German History after the Holocaust; Museums Mirror Strong Cultural Identity

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Byline: Suzanne Fields, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

BERLIN - A choir from a suburban Chicago high school came to the Jewish Museum in Berlin not long ago to sing in commemoration of the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht ("the Night of Broken Glass"), recalling the pogrom in 1938 when the Nazis broke into houses and stores, destroyed more than a 1,000 synagogues, murdered 91 Jews and arrested more than 30,000 Jewish men. It was a brutal foreshadowing of the Holocaust to come.

The Chicago teen-agers sang songs in Yiddish, Hebrew and English interspersed with narrated recollections of Jews who survived the Holocaust, talking of their lives and losses. Beautiful young voices soared on hymns and spirituals from slave times, powerful modern protests …