Remembering the Unthinkable

This past weekend we went to hear a survivor of the Holocaust, Rose Price. She will be 82 sometime this year, but she was 10 years old and an Orthodox Jew in Poland when the Nazis invaded her homeland. Like our veterans who fought in WWII, survivors of the Holocaust are getting fewer every year as they die off. I had heard Rose back about 6 or 7 years ago, and she had more trouble staying on topic and not wandering this time than last, which was sad since there was a much larger crowd this time and the power of her story did not really come through as well as it could have.

She and her older sister both survived the death camps. Her mother, father, and younger sister all died there. She was chosen to be shot on two occasions: on those days the 'chosen' would be forced to dig a ditch, then line up in front of it to be shot. They would hold hands usually in those last moments. She held on and fell into the ditch with her dead compatriots, but had not been shot. She would crawl out later, only to be recaptured and put back in the camps.

One particular guard seemed to enjoy humiliating her and her sister. On rainy days he would force them to lie in the mud so he could walk on them to avoid getting mud on his boots. On fair weather days he would simply beat them. Though she left Germany after the war having abandoned faith in God, she later met the Messiah and went back to Germany to tell her story, and she met that guard there at a crusade where she gave her testimony. It was there that she really learned about the power of forgiveness.

There is much more in her book, and the other atrocities in the death camps, including the 'medical' experiments, are well documented in many places. Yet, today not only do the Palestinians and Iranians want to deny that all this happened, there also seem to be many even in the U.S. who are either ignorant or simply unconcerned that all this happened. They seem to have forgotten that Israel exists not because they conquered the Palestinians: it exists as a U.N. mandate, a mandate of the world community as a result of the Holocaust. The Arab world tried to overturn that mandate, and lost. The West Bank had been a location for Syria to shell Israel with heavy artillery until they lost that as well. The current leadership of the U.S. seems to have forgotten all that, apparently thinking that Israel should just give the land back and live with daily artillery barrages from those who to this day deny Israel's right to exist.

We dare not forget either the holocaust and the stories of those like Rose Price or the history of Israel's fights with the Arab world. To forget is to guarantee another holocaust will happen, this time in Israel.