smell the palpable, ghastly odor of burning human flesh
WOULD YOU HAVE HELPED?
Any of us who've read about that horrific era are terrified by the thought of it, the photographs, even by meeting people who lived through it. Our hearts break. We cannot possibly comprehend. How can we say, "We're sorry"? It is not enough.
But of what are we most afraid? I personally think what torments us most about that piece of charred history is our not really knowing how we'd have reacted had we been non-Jewish Germans living in Deutschland at that time. Oh, many of us loudly insist we'd have taken a stand, protested, put a stop to the slaughter of millions. In fact many did try, some were successful, but many ended paying the ultimate price for their heroism.
We are left wondering if we really would have had the courage to stand up to the black, brutal violence of Nazism, if we would have had the bravery to save even one life; Jewish, Gypsy, homosexual, mentally or physically handicapped, or any marked for extermination in order that the so-called Aryan race be kept pure. Would we? Would you? Would I?
I've pondered on this problem a great deal over the years. I was alive, happy and thriving back in the 1930s and 40s while millions were dying in ways so horrible most of us cannot touch our minds to the thought of it for fear it will burn into the very core of our psyches. Children like me were being ripped to pieces. Who knew? Did you? Did we? Did I?
I wonder if I'd been a parent in Germany with a family I loved and knew what was happening, and yet because a horrible war was exploding all around me, would I have had the courage to scream "Stop!!"? Would I have taken the terrible chance that my family would be piled amongst the slaughtered because of my heroics? If I lived near a crematorium and could smell the palpable, ghastly odor of burning human flesh, would I have called a meeting of my neighbors, demanding to know what that was? Would I, like so many did, have spent my life protesting, "But we just didn't know!" Would I have put my beloved family at risk to save complete strangers?
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