Reflections on the Holocaust

Not for the weak of stomach. Exit while you can. Written on a sheet of notebook paper and transcribed.

I’m sitting outside of chapel, They’re doing praise and worship inside, and I can’t go in. Not yet.

We just watched a holocaust video. For the first time, I cried over it. The inhumanity. This must have been what YHVH saw when He sent the flood. I can’t go into chapel. I need to process this.

God, You let the human race go on? After such inhumane, abominable atrocities? There are no words, no adjectives, to adequately describe the horror, the revolting… the camera pointed at a corpse on a man’s shoulders… and stayed on him, and so many others. To run the camera, and not point it away because the world needs to see it. Why? I don’t really even know. Because it’s true. Because it’s terrible. You want to cry out “NEVER AGAIN,” but it has ALREADY happened again. And somewhere in the world, it is probably happening now.

Thousands of dead
starved beyond recognition as humanity
tossed – unceremonious – into mass graves
calloused guards, uncaring citizens
bulldozers, and a sign:
__“Grave No. 3, No: 5000” on the grave.
Typhus, lice, starvation
Blood crying out from the ground
__Am I my brother’s keeper?
Human skin, cut off, and used
__as lampshades.
This is what Elie Wiesel saw.

Beware of lies that poison the soul
calling any less than human.
Auschwitz’ sign, a stark bleak warning:
“Do not repeat this desolation.”

Can God forgive such atrocities?
Is this the sin Yeshua bore
__to the cross?
A cross very much the same
__as the ones to which
____the men with swastikas nailed
The least of these, His brothers?
__(And those, in some ways, were
____the lucky ones.)
To forgive those cruel butchers, He must be
__a great, a powerful, savior, indeed.

Why, when seeing atrocities, do men look
____to God?
__To wonder where He is, how He
____could let this
______happen?
The cries for justice
__to the Judge of all the earth
____and the victims’ cries go up to Him,
__“Oh Lord, how long?”
____“Will not the Judge of all the earth
______judge rightly?

The camera whirred on
__focus unbroken
____from the suffering
______refusing to turn away
____though willing
because the world needed
__to know
____what happened here.

And there was slavery
__and Wilberforce
And “Christian” racism
__and King

What lies are we believing
__to carry on our lives
in such a way
__as to ignore
the suffering in our world?
How will future generations
__look on how we’ve lived?
And then the judge of all the earth
__Who for us, His life giv’d?
Will we seek justice
__and love mercy
____and walk with God?

And the earth cries out
__the ground weeps
____the dirt, the dust from which man was taken
__and is
__and shall return to
____silently laments

God hears.
God sees.
And the angels carry
__to Abra’ms bosom
____the hearts of the innocent.

Can anyone escape the guilt?
__Even we who were not there?
Who were not even alive to see
__this awfulness?

Ours is the responsibility
__to see
____and to tell our children
______To warn them, about Buchenwald.

Never again.

______Lord,
________Have mercy.

David M Schell About David M Schell
I am a doubter and a believer. I have a Master's in Divinity from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, but because faith grows and changes, I don't necessarily stand by everything I've ever written, so if you see something troubling further back, please ask! Read More.

Author: David M Schell

I am a doubter and a believer. I have a Master's in Divinity from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, but because faith grows and changes, I don't necessarily stand by everything I've ever written, so if you see something troubling further back, please ask! Read More.

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