Ruth Landau can still remember walking the streets of Berlin, glass crunching underfoot, the morning after Kristallnacht.
She was nine years old and her father wanted to show her what had taken place on the “night of broken glass”, despite being a Jewish man and in serious danger of being captured by the Gestapo.
Kristallnacht was a series of attacks by the Nazis on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. More than 7000 Jewish businesses were destroyed and more than 90 Jews were murdered.
On Wednesday Mrs Landau will speak at a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht at the Wesley Uniting Church in Forrest.
The event will be a chance for Canberrans of all religious and cultural backgrounds to come together and remember the events of November 9 and 10, 1938 and all those lost in the Holocaust.
Looking back, Mrs Landau said it was the culmination of a frightening time for her family in their native Germany.
“The Germans had, for six years, been putting in more and more draconian laws targeting Jews,” Mrs Landau said.
“Kristallnacht was the sort of crescendo which said ‘ok bugger all this, forget about the law, we can do what we like’.
Read the article by Elliot Williams in The Sydney Morning Herald and Canberra Times.