I really didn’t see it coming. If you are one of the many younger than I am, the headline may just have been a pass under your eyes. Survivors remember the 80 anniversary of the liberation of Aschwitch. I am a child of WWII. Fighting wasn’t on our soil, so it was easy for me to have a them/bad and us/good attitude. Magazines and radio reports did updates and friends we knew offered prayers for family members in battle zones. Then we won and I understood a little more about hatred and exclusion of a group of people. Some groups made their own sacrifices to provide places of hiding or escape and I learned names like Anne Frank and Corrie Ten Boon.
Fifty years passed and I taught in a prestigious private school in Houston. Sometime during each year a Jewish grandparent would speak of their personal route of survival and a glimmer of the part pure hate of a group of people played in this atrocity began to broaden my understanding of what had been just an historical happening. We had a noble, no other word could describe, principal. He was an American citizen of German heritage and had driven one of the tanks for the liberation of Dachau and was also a speaker in assemblies at times. The year my life turned was when when he quietly told of driving his tank to the gate that opened and revealed the malnourished, mistreated fellow humans being offered freedom. With a break in his voice, he said to room full of sixth through eighth graders; “Gott im Himmel! ” At that moment, I desperately never wanted to be a part of the group who hates.
It’s hard! Always there is the feeling of a self-assured eight year old who rests with confidence that in a world of them and us, my us side is mostly right. At this very moment, I’m sure each of us could make a list of choices and directions that are disfranchising some of our most heartfelt beliefs and we feel that supporters of those beliefs are wrong. I may have to speak out, or write a letter or organize a safe way to have another opinion. Yet, even if it’s a struggle, I can’t offer hate and separation as a solution. With God in Heaven, we have to work together.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave]nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one.
Galatians 3:28
Let Me Tell Ya 
Thank you for this extremely timely and thoughtful blog post. I have been reading about President Eisenhower and how he visited the Ohrdruf camp. I think this quote speaks to what you have done here in your writing:
“I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.'” — President Dwight D. Eisenhower
LikeLike