Jewish women and children deported from Hungary, separated from the men, line up for selection. Auschwitz camp, Poland, May 1944. Yad Vashem Photo Archives
Photograph and caption courtesy of Fighters For Zion
One of the deeply moving experiences of my childhood was seeing such pictures as these. There were not widely published in the mid-fifties as Ike and Adenauer were busy rebuilding the German Republic, and frankly we were rebuilding much of Western Europe and England as well.
I was 12 years old when I first saw such pictures, fairly innocent pictures of stacks of suitcases, then shoes, then eyeglass frames, then metal scrapes described as “gold fillings.” How curious were these photographs, why ever were people interested in trash and junk, heaped in piles as these were?
Now, no doubt I was an extremely curious child, said to be very bright, well-read for my age, college level on reading exams, and as both my parents had been soldiers, one a naval aviator, the other an air evacuation nurse in CBI, I had a natural proclivity to read about the last World War. I knew what a “Gold Star” mother was, one Grandmother still hung that banner in her front window. I knew that many brave men and women had given their lives to defeat National Socialism and fascism, and that many of those who fought and came home bore the scars of battle.
Mother was working on some Public Health Program for Veterans Administration, and had researched the Nuremberg Trials in the course of her work, and had a good amount of research material in her study. Much of what she received was printed text, testimony, pretty dull stuff for a kid, but still I read some of it, and looked through similar pages of dry boring translated testimony of the German War Criminals. And then I found a folder, stamped Confidential, with a Government seal embossed, and there I found those photos, print after print of mounds of materials as I described above, from full warehouses through-out Germany, followed by pages of photographs of clothing, watches and jewelry, paintings and prints, upholstered furniture and lamp shades, statues and porcelains and other objects d’art and then, turning a page…
…Most curious of all, why, piles of mannequins stacked like cord wood, page after page of these bizarre displays. Now I had never seen a human naked, so I really did not realize, at first, what I was seeing. Then I flipped to a page that quite clearly had little mannequins, shaped like the children in my class, but unclothed, naked, piled on each other, nude. My eyes were drawn to the details of their bodies: gaunt, drawn, their genitals exposed, their hair tussled, their eyelids closed or their eyes opened and staring blankly into, into what? Oh God! I realized they were children, little ones, “kinders” thrown on a heap, legs and limbs akimbo, heads and torso twisted; older children, my age, the girl’s bodies exposed, legs parted, breast’s flattened stacked among the lithe bodies of boys with wisps of genital hair, all piled up, heaped one upon another, discarded as trash. Even as I felt my body revolting, even as I felt my throat tightening and my breath drawing deep, I could not look away. I began to look at their faces, their chins and noses and lips and ears, faces like my friends faces, my classmates faces. I cried out and wept, praying for those bodies. I wanted to stop, but I could not. I was a witness to such a horror, to page after page of dead human beings mothers, fathers, children, men, women, boys and girls. Dead, thousands dead, who could have done such a thing?
The Germans! The people of Luther, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, of Beethoven, Bach, Handel of Gauss, Hertz, Planck, Heisenberg; a people and culture considered the most literate, educated and accomplished Western Europeans. The people who had waged the first Great War and lost, who had then been ignobly punished for that loss, who had overthrown a monarchy and formed a democracy and then elected, yes, elected Adolph Hitler. A people who had stood by silently as depraved demonic men made Juda the boogeyman, who sat on their hands while Kristallnacht terrorized their neighbors, their shopkeepers, their doctors and their lawyers. An “enlightened” culture who did nothing while their Christian Churches, Reformed, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, tolerated this pogrom against God’s Chosen People, at times even tacitly cooperating with the National Socialist Party in power.
And these German people, so “Christian” on Sunday, so treacherous every other day of the week, these “good” people turned their backs on friends and neighbors, Jews and gentiles alike, even often informing on them to the secret police, and being rewarded with the possessions of those they named. How was this possible?
I write all this some sixty years after I first looked into the souls, not onto the bodies, of that first page of “kinders,” of children, of children just like me, just like you once.
It was not “Nazis” who murdered them, it was not the Schutzstaffel the “SS” who beat, shot, or gassed those children out of life, No, it was Christians! Steepled churches in every German town, looming cathedrals scattered about the German countryside, and often the highest spire, topped with a Cross-, soaring skyward in German cities. The Holy Bible, taught each Sunday, read in lessons throughout the week. Men and women making the Sign of the Cross, as they passed the trucks carrying away humans who would soon be “trash,” soon be bodies piled in heaps, awaiting an oven’s flame or a layer of soil covering a tractor’s trench.
“Would you die for Him?” Would you stop the death of other’s for Him? I later learned that thousands would, among the millions who did nothing. They joined the Jews in those trucks, in those cattle cars following the rails; they lifted up their voices and their cries for justice were drown out by the silence of millions.
Everyone needs to see these pictures to know where Materialism and Socialism lead. Everyone needs to know that a voice unspoken is justice stilled. Every human needs to fear a world in which once you have no more usefulness, no more value to the State, they will find a way to discard you onto a trash heap. Most of all, every human must fear silence above all other vices, for in the presence of evil the absence of outrage spurs the apathy of all. We all die, our bodies all will lay as still as those piled motionless before the judgment of history, we will all be judged.
What will your empty eyes behold? Those Innocent Children murdered then, aborted fetuses murdered now… those innocents see the light of Heaven, the arms of a welcoming God. When the last breath of the passive, compliant and pitiable German Christians, those adults who lived from 1933 to 1945, who allowed these murders, and then tolerated the death of tens of millions of humans for German’s hegemony over the property, power and people of dozens of countries and cultures, when that last breath of those silent participants in genocide was exhaled, what did their vacant eyes behold?
God have mercy upon their souls, and upon our souls, as we witness the slaughter of innocents on an unimaginable scale, defying both the God of Abraham and the teaching of Jesus Christ.
Those photographs I saw so long ago remain burned into my memory and my heart. I will support the Jewish State as long as its actions comport with God’s Laws, and I will support the Government of the United States as long as its elected men and women seek to turn us back to God, Family and Country… American Values… but we are on the edge of History’s precipice and we will soon topple over into oblivion or stand firm in defiance of evil and in the promulgation of the dignity, beauty and value of all mankind. God have mercy on us.
This is the Day the Lord has made.
Let us give thanks and praise to the Lord our God,
For the Lord our God is Just and Merciful,
and His creation is Beauteous, Boundless and Eternal!
Alleluia, Alleluia!
Blessed be the name of God, Blessed be His Holy Name!
Alleluia, Alleluia, Amen!