THE PIERCING SOUND OF GLASS BREAKING, AGAIN

It should have been a night of light.

An event to mark the start of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of light, was underway on Bondi Beach in Sydney. A moment meant for joy. For family. For remembrance and for hope. Instead, it became a scene of terror. A targeted attack on Jewish Australians. At least sixteen dead. Forty-people hospitalised.

It is another chilling moment.

Just over a month ago, we looked back to November 9, 1938, within living memory of the precious few who still walk among us, when the night air across Germany and Austria was pierced by the sound of breaking glass.

On that date, the world witnessed Kristallnacht: the Night of Broken Glass. Synagogues were set alight. Jewish businesses were destroyed. Thousands of lives were shattered by hatred that was not only permitted, but propelled, by the state.

A single night marked the moment when antisemitism and persecution once again became violence, when humanity crossed a line from which it would not easily return. More than 250 synagogues were burned. Over 7,500 Jewish shops and homes were vandalised and looted. Some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps. It was the instant when whispered hatred erupted into terror.

And, as history so often reminds us, it did not begin with violence.

The Holocaust did not start with gas chambers. It started with lies. With scapegoating. With language that made it permissible to dehumanise.

It started when silence felt easier than speaking out.

Many still ask how the Holocaust could have taken root in what was considered one of the world’s most advanced, enlightened societies. Kristallnacht offers an uncomfortable, unflinching answer.

It happens when words of hate are tolerated. When falsehoods are given space to grow. When silence becomes complicity.

By the time the glass breaks, as it did again in Sydney, silence has already done its work. And by then, it is too late.

This, tragically, sounds all too familiar. How have we come back here?

It is convenient and tempting to think of Kristallnacht as history sealed behind museum glass, a singular horror, safely distant from our modern, enlightened selves. But history does not work that way. It moves in patterns. It repeats when conditions allow.

Silence is not neutral. It is oxygen. It allows hate to breathe. It prepares the ground long before the glass falls.

This is the part we still struggle to face.

Many will ask how such atrocities, in Australia today, in Manchester weeks ago, and in Austria then, could occur in societies that see themselves as tolerant and advanced. Kristallnacht offers the answer again. It happens when hatred is tolerated in fragments. When lies are repeated until they feel familiar. When intimidation is excused as politics. When silence masquerades as neutrality.

What once came dressed in the symbols of the far right now often reappears cloaked in the language of resistance. Old hatreds repackaged with new slogans. Antisemitism reborn with moral camouflage. Each generation, it seems, finds a new way to justify this same ancient prejudice.

Again, yet again, we are here, watching around the world, as a Jewish community faces terror simply for who they are and what they believe.

Today, around the world, synagogues stand behind locked gates, protected not only by faith but by armed security. Jewish schools are encircled by fences and patrols, places of learning transformed into fortresses. Parents walk their children to class with a mixture of love and apprehension. On university campuses, students are shouted down and intimidated, simply for speaking, or simply for being who they are.

Across social media, old conspiracies gain new speed, spreading their venom faster than truth can catch up. Many Jewish people now hide symbols of their identity, removing necklaces, tucking away kippahs, choosing invisibility over vulnerability.

How extraordinary, and how heartbreaking, that in a world so assured of its own progress, people cannot celebrate who they are, openly. That faith, once a beacon guiding hope, must now be dimmed for fear of the darkness around it.

And still, many turn away, comforting themselves with the notion that their silence is neutrality.

It is not. Silence is the oxygen that allows hate to breathe. It lays the foundation for what follows.

Remembering Kristallnacht is not only an act of looking back. It is the urgent reality of looking at what happened today and the need to take a vow, an absolute refusal, to allow these patterns to take root again in our time.

It is not historical reflection alone. It is a moral demand placed on the present. A refusal to pretend these patterns are unfamiliar. A warning written not in books, but in broken windows, burned buildings, frightened children and now, once again, in emergency rooms on a night meant for celebration.

Our responsibility, moral, human, collective is not only to remember the glass that shattered, but to also ensure the silence that enabled it never returns.

Because history never whispers without warning.

And it tells us, again and again:

When silence settles, glass soon breaks.