Kristallnacht, often translated as “Night of Crystal” or “Night of Broken Glass,” was a pogrom against Jewish people in Germany on November 9-10, 1938. Its name comes from the broken glass that littered the street after the destruction of Jewish-owned businesses. It was carried out by the Nazi Party’s paramilitary forces (the SA and SS), though many Hitler Youth and German civilians also participated. The Nazi Party burned Jewish synagogues, destroyed Jewish-owned businesses and homes, and killed and imprisoned an estimated 26,000 Jewish people (“Kristallnacht.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 3 Sep. 2025). Kristallnacht is often viewed as marking a shift in the Nazi government’s policies toward the Jewish people, as the party openly sanctioned and encouraged the event. Having previously passed discriminatory laws and policies, the regime now moved toward open violence, imprisonment, and even death, anticipating the Holocaust and the Final Solution.

The events of Kristallnacht open The Book of Lost Hours, as Nazi soldiers destroy Ezekiel Levy’s clock shop. He notes the events that impacted his business prior to this, as fewer Germans visited his shop and Nazi soldiers forced him to relinquish what they believed was the “magical” timepiece. As he tells Lisavet of his family’s history, he hears Nazi soldiers moving through the Jewish neighborhood in Nuremberg and destroying shops: “The crowd was drawing nearer. He could hear the pounding of their hands against the doors. The crunch of glass underfoot. […] He knew what happened next. First came the shouting, the breaking, the anger. Then came the fire, the fighting, the killing” (5). Although Lisavet escapes into the time space and spends the next 14 years there, her life is intimately tied to the events of Kristallnacht, as she literally escapes the flow of time to avoid the fate of millions of people during the Holocaust.

During Lisavet’s years in the time space, the efforts she witnesses by Nazi soldiers to destroy history literalize, in fantastical form, Nazi Germany’s effort to control the historical narrative. Lisavet begins following Nazi timekeepers, watching as they pull books from the shelves and attempt to burn them. She takes pages of the destroyed books, including her own father’s story, and hides them, hoping to preserve part of history. These events mirror the Nazi regime’s distortion of the historical record. Their most direct analog, the mass burning of books by Jewish authors (as well as works otherwise deemed a threat to the regime—e.g., socialist and pacifist texts), was a campaign spearheaded by university students but encouraged by Nazi officials. These burnings reflected a broader effort to redefine German identity in exclusionary terms by suppressing the historical and cultural legacy of German Jews. The Nazi government also strictly controlled Germany’s state-run media, censoring stories and hiding the scale of their actions against the Jewish people. They used euphemistic language, calling the operations of the Holocaust things like “resettlement,” “evacuation,” or “The Final Solution” instead of identifying the concentration camps as locations of experimentation, torture, and murder. At the same time, the camps were built in remote locations, intentionally hiding what took place there from the German citizens and the rest of the world. While the magical time space in The Book of Lost Hours allows Nazi timekeepers to literally alter history, it therefore reflects the real-world actions of the Nazi regime.