Holocaust Reflections

Alice Lok, born February 7, 1929 in Budapest Hungary: a Jew. When the Germans invaded Sarvar, Hungary, where she was living at the time, Alice and her mother, brothers, and sister were shipped to Auschwitz, the infamous extermination camp. She survived to be liberated, yet her sister did not. I was assigned Alice’s identification card during the tour of the Holocaust museum, and her story of loss and tragedy is just one of millions. Remembering the Holocaust in this way put faces to the statistics, and horrific illustrations to the heinous brutality that human beings inflicted on other human beings. Never again can I read about the inhumane massacre of six million Jews and other “inferior races” without remembering the stark images of these abominable acts which have been imprinted in my mind.

The photographs and videos displayed throughout the exhibits made me a first-hand eye witness of the despicable cold-blooded murder of so many innocent people at the hands of the Nazis. One slideshow of photographs illustrated the massacres portrayed in Ordinary Men. Jewish people of all ages were stripped, lined up, and then shot like stray dogs, their bodies falling indifferently into a ditch. Piles of naked, broken bodies were carelessly covered and forgotten, unwept for because those who would weep were also dead, tangled up above, below, and all around families, friends, and communities.

Another image I saw was of an entire family: a father, mother, and four children, shot dead in the middle of a Polish street. A little girl of around 3 or 4 is crumpled over, her head of curls resting in a pool of her own blood, sprawled next to her father and mother. There were countless faces of the dead and dying, the hopeless and the desperate, the haunted eyes of children who have seen more than a lifetime of suffering should reveal. There was a Catholic priest who fearlessly faced his executioners at the edge of a ditch already filled with the butchered bodies of his church flock and his friends; I saw the sawed up bodies of victims used in revolting medical experiments; everywhere I turned, there was a complete and abhorrent abuse of human life.

I asked myself who could inflict such monstrous treatment on a fellow human creature, and I looked closely at a life-sized photograph of an S.S. officer herding Jews along to their death. He was young, right around my age, but his eyes were hard and cruel. Yet there he was, no less and no more human than the people he was killing. I was struck by his humanity, and I realized that the horrific murder of six million people was not carried out by monsters or demons. The six million people massacred in the Holocaust were not just a group of statistics numbering the Nazis brutality; there are six million stories of people forced from their homes, separated from their families, and mercilessly murdered, their lives callously ended. These people were just like me and you; but even more striking is that the killers who tried to exterminate an entire race were also people—people with family and friends, hobbies and homes. People just like you and me. The Holocaust museum not only reminded me of the reality of six million horrendous deaths; it also revealed to me for the first time the death of thousands of men’s souls. The nightmare inflicted on the victims of the Holocaust was a reflection of the depravity of the killers’ souls, and it told me that there are worse things than dying.