By: Fern Sidman – Jewish Voice News

Eighty-seven years after shattered glass illuminated the terror of Nazi Germany’s pogrom against the Jews, three living witnesses to Kristallnacht — the Night of Broken Glass — have issued a chilling warning to the world: history is repeating itself.

In a joint statement reported by the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) on Sunday, Holocaust survivors Walter Bingham, 101, George Shefi, 94, and Paul Alexander, 90, each of whom lived through the Nazi onslaught as children, declared that “the world today is no safer for Jews than it was in 1938.” Speaking through the International March of the Living, the trio described the current climate of escalating antisemitism as “eerily reminiscent” of the atmosphere that preceded the Holocaust.

“With today’s antisemitic atmosphere, pogroms against Jews can happen again,” said Bingham, who as a young boy in Karlsruhe watched the rise of Adolf Hitler and witnessed the early stages of Nazi persecution firsthand.

Their joint declaration — signed in Israel and released globally — arrived on the anniversary of the pogrom that destroyed over 1,400 synagogues, looted thousands of Jewish businesses, and marked the Nazi regime’s transition from discriminatory law to organized violence. It was an anniversary not of the distant past, but of a historical echo now reverberating into the present.

As reported by JNS, the survivors’ message was not confined to remembrance; it was a dire call to action. “Once again,” they wrote, “Jews are murdered for being Jews. Once again, synagogues are attacked. Once again, universities remain silent in the face of incitement. In today’s atmosphere, Kristallnacht could happen again.”

Each survivor spoke from the deep well of lived trauma. Paul Alexander, whose father was arrested on Kristallnacht and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp, recalled how Nazi police stormed their home, upending their lives overnight. His father never recovered from the imprisonment. “The images of the past two years,” Alexander said, “remind us of the darkest days of the 1930s in Nazi Germany.”

George Shefi, then a boy of seven, awoke on the morning of November 10, 1938, to find the synagogue in his Berlin neighborhood engulfed in flames. His mother perished later in Auschwitz. Walter Bingham, now one of the oldest working journalists in the world, remembers his father being forced to march in the streets wearing a sign that read Ich bin Jude — “I am a Jew.” His father would die in the Warsaw Ghetto.

All three boys were rescued through the Kindertransport, the British rescue operation that brought nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to safety in the United Kingdom. They would grow up far from the land of their birth — but never far from its memories.

“We saw with our own eyes how hatred turned to flames, how indifference became complicity, and how the world stayed silent as Jews were attacked,” their statement read. “Today, eighty-seven years later, we look around us and say with deep pain: the world has learned nothing.”

The urgency of their appeal, as noted in the JNS report, coincides with an alarming global rise in antisemitic violence. According to a report released by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, antisemitic incidents have surged to levels unseen since the end of the Second World War.

The report recorded 99 attacks on synagogues, 98 on Jewish-owned businesses, 14 cemetery desecrations, and 182 incidents targeting Jewish schools and community centers worldwide over the past two years. Since October 7, 2023 — the day of Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians — there has been an explosion of Jew-hatred on social media, in public demonstrations, and on university campuses.

As the JNS report observed, the timing of the survivors’ message is deeply symbolic. Eighty-seven years after Nazi mobs torched synagogues across Germany, Jews are again witnessing houses of worship under assault — this time in Europe, the United States, and even the United Kingdom, where two Jews were murdered in a synagogue in Manchester just weeks before this year’s commemoration.

“Kristallnacht was a warning,” said Scott Saunders, CEO of the International March of the Living, speaking to JNS. “Today we issue another: a pogrom against Jews can happen again.”

Saunders described the anniversary as “a moment of moral reckoning” for Western societies that claim to uphold tolerance yet fail to respond decisively to antisemitism in their midst. “We are seeing the same pattern — denial, silence, and indifference,” he said. “The survivors’ message is not a history lesson. It is a call for survival.”

