Kristallnacht survivor Walter Bingham warns of rising antisemitism today
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A 101-year-old Holocaust survivor says the world today looks alarmingly similar to Nazi Germany in 1938, 87 years after surviving the terror of Kristallnacht.
Walter Bingham was 14 years old when Nazis and other Germans attacked Jewish businesses, stores, homes and places of worship.
During Kristallnacht, commonly referred to In what became known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” the Nazis burned more than 1,400 synagogues, destroyed thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, broke into apartments and homes of Jewish people, and desecrated Jewish religious objects, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Approximately 26,000 men were also arrested for being Jews and placed in concentration camps.
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A Jewish-owned store was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti following Nazi attacks in 1938. (Images from History/Universal Images Group/Getty)
Bingham, 101, he told the Associated Press The current climate against Jews and the increasing anti-Semitism following the Israel-Hamas war seem reminiscent of those dark times.
“We live in a time when synagogues are burned and people on the streets are attacked, just like in 1938,” he said.
Holocaust survivor Walter Bingham, 101, poses in the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem on November 5, 2025, ahead of the 87th anniversary of Kristallnacht. (Leo Correa/AP)
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A synagogue in Manchester was the target of a deadly terrorist attack on Yom Kippur in October; A man had driven his car into worshipers and stabbed the victims outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, killing two Jewish men.
A synagogue in Melbourne, Australia, was also set on fire last year in an act condemned by the country’s prime minister as an anti-Semitic attack.
In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League reported 9,354 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. 5% increase Compared to 2023, there has been an increase of 344% in the last five years and 893% in the last ten years.
Protesters draped in Israeli flags gather outside Downing Street in Westminster during the Campaign Against Antisemitism demonstration marking a week since the Manchester synagogue attack on October 9, 2025. (Lucy North/PA Images/Getty)
“I don’t think anti-Semitism will ever go away completely because it is the cure for all the ills of the world,” Bingham told the Associated Press.
He said living in today’s climate is eerily similar to pre-war Germany, but he sees an important distinction.
“The Jewish mentality in those days was apologetic,” Bingham explained. “Please don’t do anything to me, and I won’t do anything to you.”
Israeli soldiers monitor the northern Gaza Strip from southern Israel on Wednesday, July 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
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“Thank God, we have the state of Israel today, we have a very strong state,” he said. “And even though anti-Semitism is still on the rise, the only thing that won’t happen is the Holocaust, because the state will take care of it,” that doesn’t happen.
