The Least of These

Several years ago I sat watching a video with my 2 young daughters. It was a movie version of a book my youngest daughter had read for school. I watched the entire movie and when it was over I was inconsolable. I cried and cried. The ending was tragic. As a parent I felt my own heart was being ripped out of my body. The name of the movie was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Now, before I go on, let me warn you: SPOILER ALERT: If you have not seen the movie or read the book, if you continue to read this post I will spoil the ending for you. The story centers around a German family during World War II. A young boy and his family move to a new house. The new house just happens to be adjacent to the property that is housing a Concentration Camp. Why would a family choose to live next to a Concentration Camp you might ask. The boys father is a high ranking officer in the SS, Hitler's Nazi Army, and he is in charge of the camp and all that goes on there. As young boys often do, he gets bored, and one day, decides to go exploring in the lush woods that surround his home, disguising the ugliness of the camp. He comes upon a large fence, and, as most little boys would be, he is curious and begins to explore along the border of the high fence. He meets another little boy on the other side, dressed in striped pajamas. They strike up a friendship, and the little boy on the outside visits the little boy on the inside almost daily. As their friendship grows, so does their desire to play together without the fence separating them. They make a plan for the boy on the outside to get in, and to go unnoticed while they play, he will wear striped pajamas too that the little boy on the inside has somehow smuggled. The day comes to embark on the big adventure. Both boys are inside, together at last without the fence separating them. There are lots of people in striped pajamas, and it just so happens that the day their adventure begins on the inside was the day planned to go to the showers. Hand in hand they walk in together, one Jew one non-Jew, neither knowing what is really in store for them. I sat there watching, horrified, hoping against hope that his Father would realize what's going on in time to save them. Please make this a Hollywood, happy ending, but that was not to be. Both little boys die in the gas chamber that day. The German boy's father is devastated. The man who had overseen the murder of hundreds of children and adults was devastated because his own boy was just like all the others in his striped pajamas that day. All the others that didn't matter, that needed to be eliminated, that were a threat to our HOMELAND. Are these words sounding familiar? They should because we are being told the same thing about people who are different from us, and when I say different, I mean non-white. Yeah, I know I hardly ever get political in this blog, but this is not about politics!!!! This is about human compassion. The current administration is working hard to keep us(America) safe from illegal immigrants. They have a zero tolerance policy for anyone trying to cross the border illegally, and it is a misdemeanor. Families who are seeking asylum in this country are being separated. Children are being taken away from their parents for "baths" and then never returned as parents are detained. The children are being kept in pens, cages. I'm sorry, but the similarities are too great! This is scary and cruel and rings true with every dictatorship I read about in school from Hitler to Idi Amin, but this is my country, where I have lived for 54 years, and where we have welcomed people. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe FREE..." "Keep 'em out! they're takin' our jobs!" "Keep 'em out! they're rapists and murderers!" "Keep 'em out! They're foreigners!" "Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or ill or in prison and did not help you? He will reply, ' Truly I tell you , whatever you did not do for the LEAST of one of these, you did not do for ME!" ...Matthew 25:44-45.

Then They Came For Me

Survivors

70 years! What a very long time. 70 years ago, it would still be almost 20 years before I would come into this world. My mother was only 5 years old. My grandparents were 34 and 36. No, I am not writing this so that you will know the ages of my family in 1945. What happened 70 years ago today changed the world as we know it. Auschwitz, one of the Nazi's concentration camps was liberated on January 27, 1945. I cannot imagine what the remaining prisoners must have felt after the horrors they had seen and made to endure daring themselves to believe that it could all be over. How could they even imagine waking up on a morning and not wondering if this would be the day they would die or be killed? We can read memoirs and articles and books, and see movies and television shows and be absolutely shocked, but none of us will ever know what any of those people endured.
What allows someone to survive such unspeakable treatment? How can such evil exist? How can one human being treat another human being so terribly simply because they are different? I wish I had an answer. I don't. It is unfathomable to me that people could be so cruel and actually enjoy it.
This day has been designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. REMEMBRANCE DAY. Webster defines remember as to have or keep an image or idea in your mind of (something or someone from the past) to think of (something or someone from the past) again. According to this definition, there are very few left who can remember. I wish it were called something else. Remember seems too trivial to me. I want it to be called International Holocaust this happened, and we can never forget that it happened Day. I am so lucky to have grown up in relative comfort and without fear. So many don't. What these people were forced to do on a daily basis would have made me want to run just so that some SS guard's bullet would put me out of my misery, but so many endured, and lived to tell the story the Nazi's tried so hard to cover up. Thousands of people killed a day, a day, and one man convinced a nation it was the right thing to do. That scares the hell out of me! " The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." ~ Edmund Burke
What would have happened if one person had stood up for the right when it first started? We sit back and say, Well, it's not here. It's not happening to me. What can I do? I'm only one person?

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.