The evil that stoked the Nazis still remains

The evil that stoked the Nazis still remains

Exclusive: Barbara Simpson warns against forgetting WWII horrors

By Barbara Simpson

WND - Commentary

Published January 31, 2020 at 7:33pm

https://www.wnd.com/2020/01/evil-stoked-nazis-still-remains/

Media being what they are today, there wasn't much coverage of the varied remembrances of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland.

Given the level of our educational system over the last 60 years, and our penchant for "forgetting," it isn't surprising that outside of perfunctory coverage of the day in local news and several larger remembrances by interested groups, it was a day like any other.

But it wasn't. And it isn't. And it never will be.

We have become inured to violence as our present-day world is filled with horrific instances of ancient forms of torture and killing – kidnappings, stoning, beheadings and more.

It's reported in the news media, and we're subjected to grisly pictures of the horrific deaths of innocents – people killed because of their religious and/or political beliefs. There's no end.

When children grow up seeing things like this, when adults see it repeated constantly, there comes a time when it doesn't horrify them to the point of wanting to put an end to it. They shut it out.

Add to the news coverage of such violence, the degradation of our "entertainment" – movies, videos, all forms of print and stage performances – which explicitly show acts prior generations considered vile.

What, you might ask, does all this have to do with the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in 1945?

I relate it because as our culture has become more tolerant of violence, we have managed to forget parts of our history and how it affected the world.

I would suspect the average school child today knows virtually nothing of the horrific details of World War II. That's a reflection of the deplorable situation in our schools and what they don't teach anymore. History is treated with kid-gloves – we don't want to upset those little minds, after all – so gruesome details are ignored.

Add to that the fact that we hardly celebrate any historical events anymore – from trying to eliminate Columbus Day for politically correct reasons to the virtual elimination of patriotic parades and the lessening of flying and honoring our flag.

I grew up at a time and in a place where patriotism was rampant.

The people I knew and grew up around had been through the WWII – and many had older relatives who were in World War I. My husband's father and his brother were in World War I. In fact, both those wars affected almost everyone in this country.

Families had members who fought in WWII; they either did or didn't come home, and often they came home in pieces. Death was ever-present. My mother's cousin was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. Other relatives were in the military. Many homes displayed small flags in their front windows, showing the number of their relatives who were war fatalities.

Trips to the movies showed newsreels with the latest films of the varied battles and the consequences on the people and the terrain. One thing they didn't show, until after the war, were pictures of the people who were prisoners of the Nazis in those torture death camps that, in fact, were kept virtually secret until that fateful day in 1945 when Soviet troops went into Auschwitz and freed the 7,000 prisoners who were left there by the Nazis.

The prisoners found by the Soviets were in the worst condition. They were left because the Nazis figured they were ready to die – starved, tortured and diseased. The other thousands of prisoners had been marched out by the Nazis to other camps where eventually they all were killed.

Murdered is the correct word to use.

The world was horrified as the truth came out. Auschwitz was but one of a string of such camps run by the Nazis. The main purpose was to kill all the Jews from all the countries occupied by Germany. They also killed Poles and Catholic priests and nuns, Jehovah Witnesses, the mentally ill, homosexuals and anyone else considered beneath the level of pure Germans.

It's estimated that 1.3 million people were deported by train to Auschwitz between1940-45, and of them, at least 1.1 million were killed.

Try to imagine that.

People were rounded up and families separated. They were stripped of their belongings, clothes, eyeglasses, their hair cut off. They were beaten, starved, gassed, individually killed – and eventually, their bodies were put into oven to be cremated, their ashes dumped in pits and across fields.

There were work units of prisoners whose job it was to kill and dispose of the victims – until it was their turn to die.

Everyone was killed – from infants to the elderly, men and women. They were all disposable. When the whole horrid scenario was examined after the war, it was determined that more than 6 million people were killed.

Try to imagine that.

I was fortunate to have grown up in a part of New Jersey where many of the survivors of WWII came to this country to settle. The people I knew were mostly farmers, and they gloried in the freedom the United States provided them.

But the fact that I knew them made their war terrors all too real.

I saw that they all had numbers tattooed on their arms. They explained they were put there by the Nazis. I knew people who were there and fortunately survived.

They told of horrors endured. One that has stayed with me was the parent who told my father that he saw his child taken from his wife by a Nazi soldier, the baby thrown in the air and caught, as a joke, on the soldier's bayonet.

My dad was horrified, and when I heard that story, it was seared in my memory.

We hear "Never Again." And for Jews, especially, that is a good goal – but it appears we are sliding back into the mire. Cases of anti-Semitism are not only rampant in Europe but also are increasing in this country.

We must NEVER allow anti-Semitism to grow. Americans must join together in celebrating our freedoms and the life our Constitution makes possible. And we must educate our children about history and prepare them for the world they will face.