Lest We Never Forget

[SeattleDan]

This is from today's Writers Almanac, April 11th:


It was on this day in 1945 that the U.S. army entered the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. At the time, there had been reports of concentration camps from the field, but no Americans had seen the camps for themselves. The American soldiers who arrived at Buchenwald on this day in 1945 would become the first Western observers of one of the worst atrocities in human history.

Several of the soldiers carried Kodak cameras, and so they took photographs of the surviving prisoners and the dead, so that people would believe what they had seen. Their photographs showed human beings so emaciated that they could barely walk, and victims' bodies stacked around the camp like piles of wood.

One of the children liberated at the camp that day was a teenager named Elie Wiesel, who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He had been forced to march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald a few weeks earlier, and his father had recently died in the camp. In the weeks before the liberation, Wiesel had stopped going to get his food rations, had given up on living. And then, on this day in 1945, Wiesel saw American jeeps rolling into the camps. In his memoir All the Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel wrote, "I will never forget the American soldiers and the horror that could be read in their faces. I will especially remember one black sergeant, a muscled giant, who wept tears of impotent rage and shame... . We tried to lift him onto our shoulders to show our gratitude, but we didn't have the strength. We were too weak to even applaud him."

[hartlikeawheel]

Thanks, Dan.

The book Night by Elie Wiesel is worth more than one read.

Does anything those who desire peace do actually make a difference? I suspect that it does only in the hearts of those who already desire peace.

To go quietly? To lie down?

Or to join the warmongers who believe that fighting back is the only humane way to achieve peace?

Who gets lost in the balance?

How do we reconcile this dichotomy?

It is overwhelming to contemplate.

[joew]

Thanks for posting the reminder, dan.

For decades after WWII there was the slogan "Never Again," expressing the belief that we had learned the lesson that the world had to prevent genocide. But then came Rwanda, Sudan, and other instances, and the world did nothing, except in Yugoslavia. Apparently the lesson still hasn't been taken to heart, and now we get the Holocaust deniers, who implicitly accuse our soldiers, along with those they liberated, of being liars.

It is profoundly discouraging. But we still need to remember and to hope that sometimes the awareness of that immense evil will enable people to prevent recurrences.

[hartlikeawheel]

From my reading, and rereading and rereading, of the Bible, joe, I am convinced that we will never accomplish the goal of peace here on earth. I don't think that we are supposed to.

Not even sure that I need to read the Bible to be able to conceive of that impossibility. All I have to do is keep an open eye and ear to the state of the human condition.

When I read of the devastation done to humans by others the only solution I am willing and able to put into action is on the personal level.

Groups of people, as is once again being exhibited by the all-too-human behaviors of our troups and others, are prone to mass action which is damaging to the human spirit.

This kind of agressive behavior not only hurts those upon whom it is perpetrated but also harms the spirits and lives of the perpetrators.

Our government takes young and maleable people and trains them to be killers in the name of peace. I suspect it has more to do with economics than with the protection of human lives. How do we chose whom we go after while ignoring other atrocities occurring in the world?

We who are aware know what kind of effects this has on our society when those who survive the horrors they have perpetrated and observed come home again. I speak from the experience of trying to help those people try to put their souls back together again and it is not an easy task nor one which has an ABC-book learning ability behind it.

Those who didn't participate in the war - wives, girlfriends and boyfriends and children suffer from the loss and then are subject to the craziness which follows a return home and an attempt by the spiritually wounded to adapt to "normal" life once more. It is sometimes not a very attractive thing to watch and those who are called to help are so often out of the loop as to be ineffective.

What to do?

How much do we want to contribute to human damage in the name of peace? And, conversely, how willing are we to be overrun by groups of people who have human damage in mind?

It is a conundrum beyond comprehension.

[booklady]

Dan, thanks for posting that. I read it this morning, and told my students something about it this afternoon.