I have just finished reading Kristallnacht by Sir Martin Gilbert. I have had difficulty putting this book down. It is a relentless account of the systematic dehumanization of German Jews and later Austrian Jews during the mid to late 1930's, the night of Kristallnacht, November 7, 1938, and how a civilized society degenerated into a systematic orgy of violence ending in the state murder of a whole people. Much of the material Martin Gilbert has gathered is from many survivor childhood memories and newspaper accounts of the day.

I had no idea of the extent of the damage to Jewish property, businesses, homes and synagogues in one single night in every German city, town and village - The German population had been primed for years with relentless anti-Jewish propaganda, so the simple shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by an outraged young Jewish man, angry about the deportation of his family from Germany, was the spark to set it all off.

It depicts the tremendous difficulty German and Austrian Jews had in obtaining the necessary travel documents, passports, visas and the like to any country in the World who would take them when they could escape, and how those doors closed completely when war broke out. Most countries had paltry immigrant quotas and only wanted those who could support themselves. These Jews had been stripped of all of their wealth and were penniless. It depicted those who had escaped by ship only to have to return to Germany because no country would accept them. They didn't survive.

The book details the beginnings of mass murder in sealed moving vans with the truck's exhaust piped into the van, the shootings, the deportations by railway transports to concentration camps, the gassings and deaths by slave labour. It also describes the meticulous records kept of all the victims, where they were born, and where their final destination was.

Since I am not Jewish, as I read this book, spellbound, I kept asking myself: why am I so drawn to this tragedy? Is it morbid curiosity? voyeurism? To some extent I could probably answer yes.

But there are other factors, too. I am very interested in Jewish culture and history and am drawn to this period of time.

I wonder what I would have done had I been there. Would I have helped, risking my life and that of my family? Or would I, as millions of others did, simply have turned a blind eye. I don't know. I do know I have an overwhelming sense of compassion for the victims of the Holocaust, and I hope I would have felt compelled to act, in defiance of my government, to help my fellow human beings whenever I could. I have read much and seen many documentaries about the Holocaust, and learned a great deal on my Jewish Heritage trip to Poland in 2001, and this book conveys the enormity of it all.

My lifelong hobby is photography and I took many photographs of Jewish sites while in Poland, and some of which were displayed at two conferences of the Jewish Genealogy Society, where I also spoke about my trip. I have created a web site about this trip which you may find of interest.

Alex Oldfield.