11/12/2025
"At 101 years old, Walter Bingham is one of the few remaining witnesses to that night of terror some 87 years ago. He remembers the sound of glass shattering, the smell of burning Torahs, and the look on his neighbours’ faces as the world fell apart. And this week, he said he feels like he’s living through the 1930s again.
The Holocaust didn’t begin with the gas chambers. It began with six years of indoctrination, with laws, lies, and lessons that conditioned a population to hate their neighbours. People saw the march toward antisemitism. They had time to stop it. Most didn’t.
“In those days,” Bingham recalled, “the Jewish mentality was apologetic. Please don’t do anything to me, I won’t do anything to you.”
If ever we needed a lesson from someone who lived it, there it is: Stand up. Speak out. Be proud. And never, ever apologise for calling out the antisemites in our society.
The shattered shopfronts of 1938 have become the shattered sense of belonging in 2025. The broken glass was swept from the streets, but its echo was never silenced. It glitters again now, in the windows of synagogues, in the pixels of our timelines, in the fractures of our shared society.
Our November pogrom doesn’t need torches and uniforms; it hides behind hashtags, headlines, and hesitation. Eighty-seven years on, the glass is both real and digital, and both cut just as deep."
This week, on the 87th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the glass is breaking again.
