Hatred

As I research my family roots for my genealogy I've discovered that 98% of my ancestors came from England and Ireland with a tiny bit of French thrown in.  Now think about yourself.  How many have, even a small amount, some Polish, Spanish, African, red Indian, Russian, Korean, east Indian or Romanian blood in the family?  How many of you, or someone you know personally, are handicapped, gay or deformed?  According to Hitler all of you, even though you may not be Jewish, but all of you are inferior to me.  Why?  Because I am of European descent - the superior race and you all need to be wiped out.

As you can guess our last stop was at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - one of the hardest museums I've ever walked through.  Again no photography allowed.  On one hand I'm glad there wasn't - much too hard to see.  On the other hand I wish there was - so I could remember what hatred can do.  But even pictures can't re-tell the full horror of the holocaust.  Videos?  They can seal images in your mind.  Exhibits?  They seal the reality of it when, on either side of a 60' hall, 6'wide and 1' deep are only a portion of shoes worn by the massacred.  Then you will walk into a tower and there on the walls, two stories high, are snapshots of people and families who lived in a town that was completely wiped out - wiped off the face of the earth.  Toys, toothbrushes, prayer shawls, hair brushes, scissors, pipes, things that people cherished, all stripped from them and tossed in a pile.

It hurts the heart.  And yet we still go on destroying lives because we think we are superior to everyone else - Sudan, Darfur, young gay students.  On the bottom floor is a wall covered by thousands of 4x4 tiles drawn on by children who went through the museum.  One little girl drew two people holding hands, side by side.  One was dark-haired with dark eyes and the other was a blue-eyed blond.  She wrote, "Why do we hate?  We are all the same."

                                                                    www.ushmm.org


First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out --
          Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out --
           Because I was not a trade unionists.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out --
            Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me --
and there was no one left to speak for me.

                                 -attributed to Martin Niemiller (1892-1984),
                                   anti-Nazi German pastor.