Pomnik Pamięci Ofiar Nocy Kryształowej, Wrocław

Before you is the Memorial to the Victims of Kristallnacht: a monument shaped as a three-part granite Jewish gravestone. It stands at the meeting of Łąkowa and Druckiego-Lubeckiego streets, on the former site of Wrocław’s New Synagogue. That synagogue, the largest used by the city’s Jewish community, existed from 1872 until 1938.

Its destruction gives this quiet marker its force. During Kristallnacht in 1938, the synagogue was set on fire by the Nazi regime. The memorial identifies that assault as the beginning of the murder of Wrocław’s Jewish children, women, and men.

On the granite, you can see an image of the vanished synagogue, alongside its years of existence. The inscriptions are presented in Polish, German, and Hebrew, making this a place of mourning that speaks across the languages of the city’s past. The foundation stone was laid on the eighth of November 1996, fifty-eight years after the destruction, and the completed memorial was unveiled on the ninth of November 1998. Its form recalls a matzevah, the upright stone traditionally placed at a Jewish grave, so the lost synagogue itself is treated here as something to remember and mourn.