The Washington Post Notable Non-Fiction of On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht comes this untold story of a teenager whose act of defiance would have dire international consequences On the morning of November a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris and in an act of desperation assassinated Ernst vom Rath a low-level Nazi diplomat He did it he said out xCof love for my parents and for my peoplexD Two days later vom Rath lay dead and the Third Reich exploited his murder to inauguratenbspits long-planned campaign of terror against Germanyxs Jewish citizens in the mass pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht In a bizarre concatenation of events that would rapidly involve Ribbentrop Goebbels and Hitler himself Grynszpan would become the centerpiece of a Nazi propaganda campaign that would later describe his actions as the first shot of the Jewish War In The Short Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan best-selling author Jonathan Kirsch brings to light this wrenching story reexamining the historical details and moral dimensions of one ofnbspthe most enigmatic cases of World WarnbspII Was Grynszpan anbspcrazed lone gunman or was he an agent of the Gestapo recruited to provide a convenient pretext for a major escalation of Nazi aggression Was he motivated by a desire to strike a blow for the Jewish people as an early partisan fighter or did his act of violence speak to an intimate connection between the assassin and his target as Grynszpan later claimedIn re-creating the life of this German-Polish refugee turned assassin Kirsch convincingly demonstrates that the life of Herschel Grynszpan remains just as fascinating as the conspiracy theories that surround him Challenging the perception of the European Jew as docile and unwilling to resort to violence in the face of aggression Grynszpan was almost unanimously assailed by most German Jews who were rightly fearful that the Nazis would usenbspthe murder to wreak widespread retribution Yet he was at the same time embraced by the American journalist Dorothy Thompson who rallied others to his international defense Condemned by the likes of Goebbels at the time he was still labeled as a psychopath and an agent provacateur by Hannah Arendt at the Eichmann trial two decades laterAs Kristallnacht increasingly becomes known as an international day for remembrance Jonathan Kirsch brilliantly succeeds here in illuminatingnbspboth a single life cast into the shadows of history as well as the countless tragic lives of Eastern European Jews in the terrible days leading up to World War II pages of photographs.
