On Monday, Nov. 9,  2020, YU’s Student Holocaust Education Movement (SHEM)  presented its annual remembrance of Kristallnacht. Often referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht was a state-sanctioned pogrom that visited destruction on Jewish communities throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland from Nov. 9 through Nov. 10, 1938. Hundreds of synagogues were desecrated, thousands of business destroyed, and tens of thousands of German males were sent to concentration camps, many of them later released when they agreed to turn over their assets to the German government and leave the country within six months. This year’s online event featured a riveting interview with survivor Walter Spier, filmed by Names, Not Numbers©, the famed documentary film project founded by Tova Rosenberg in which student teams record testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Opening remarks from Tania Bohbot, SHEM’s co-president, placed Kristallnacht within a historical context.  Bohbot noted that the systematic stripping away of civil rights for German Jews, which began in 1933 as Hitler assumed power, reached its violent conclusion on the night of Nov. 9, 1938 when the Nazi regime made Jewish survival in Germany not only perilous but impossible. Confronting that impossibility was the night’s guest speaker Walter Spier, 93, a Kristallnacht survivor from Marburg, Germany. In the interview, filmed in 2018, Spier painfully recounted his family’s dislocation and destruction, his imprisonment in Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz, and his eventual postwar emigration to the United States. Spier enjoined the viewers to “never give up on Judaism. You must fight for it.” After the video presentation, participants met in virtual breakout groups to discuss how Spier’s message of survival and resilience can continue to resonate. “It is important to note that when discussing the Holocaust and the horrors that Jews went through at the hands of the Nazis that we remember it and learn from it,” noted Isaac Goor, SHEM co-president. “From these lessons, we have an acute understanding of the precursors to genocide. It is our duty not only to ourselves but the world at large not to let these lessons remain unsaid. We must speak up.”