by Tom Brennan,
A quiet but great voice is silent. A young boy who spent his childhood in a death camp waiting for Nazi “supermen” to select him for death survived and told the world what he saw, lived through and remembered. Today Holocaust survivors are aging and dying. They outlived the supermen and women who considered them “untermenschen (sub-human). My BA degree is in history, not the more touchy-feely, pluralistic and tolerant social studies (play nice with others, everything is just wonderful type studies). I grew up just after WW2 and was very familiar with what had just ended: a battle of good against evil. Nazism was a demonic and outright satanic force that came close to overwhelming the world. The survivors of the Holocaust can tell us firsthand what evil is. Several comments strike me forcefully here. The banality of evil, a term used by Hannah Arendt to describe the attitude of the Nazi technocrats and bureaucrats causes me wonder. How could the systematic and very organized processing of human beings into death camps and “recycling” of their property and even gold fillings in their teeth, be taken so matter of factly? How could the German people, Lutherans and Catholics quietly consent to it?
“Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it”. This is a constant in our modern culture. The drift away from the Bible and its precepts, the secularism and pluralism of being “nice” and “tolerant” and most people just wanting to go along and stay popular are evident. The Nazis manipulated a largely Christian nation into becoming an obscenity. When Jewish refugees tried to escape what they saw coming, shiploads were turned away from America by a Roosevelt Administration that needed the votes of a racist (and KKK membership Democrat Congress) to pass their recovery agenda. Jews died because politics won over morality. Today many nations have become so “tolerant” they consider Islam a religion of peace (as all the networks and spokespersons say). Nothing is further from the truth. Islam has more moderate sects but the Islam of the Quran is about submission and subjugating infidels (you and me)
In many school systems the Holocaust is no longer taught. As a generation dies out, the stories must have a voice. Elie Wiesel’s is silent. But let us remember several things as we honor his memory and that of the millions of innocents who died, “Masada must never fall again”. Israel is Masada, Israel is in our hearts. We owe a debt to the fallen to never forget. No More, never again.
Follow News from JerusalemShare this page with your friends