… and the Christian Connection

The sledgehammer exploded through the window, sending splinters of glass flying through the air. The young storm trooper thug wielding the hammer turned his back as crystal shards tinkled to the ground. “Vom Rath will be avenged! Destroy another Jewish shop!”

By the end of the night, so many windows in Jewish shops and synagogues across Germany had been destroyed that the carnage was dubbed ‘Kristallnacht’— Crystal Night or the Night of Broken Glass.

Supposedly, this destruction of property was to expend their fury over the shooting of Ernst vom Rath, a young embassy official in Paris, by a seventeen year old Jewish boy. Young assassin Hershel Grynszpan, whose father had been herded into a cattle truck and sent to a concentration camp in Poland.

In retaliation over 30,000 Jews were rounded up by the Nazis and deported to death camps and the world— mostly—fell silent.

Stung by the reports of destruction, looting and wholesale arrests of innocent people, William Cooper decided to act. He took his protest to the German Embassy in Melbourne on 6 th December Leading a delegation of the Australian Aboriginal League he tried to deliver a formal petition which condemned the “cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany.”

Nourished by the faith community of the Aboriginal Mission at Maloga, William’s growing understanding of Scripture equipped him for a fight for equality for his own people. He knew injustice first hand. He would not stand by and watch the Nazi’s cruelty in silence.

Although the petition was not accepted, the protest did not go unnoticed. When the people of Israel made plans to set up Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, they found this record of what is considered ‘the only private protest against the Germans following Kristallnacht.’ As a result William Cooper is highly honoured in Israel.

Seventy Australian trees have been planted in Jerusalem to pay tribute to William Cooper.

Although William died in 1941, he inspired an entire generation of Aboriginal people to seek justice and to work for the elimination of racist elements in Australia’s government legislation. His work saw the beginning of ‘Aboriginal Sunday’ a commemoration still held today, known as NAIDOC week.