“The Holocaust, more commonly known now among Jewish scholars by its Hebrew term, Shoah (i.e.,”annihilation”), refers first and foremost to the systematic destruction of some six million European Jews by the Nazi government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. It also includes the death through disease, medical experimentation, war, and direct extermination of approximately five million non-Jewish victims, especially the physically and mentally impaired; Polish people, whose nation the Nazis hoped to reduce to slavery status; and Gypsies. The ultimate goal of the Nazis was the creation of a new, supposedly advanced society of totally liberated individuals, biologically perfect and complete masters of their own destiny. For the framers of Nazi ideology, God was dead as an effective force in the Universe…They were no longer subject, in their minds, to any moral norms beyond the wisdom of their own decision-making. Though they sometimes enlisted the cooperation of church people in their plan of Jewish annihilation, the Nazis were in the final analysis as deeply anti-Christian as they were anti-Jewish. Yet traditional anti-Semitism blinded many Christians to the profoundly anti-Christian outlook of the Nazis” (The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality - page 491).
Though I was born only ten years after World War II, and a large number of the male adults in my life were Veterans of the war, I do not remember any of them even whispering about the tragic events of The Holocaust. The adult Veterans in my life would speak about some of their experiences in the war; but they would rarely speak of the true horrors they had witnessed. My first real encounter with the subject occurred while watching a Spencer Tracy movie called “Judgement at Nuremberg” in the mid-sixties, when I was ten or eleven years old. As I grew older, I would watch TV Documentaries on The Holocaust; however I never actually met anyone who was an actual witness to the events of The Holocaust”.
My first chance to receive formal education on the subject of The Holocaust occurred in the early 1990s, while I was a seminarian at Saint Thomas Seminary. As a seminarian, I was allowed to attend a class on The Holocaust sponsored by Iliff School of Theology. The students attending the class were members of a variety of faith traditions. We had Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Jews; and I was the only Roman Catholic. The professor was a middle aged, Rabbi. The Rabbi assigned the members of each Faith tradition to give a presentation on their Church’s response to The Holocaust. I was assigned to give the first presentation on the Roman Catholic Church’s Response to The Holocaust. I did my research and gave my presentation, which proved to be a horrific indictment of my Church’s actions. After I gave my presentation, students jumped in with their agreement in regards to my presentation. The Rabbi noticed that the presentation had a devastating effect on me; and after the class he came up to me and said, “Pretty Bad huh” and I responded with a facial expression of agreement. He then said, “Nobody looks good in The Holocaust” and after a short moment of silence he said, “Except maybe the Dutch. But just remember that nobody saved more Jews than your Church; however it didn’t happen in the Church. It happened through individual families hiding Jews in their homes.” In the weeks that followed, I listened to one presentation after another and I came to the conclusion that the Rabbi was right, “Nobody looks good in The Holocaust”.
In 1995, I was ordained as a priest and assigned as the Associate Pastor to the Catholic Churches in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Every two weeks on Friday, I would visit the elderly and sick in their homes. There was one particular elderly man whom I visited who could barely get out of his bed. I knew that he did not have long to live. When he heard that I was a peace time Veteran of the Army, he started to open up to me about his family and his faith. One day I stopped by his house for a visit and he was sitting on his bed with a large shoe box on his lap. He said to me, “I do not know what to do with these. I can’t allow my family to see them. I don’t think it would be right to burn them. “ I looked within the box and saw dozens of black and white photographs of death and carnage. Knowing that he had limited strength and not much time, I started visiting him two or three times a week. He told me that his unit was just walking through the forest, without any expectation of seeing anything. They came into a clearing with rail road box cars. Then they saw the dead bodies on the ground and hanging out of the box cars. His unit and come across a camp that was part of the Dachau Concentration Camp System and he had buried his story within himself for over fifty years. Eventually, I suggested that he should give the pictures to a museum that did research on the Holocaust. I never found out what he did with the pictures.
Ten years after my experiences with the old man in Rock Springs, I became a chaplain for the Department of Veterans Affairs. I heard one story after another about World War II Concentration Camps; POW Camps in Korea; Massacres in Vietnam; Kidnapping and Murder in Central America; and Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans, to name a few.
As Christians, we are required to seek the truth and not bury our heads in the sand. No national border or ocean can protect us from ideologies and governments willing to commit Mass Murder and Ethnic Cleansing. As the American philosopher George Santayana once said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
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