Sorry we linked our decadent spa treatments with that time your Torahs and businesses were set on fire and your people got killed and whatnot!
The German spa Kristall Sauna Wellnesspark apologized for running an ad for a “long, romantic Kristallnacht,” scheduled for the 75th anniversary of the not-so-fabulous Night of Broken Glass, when over a thousand synagogues were burned and over 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Oops!
According to a story reported by JTA, the hotel owners expressed regret yesterday for their “insensitive naming of this event,” which was “extremely inappropriate.” They said they only meant to play with their own name, Kristall. “We are extraordinarily regretful and of course this was unintentional; believe us, we are quite ashamed about our mistake,” the spa said.
As ever, SorryWatch must regretfully point out that the words “of course” do not belong in any apology. The bonus “believe us,” only adds to the sense of “Christ, we’re SORRY, OKAY?” which is not really the tone anyone should be going for, particularly not Germans apologizing for something Holocaust-y.
Perhaps some imagery will help explain this complex issue.
FUN KRISTALLNACHT:
UNFUN KRISTALLNACHT:
The part I’m not getting is whether it was just coincidence that the spa’s Kristallnacht was slated for the 75th anniversary of the less-massage-oriented Kristallnacht. It shall remain a mystery.
I …….. boggle.
Un-freaking-believable.
The “of course” and “believe us” just… wow. I mean, NO. I don’t believe them. At all. It’s hard to believe anyone is THAT DUMB. What they wanted to believe is that the rest of us had forgotten, and would give them a pass.
FAIL.
So wrong, I can’t even form a sentence that properly scourges them. This is why we must never ever allow the world to forget our history. This kind of thing will never be okay.
What were they thinking? Oh, right. No thinking here.
May I, as goyishe as I am, and probably with German heritage to boot, say “oy”? Because oy, these people. Some things are off-limits FOR EVER.
That goes waaayyy beyond “Bless their hearts…”
The black and white photos at the bottom need some clarification. The first shows what look like Russian soldiers during World War II itself. The middle photo, of a burning synagogue, must be from Kristallnacht. The bottom photo looks like it was taken during a roundup in the Warsaw Ghetto, although it could be elsewhere. I doubt it was taken during Kristallnacht. In any case, the company’s marketing shows a stunning lack of historical knowledge–or, worse, knowledge untainted with any human decency.
Agreed. Only one photo is from Kristallnacht. Couldn’t they get this right? There is a substantial photographic record available of synagogues burning all over Germany, shops with broken glass on the streets, Jewish men herded through the streets on their way to concentration camps.
My question is not whether they were so dumb, my question is if they really were German. Because there’s an onslaught of media every year, and it would be pretty impossible to miss it.
it kind of reminds me of Joey (Joseph) from “Friends” picking Joseph Stalin as his showbiz nickname.
ahahahahahahaha!now you’re making me regret not watching friends! my brain just exploded. (but matt leblanc is also great as “matt leblanc” in the criminally underwatched show Episodes, currently on hiatus.)
In response to an email, I added links for the Kristallnacht photos, which I should have done before. I apologize for lousy sourcing. Given the subject, I absolutely should have included links. And I should have been doubly careful about checking them, because I was wrong about one: it had been labeled Kristallnacht, but when I did an image search instead of a web search for it, it was of the Battle of Berlin. So I swapped that one out for a Kristallnacht picture from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and scholarship center, whose sourcing should be acceptable to all but the most fervent Holocaust deniers.
Thank you for the corrections regarding the photos.