Eighty-seven years after surviving the terror of Kristallnacht, a 101-year-old Holocaust survivor says the world today looks alarmingly like Nazi Germany in 1938.
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 According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, during 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.
Also, approximately 26,000 men were arrested and placed in concentration camps because they were Jewish.
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A Jewish-owned shop is vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti after the Nazi attacks in 1938. (Photos from History/Universal Images Group/Getty)
Bingham, 101, told the Associated Press that the current climate against Jews and the increasing cases of anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the war between Israel and Hamas are reminiscent of those dark times.
“We live in an era similar to 1938, when synagogues are being burned and people are being attacked in the streets,” he said.
Holocaust survivor Walter Bingham, 101, poses at the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem on November 5, 2025, ahead of the 87th anniversary of Kristallnacht. (Leo Correa/AP)
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A Manchester synagogue was the target of a deadly terrorist attack on Yom Kippur in October when a man rammed a car into worshipers and stabbed victims outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, killing two Jewish men.
Last year, a synagogue in Melbourne, Australia, was also set on fire, an act condemned as an anti-Semitic attack by the country’s prime minister.
In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League reported 9,354 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States – an increase of 5% from 2023: an increase of 344% in the last five years, and an increase of 893% in the last ten years.
Protesters draped in Israeli flags gather outside Downing Street in Westminster on October 9, 2025, during a Campaign Against Antisemitism demonstration, a week after the Manchester synagogue attack. (Lucy North/PA Images/Getty)
“Anti-Semitism, I don’t think, will ever go away completely, because it is the panacea for all the ills of the world,” Bingham told The Associated Press.
He said life in the current climate is eerily similar to pre-war Germany, but he sees one key difference.
“At that time, the Jewish mentality was apologetic,” Bingham explained. “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.”
Israeli soldiers observe the northern Gaza Strip from southern Israel, July 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
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“Today, thank God, we have the State of Israel, a very strong State,” he said. “And while anti-Semitism is still on the rise, the one thing that won’t happen is a Holocaust, because the state will take care of it.” That doesn’t happen.
