Warsaw, 1943

 August 30, 2020

This afternoon I finished reading “Rescued from the Ashes: The Diary of Leokadia Schmidt. She was a young Jewish wife and mother caught in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 when the Nazis barricaded it and began systematically rounding up and transporting Jews to the gas chambers. Miraculously, she, her husband, and their young child all survived the horrors of those years, often by having chosen one place to hide over another. The deprivation they endured and the constant fear with which they lived is unimaginable to us today, as is the wanton and deliberate slaughter of men, women, and children carried out by the Nazis. 

“Never Again” was the cry of the Jewish people who managed to survive the Holocaust, and led to the formation of the Jewish state in 1948. When Auschwitz was finally liberated, General Eisenhower insisted that films and photos be taken of the wretched conditions, the piles of bodies, the crematoriums, the storerooms filled with shoes, hair, eyeglasses, and such. He was strangely prescient when he said that “someday, some bastard will say this never happened,” and he wanted the world to never forget the depths of depravity carried on within the camps. 

Today there are millions who are willingly ignorant of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, who deny the Holocaust; there are plenty more who turn a blind eye to similar ethnic purges that happened in Soviet Russia under Stalin, and are happening in China today as ethnic Uighurs and Christians are persecuted. North Korea is particularly brutal in its treatment of its own people. 

We always think, “This can never happen here,” but such was the thinking of most Europeans in the 1920s and 30s. They were a cultured, sophisticated, multicultural society, much as we are today. Sadly and dangerously, we are seeing the same tactics playing out in our culture as were employed by the Nazis. A favorite tactic of Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, was to accuse others of the very atrocities they were about to unleash on the people. Riots and thuggery became commonplace, eventually overwhelming the resources of law and order. People forget that Hitler was elected by popular vote by promising to restore Germany’s greatness and bring order to the chaos he himself orchestrated.

Schmidt’s diary is a heartbreaking story of survival in the most adverse of circumstances. Any troubles or difficulties I encounter in life are minimal irritations compared to her trials, for which I am deeply grateful. But when I look around me and see the rioting, the inability or unwillingness of politicians to deal with the destruction of entire neighborhoods, the wanton destruction and violence that goes unchecked, I know that history can repeat itself, and how important it is for us to be ever vigilant. It could happen here; I am grateful it hasn’t, and lay my head on my pillow tonight with a prayer that those who wield power and make decisions have only wisdom, but also integrity and compassion as they lead. With COVID-19, we have seen how drastically life can change almost overnight, as we go around masked and distant from one another. No matter how often we encourage one another to “be safe,” we are not assured of a safe world. But we are assured of God’s presence through whatever comes. On numerous occasions in Mrs. Schmidt’s diary, she writes of Providence that was with them at critical moments. That same Providence is with us, repeatedly commanding us to not be afraid, but to trust in his mercy and grace. It is that mercy and grace that enables me to lie down in peace and rise in the morning with hope and joy, for which I give thanks tonight.