Fox News: A Survivor Looks Back on Auschwitz 70 Years Later

660-Auschwitz-API, too, visited Auschwitz as a teenager. In 1944, my family and I stood in line before Dr. Joseph Mengele—the Nazi physician known as the “Angel of Death”—as my mother, grandparents, two sisters, and baby brother were all sent to the left to be burned in Hitler’s ovens. My father and I were sent to the right.

The first night inside Auschwitz my father said we must separate because together we would suffer double. “On your own, you will survive,” he told me. “You are young and strong, and I know you will survive. If you survive by yourself, you must honor us by living, by not feeling sorry for us. This is what you must do.” That was the last time I ever saw my father.

I’m grateful for my father’s words of grace and guidance. They echo in my heart even still. It’s a cruel thing, feeling guilty for surviving. But my father erased any future guilt and replaced it with purpose. It was a gift only a father’s wisdom could give. It gave me a reason to go forward, a reason to be. It does still.

Read it all.

Holocaust Memorial Day

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I was stunned to read an article yesterday that cited a recent survey in which only 54% of the respondents don’t know what the Holocaust is. FIFTY-FOUR PERCENT!! How can the other 46% not know that over SIX MILLION people were exterminated by the Nazis during World War II???? Unbelievable.

Under orders from General Eisenhower at the end of the war, my dad, along with every American soldier in Europe, was ordered to visit a liberated concentration camp closest to where they were stationed. The closest to him at the time was Buchenwald and I have pictures he took of the ovens with their human cremains. He told me dead bodies were stacked “like cordwood.” Eisenhower ordered our troops to witness this spectacle because he was convinced that someday people would forget there ever was a Holocaust and even spread lies claiming it never occurred. General Eisenhower was a prophet.

I made it a point to teach the Holocaust to students in my history classes and didn’t spare them the gory details in film and pictures (and please do click the link to watch the video). Get the word out. Don’t be part of that 46% because these were real human lives that were exterminated. That’s what human hate inevitably leads to if left unchecked.

If you are interested in participating in the Holocaust Memorial Day, tomorrow, January 27, 2105, click the graphic above and see how you can get involved.

A Prayer from William Barclay

O God, we thank you for all those in whose words and in whose writings your truth has come to us.
For the historians, the psalmists, and the prophets, who wrote the Old Testament.
For those who wrote the Gospels and the Letters of the New Testament;
For all who in every generation have taught and explained and expounded and preached the word of Scripture;
We thank you, O God.
Grant, O God, that no false teaching may ever have any power to deceive us or to seduce us from the truth.
Grant, O God, that we may never listen to any teaching which would encourage us to think sin less serious, vice more attractive, or virtue less important;
Grant, O God, that we may never listen to any teaching which would dethrone Jesus Christ from the topmost place;
Grant, O God, that we may never listen to any teaching which for its own purposes perverts the truth.

O God, our Father, establish us immovably in the truth.
Give us minds which can see at once the difference between the true and the false;
Make us able to test everything, and to hold fast to that which is good;
Give us such a love of truth, that no false thing may ever be able to lure us from it.
So grant that all our lives we may know, and love, and live the truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
—From Prayers for the Christian Year by William Barclay

Carlo Carretto On Knowing God

Only God knows how to speak about himself, and only the Holy Spirit, who is love, can communicate this knowledge to us.

When there is a crisis in the Church, it is always here: a crisis of contemplation.

The Church wants to feel able to explain about her spouse [Jesus] even when she has lost sight of him; even when, although she has not been divorced, she no longer knows his embrace, because curiosity has gotten the better of her and she has gone searching for  other people and other things.

The revelation of a triune God [God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit] in the unity of a sing nature, the revelation of a divine Holy Spirit present in us, is not on the human level; it does not belong to the realm of reason. It is a personal communication which God alone can give, and the task of giving it belongs to the Holy Spirit, who is the same love which unites the Father and the Son.

The Holy Spirit is the fullness and the joy of God.

It is so difficult to speak of these things. We have to babble like children, but at least, like children, we can say over and over again, tirelessly, “Spirit of God, reveal yourself to me, your child.”

And we can avoid pretending that knowledge of God could be the fruit of our gray matter.

Then, and only then, shall we be capable of prayer; borne to the frontier of our radical incapacity, which love has made the beatitude of poverty, we shall be able to invoke God’s coming to us, “Come, creator Spirit!”

—Carlo Carretto, The God Who Comes