Never again

Holocaust Memorial Day today. I caught part of a TV documentary about the persecution of French Jews this evening - little children separated from their parents and transported by train 60 hours across Europe to Auschwitz.  Our September Pilgrims will be visiting that most hellish of 20th century sites this year. I think I will have to gear myself up well before for that experience... 

In August while in the Baltic Republics I saw and heard much about the horrors of the Soviet era, and I was sorry that we missed our usual visit to Yad Vashem on September's Holy Land pilgrimage. Yad Vashem is the Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Jerusalem, and is a deadening experience. Sometimes I hear people say that it is time for the world to "move on" from thinking about the Shoah, the Holocaust. Yes, there have been other crimes on a huge scale, but I think that the cold, calculated nature and scale of the Final Solution has no precedent - and no future equal, I pray. I believe that our culture has maybe still not really handled what happened, not in far off Africa or Asia, but here in allegedly Christian Europe. I am not at all surprised that there should be Holocaust deniers, just as there are abuse deniers in the Church. It is all, indeed, hard to believe.

And, Lord, I am not surprised that all this, in turn, makes it hard for many to believe in You.