The Sanctity of Life/Continued

The Sanctity of Life/Continued

My dear Rabbi friend in Israel sent me this link the other day. I thought I would share it with you as well. It is a 60 Minutes segment chronicling the life of a Jewish boy during Nazi Germany.  Here is the link…

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4819430n

In summary; one evening, a little boy is told by his mother that the next day that he and his family would all be rounded up and killed by the Nazis. Not wanting to die, the little boy miraculously escapes the Ghetto, undetected by the Nazi guards.  In the morning, from a hill above the Ghetto, the little boy watches as all the Jews are marched out to hastily dug trenches and shot. The little boy watches as his mother and siblings were all murdered. He wanders aimlessly for weeks, avoiding capture until he turned over to the Germans by a civilian…doing his "civic duty".

For some unexplainable reason, an SS Officer takes pity on the boy, and the little boy is turned into a mascot for a German army unit.  For months on end, he goes out on patrol with these soldiers to round up Jews to be murdered. Eventually, he ends up living with a very influential German family. Ironically, this Jewish boy even stars in a Nazi propaganda film portraying a loyal Nazi youth. He explains in the story his endless fear that he would be found out, should anyone see that he was circumcised.

This little boy eventually migrates to Australia after the war, gets married, and raises a family. It isn’t until he is an old man that he shares his story with one of his grown sons.

As I watched his story unfold, I tried to place myself in his shoes…what must it have been like to be hiding on that hill as he watched his mother and siblings being shot to death? What must it had been like to stand there hopelessly, in town after town, as he witnessed other Jews being executed? The guilt he must have felt…knowing that he had been spared ,when all around him, others were being murdered. The fear he must have felt…wondering every day if he would be discovered, and killed on the spot.

How does one get past all that?

And yet he does. He survived so he could tell his story...so, he could tell the story of man’s inhumanity to man.

In my earlier blog, I spoke about how it easy it is to become a monster…and if we are not careful, one step in the wrong direction, leads to another step in the wrong direction, to another…until we have crossed over into that immoral wasteland. We know Hitler was an evil man, and yet…sadly, he needed people like you and me to carry out his brutality. Hitler wasn’t there in the little boy’s ghetto when all those people were murdered. Sadly, he had been able to clone monsters from normal people. People who had been indoctrinated into believing that those different from them, weren’t worthy of living.  The Nazis had developed a laundry list of those deemed unworthy. Along with the Jews, the mentally ill, the gays, the old, the sick, the infirm, and anyone else who were deemed unable to be productive members of the new German society and race were also rounded up and executed.

We comfort ourselves by telling each other that this was such a long time ago. The world is a much different place today…it couldn’t happen again…and yet, to our horror…we know that it happens every day. Oh sure, it is certainly on a much smaller scale…but one unjust victim is one too many!

While each of us has a moral responsibility to personally bring harm to no one; our responsibility is much broader. We need to take steps to insure those among us unable to defend themselves are not bullied and picked on. We need to teach our children that it is morally unjust to cause harm to anyone, or anything. Might does not make it right.

I would like to end with the quote from the Dalai Lama that I used in the previous post, “Our prime purpose in life is to help others...and if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them.