A Day to Remember

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.
I am a Lutheran, an American, and too young to remember.  Why does this day matter?

When I was 9, my mom gave me the All of a Kind Family book.    I was completely intrigued.  I knew about the Hebrew people from the Bible, and that Jewish people lived here in the US, but I had never met anyone Jewish.  There was something about that story that tripped my heart and imagination.

When I was 11, my mom gave me another book after I asked questions about WWII.  My grandfather and I had been talking about bombers and planes at an airshow, and again my curiosity was sparked.  The Hiding Place and then The Diary of Anne Frank, and then the entire series of books called The Zion Covenant were the start of books I read about the subject.

 As I've gotten older, I have struggled to understand the war, the persecution, and where God was in all this.  Elie Wiesel's book Night shook my faith, made me question and ultimately continue my search for truth.  My heart is consistently moved by anything surrounding the war-  how relationships changed, how people reacted to ethical and moral dilemmas , who chose to fight, who chose to stay out.  One of my personal heros is Dietrich Bonhoffer, a man who was involved in the plot to kill Hitler, but instead became a martyr. 

My husband's mother is Polish, born in Germany to a Polish woman and an American solider.  I am waiting for her to write her mother's fascinating story about the invasion, switching identities with her sister, thereby protecting her parents, and then working as a cook in a work camp for the SS and being liberated by the US.  

Today matters because no victim should die in vain, whether the victim be a race of people, or a single person.  While it is impossible to honor each individual person, it is possible to look forward and recognize the symptoms of humanity's sickness and work towards a cure of peace and tolerance.