I have started reading Elie Wiesel’s Night after so many years of avoiding it.
As a teenager in Sunday school I was shown many horrific films about the Holocaust. The scope and depth of its evil was and is always something unimaginable and incomprehensible. Years later I watched Shoah and then I think I could no longer bring myself to experience any documentary forms about this cosmic tragedy.
I became friends with someone several decades ago whose parents were both caught up in the rise of Nazism. Her mother was from a well-to-do family whose wealth was stolen from them before their eyes. Both she and my friend’s father
managed to pay their way out of the ensuing nightmare, since this was in the early years. They refused to speak German henceforth. I knew them both slightly but never broached the subject. Over the years I would meet others with relatives
caught up in the horror of the time. One listens.
The stories about children are the hardest to hear, not only because I am a father. They belie any understanding of humanity and lead one to question the very existence of our species. How are we capable of such atrocities? We know that such things continue into our own time. But not on such an organized, mechanical, programmed, logical framework, as was the Holocaust. A Republican friend of mine was shocked to hear from me recently that George W. Bush’s grandfather did business with the Nazis. So did IBM and other American interests. One can always plead ignorance or look the other way. America is in the process of morphing into a Capitalist Democracy, where millions may have their very livelihoods sacrificed to maintain the survival of major corporations. Our leaders plead ignorance or look the other way.
At least they are not throwing babies into fires.
Yet!
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