In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as Holocaust Remembrance Day in commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp (the Soviet army liberated the camp in 1945). Last Sunday, a teenager in my church came and sat down in my office and asked me some tough questions about God. Among his questions was: "Where was God during the Holocaust?"
Tough question. Impossible question, even.
I'm reading a book right now by Elie Wiesel called "The Night Trilogy." The first part of the book is Wiesel's memoir about his life in the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The second and third parts are fictional stories that he has used as his way of processing the memories that haunt him. I can remember going to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. when I was in college and seeing the terrible things that human beings did to other human beings.
Where I'm living in Illinois is very close to Peoria, Illinois. At an outdoor shopping outlet mall in Peoria, there is a Holocaust memorial. There are two parts to the memorial. The first section has 18 glass containers shaped like the Star of David. The cases together contain 6 million buttons. These are buttons that you would find on a button down shirt or on a pair of jeans. Each button is different. This part symbolizes the six million murdered Jews. The second part of the memorial has five glass cases shaped like triangles to symbolize five million enemies of the Nazi state who were also murdered. If you stand in the center of the memorial, you are faced with a total of eleven million buttons. It's an incredible feeling to be standing in the middle of eleven million buttons and realize that each button is differnet, symbolizing a unique individual that lost his or her life to something so horrifying.
It's mind-boggling to think that a human being is capable of doing to another human being what people did to each other during the Holocaust. The people who suffered in the concentration camps were not even seen as people, but as disgusting dogs who deserved to die like disgusting dogs. When it was over, the world made a committment to make sure that nothing in history would ever even come close to the Holocaust ever again. We know that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.
Which makes my heart ache when I look at the world and still see genocide going on. Rowanda. Darfur. And now there are riots and violence happening in Egypt and Tunisia. I know we're not at a point where we can compare what's going on in Egypt and Tunisia right now to the Holocaust -- not even close -- and it is my sincere hope and prayer that we never GET to that point. At what point can we say that we as a human race have grown up and learned to get along with each other? We can agree to disagree. What kind of a god asks his people to kill and make other people suffer on his behalf?
Not the kind of god I know and follow. The Nazis believed -- Hitler believed -- that wiping out the Jewish people was what God wanted them to do. And so we end where we began, with the teenager in my church asking me where God was during the Holocaust.
Did God allow the Holocaust to happen? Yes. I believe that He did. And here's why: God gave human beings the free gift of free will. The problem is that it turns out free will comes with a very expensive price tag. Put in the wrong hands, free will can spiral out of control and we interpret the God of love as a God who asks us to wipe out entire races.
I submit into evidence the cruscades.
The Holocaust happened because human beings took what was given as a gift and used it for evil. Terrible evil. God allowed it to happen because if God stopped it, we cannot say that we have free will, and I believe that we have free will. I also believe that God heard the cries of His people and cried wept with them in their suffering. That's where God was during the Holocaust: weeping with His people. And praise God that other people used their free will to get the Nazis out of power because nobody deserves to have happen to them what happened to the people who lost themselves to the Holocaust.
It's easy to say this now from my perspective because I wasn't alive then. I wasn't in the Holocaust and I'm not Jewish. So it's easy for me to say that. If I wasn't a Christian and I had suffered in the Holocaust, I might not be saying this. I might not believe in God anymore. I don't know if I would be strong enough to believe in God if I had been a victim of the Holocaust. What I do know is that the human race has to step up and remember the Holocaust. We have to speak out against those who say it didn't happen. This is NOT a conspiracy theory. This actually happened. It is a hideous part of the history of the human race. Genocide is worse than cannibalism. We MUST learn from our history or we WILL be doomed to repeat it.
I don't think world peace needs to be an impossible dream. I think that if we are to live as co-creators of God's created reality, we can find a way to live in harmony with each other and respect each other's ideals. We don't have to agree. But we don't have to kill each other over our disagreements, either.
Remember the Holocaust and continue to pray for those in the world that are persecuted because they believe something different than someone else. My hope and my prayer is that the human race can find its common ground not in the same God and not in the same political system, but in the same foundation of the human existence: we want peace.
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Becki
my picture of the Holocaust Memorial in Peoria with the buttons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/indifferentchildoftheearth/5046199608/
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