Two years ago, as JNS recounted in an earlier feature, Bingham, Shefi, and Alexander retraced their childhood escape from Germany to Britain as part of a commemorative journey organized by the International March of the Living. Their visit coincided with the immediate aftermath of the Hamas atrocities on October 7, 2023 — a massacre that left entire Israeli families burned alive and more than a thousand civilians slaughtered.

From Germany, the three men watched the horror unfold on television — and recognized, in the faces of those victims, the same helplessness they had seen in their parents’ generation. “We never thought we would see it again,” Bingham said at the time. “But it is happening again — in our lifetime.”

This parallel between 1938 and 2023 lies at the heart of their new warning. The Jewish News Syndicate notes that for the survivors, the current wave of antisemitic violence and the global indifference surrounding it — especially on Western campuses and in progressive political circles — feels hauntingly familiar.

“Eighty-seven years ago, most Germans did not break windows,” Bingham said in a recorded message distributed by JNS. “They looked away. They said nothing. They thought it would pass. But silence is not neutrality. Silence is complicity.”

Their joint statement, released under the auspices of Revital Yakin Krakovsky, CEO of March of the Living Israel, calls on governments worldwide to strengthen Holocaust education, enforce existing hate-crime laws, and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

“Antisemitism does not disappear on its own,” they warned. “It grows when met with silence and thrives where ignorance prevails. It stops only when courageous people — Jews and non-Jews alike — stand up and say: enough.”

This appeal, as the JNS report emphasized, comes at a time when Holocaust memory is fading rapidly. A 2024 survey found that one in four Europeans under 35 have never heard of Auschwitz, while Holocaust denial and distortion have gained traction in digital spaces. In many Western universities, events commemorating Israeli victims of terror have been disrupted, while Jewish students report feeling unsafe displaying symbols of their faith.

The survivors’ message to educators and policymakers was unequivocal: “Learn history. Teach your children what happens when the world stays silent.”

For historians, Kristallnacht was not the beginning of antisemitism in Nazi Germany, but the moment when words became violence and prejudice became policy. The pogrom marked the first coordinated state attack on Jews under Hitler’s regime, killing at least 91 people and paving the road to genocide.

Eighty-seven years later, as JNS has repeatedly warned in its analyses, the same mechanisms — propaganda, denial, and scapegoating — are reappearing in the global discourse surrounding Israel and the Jewish people. From social media platforms that amplify antisemitic conspiracy theories to international organizations that downplay the murder of Israeli civilians, the erosion of moral clarity is once again visible.

“Each generation,” said Scott Saunders, “thinks it cannot happen again. And each generation is wrong.”

The survivors’ words, echoed in the JNS report, serve as both testimony and indictment. “We saw the world stay silent once,” they wrote. “This time, we will not be silent. But we cannot do it alone.”

In Israel, where all three survivors now reside, their statement resonated deeply. At memorial ceremonies held across Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, speakers read excerpts from the survivors’ letter aloud, juxtaposing archival footage from 1938 with contemporary images of antisemitic graffiti, vandalized synagogues, and protests calling for Israel’s destruction.

As the JNS report noted, the symbolism was inescapable: the shattered glass of Kristallnacht had given way to shattered illusions about safety, progress, and the permanence of tolerance.

“History,” JNS editorialized, “is not repeating itself exactly, but it is rhyming in dangerous ways. The survivors’ warning is not just to governments — it is to the conscience of humanity.”

Walter Bingham, the centenarian who still broadcasts a weekly radio program from Jerusalem, summed up the message in stark terms: “The hate that destroyed our families in Germany is alive again — just in new clothing. It begins with words, it ends with fire.”

As JNS reported, Bingham’s voice trembled as he recalled the flickering light of his burning synagogue. “When I see synagogues attacked today, I am that boy again,” he said. “And I ask myself: will the world stay silent again?”

His question now hangs over the international community like a moral test. Eighty-seven years after Kristallnacht, the shattered glass has long been swept away. But the hatred that caused it — if left unchecked — threatens to break again.

As the survivors’ statement concluded, echoing both plea and prophecy: “History is watching. The world failed once. It must not fail again.”