world Jewry’s attempt to shoot down the German people”. Any reprisals were therefore being justified.

Indeed, in the world view of the Nazis, the Jews and the Bolsheviks – more or less the same thing, as they saw it – were committed to a war of genocide against the Aryan/Germanic people, who must therefore fight a titanic, apocalyptic war of self-defence to save themselves.

Herschel, a Polish Jew by origin, was born and raised in Hanover. He was a clever, somewhat sickly boy, standing barely 5ft, dark-eyed and given to silent brooding.

When he was 15, he was sent to Paris to live with his aunt and uncle, while his family remained in Germany. Despite increasing persecution, they trusted that “Germany was still a nation of laws”.

On October 27, 1938, there came a knock on their door and the Grynszpan family were told to report to the police station – “a mere formality”. Taking only their coats and passports, they complied.

They never saw their home of more than 20 years again.

Along with some 18,000 other Polish Jews from all over Germany, the family were marched to the train station. Once on a train, the Gestapo moved down the crowded carriages, confiscating everything of value from the helpless passengers.

Two kilometres short of the Polish border, they were herded off the train and marched through the driving rain.

The sick and elderly who couldn’t walk were beaten in bloody savage attacks. “They shouted, ‘Run! Run!’” recalled Herschel’s father, Sendel, in later years.

Finally, they were shoved across the border and abandoned without any money, food, clothes or shelter.

On November 3, in Paris, Herschel received a distressing postcard from his sister – the final straw that triggered the murder of Ernst vom Rath.

On it, Berta wrote about their “great misfortune”, saying the family had no money. She begged for him to send some. But her brother had no money to send.

They were living in an army barracks, sleeping on sacks stuffed with straw, eating gruel and “snatching at bread tossed into the starving throng from trucks . . . In 11 days, nobody had been able to change clothes.”

Later, Berta would be just one more victim who vanished in the Holocaust, although we do not know the details. Miraculously, the rest of Herschel’s family survived and finally made it to Israel after the war.

When France fell in 1940, some 19 months after the killing of vom Rath, young Herschel was handed over by French authorities to the Gestapo, who planned to use him for a show trial to prove that “it was the Jews who started it”. But the trial never happened.

COMPLEX legal wranglings ensued, in which, the author suggests, Herschel himself played a cunning role – even at one time claiming that the real reason he had shot vom Rath was because they were homosexual lovers.

It was a lie, but a clever lie, embarrassing the Nazis and making it impossible for them to use the case as evidence of a widespread Jewish conspiracy.

Herschel’s dignified words are also on record: “It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish . . . My people have a right to exist on this Earth.”

His final fate, like that of so many in this most awful of all wars, is unknown, but he certainly died before its end. Despite the uncertainty, Koch writes him the most handsome of epitaphs:

“He had been history’s pawn, a brave and foolish boy . . . he died for his people, forgotten and alone.”