Is It Good for the Jews? The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby

CHAPTER 1 ASSAULT ON "JEW YORK" Jewish Self-Defense Before the Lobby He was seventeen, sensitive, with brooding eyes, and wept easily; little more than Five feet tall, slender and dark, but handsome. He felt alone, angry, and confused, and outrage overwhelmed him. He was a Jew. And he had a gun. Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was born in Hannover, Germany, but held Polish nationality. In 1938, he had undergone three years of chaos. The Nazis were in power, and he was not allowed to become an apprentice or otherwise gain employment. He wanted to go to Palestine but found no way to get there, even after a year spent studying Hebrew. A visa to the Promised Land was refused him. Finally he went to Belgium, then crossed the border to France without authorization. He was a refugee, an illegal immigrant, non-Christian, unemployed, a troubled youth. He had an uncle and aunt, Abraham and Clara Grynszpan, in Paris. Abraham Grynszpan was a tailor; the family spoke Yiddish better than French. France was unfriendly to Jews fleeing Germany. Herschel could not obtain legal permission to stay, and eventually the French authorities ordered him deported and began, unsuccessfully, to hunt him down. He hid in an attic. He wrote to American president Franklin D. Roosevelt appealing for help for himself and his family. Then, late in 1938, came the expulsion of his father, Zindel, along with his mother, sister, and brother, who, having stayed behind in Germany, were dragged from their Hannover home and sent to Poland. The Poles, in a typical fit of anti-Semitism, had threatened to revoke the passports of Polish citizensmainly Jewsresiding in Germany. The Nazis retorted by deporting some 15,000 Jews, including the Grynszpans. The Jewish victims were refused entry into their alleged Polish homeland, and massed in misery at the border. In Paris, the agitated Herschel argued with his aunt and uncle. He had received a note from the German-Polish frontier describing the conditions his family suffered. He had fantasies of joining the French Foreign Legion, but he had probably been refused a visa to Palestine because of bad health, and it was unlikely he would succeed as a soldier of France. He threatened suicide, then slammed the door of his uncle's house and was not seen for a night and a day. He had gone to stay in a hotel on the Left Bank, under the name Alter Heini. On November 7, 1938, Grynszpan went to the German embassy on the rue de Lille and asked to see ambassador Johannes von Welczek. An undersecretary, Ernst vom Rath, was sent to the anteroom to find out what the visitor wanted. Grynszpan pulled his gun out and shot at vom Rath repeatedly. Two bullets struck the Nazi diplomat, who later died. Grynszpan was seized by other embassy personnel, but surrendered and laid down his gun. He was turned over to the French police. He told the press, "Being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have the right to live on this earth. Wherever I have gone I have been hunted like a beast." By a terrible coincidence, the shooting came on the twentieth anniversary of imperial Germany's capitulation to the Allies and the proclamation of the Berlin monarchy's endwhich the Nazis and other German anti-Semites blamed on the Jews, who allegedly "stabbed the nation in the back." Nazi leaders ordered that the controlled press in Germany focus on Grynszpan's act. The Nazis claimed that Grynszpan represented a powerful conspiracy of all the world's Jews against Germany. Newspapers and radio broadcasts in Berlin and every other German city denounced him as a tool of the British "war party," and printed his picture alongside that of Winston Churchill. On the night of November 9Schwartz, Stephen is the author of 'Is It Good for the Jews? The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby', published 2006 under ISBN 9780385510257 and ISBN 038551025X.