Gordon Jones
This past summer my wife and I had the opportunity of traveling through much of Europe. We saw many cities, churches and museums. Of all that we saw, our visit to Auschwitz made the deepest impression. To walk on the grounds where millions of men, women and children were murdered and tortured was an overpowering experience. Their blood and suffering have consecrated those grounds and anyone who walks those paths can feel a small portion of the pain and anguish of those poor souls who were so unfairly hated and killed. There was not pretext that this was just punishment. This had nothing to do with what they did, it was simply who they were.
It was Dr. Mengele who watched the prisoners get off the train and to each he would signal the officers either a thumb up or a thumb down. The thumbs down meant they went immediately to the gas chamber. The others went to the camp where they were slowly starved and worked to death. It was here and at the nearby camp of Birkenau that Dr. Mengele conducted his horrific experiments involving the torture of twins among other atrocities. While listening to his cruel and perverse experiments I was deeply troubled to hear of one story in particular. After visiting the children’s block Mengele drew an arbitrary line on the wall. He then instructed the guards to go through the camp and any infants and children who were shorter than the line were taken immediately to gas chamber. More than five hundred children were killed as a result.
The evil that took place at Auschwitz haunts me still because of the cruelty and the random torture and murder of the innocent children is such a painful thought. As I pondered these horrific images it began to dawn on me that I own a portion of guilt for the murder of innocent children. It became much more real to me that we, as a society, have drawn an arbitrary line on the wall and have killed millions of innocent children because they were less than 22 weeks old. We are killing more than one million babies a year. We are making the atrocities of Dr. Mengele look small by comparison.
I cannot escape the guilt that I am part of the society that not only tolerates these atrocities, but encourages it in many ways. I feel a great empathy with Lincoln’s words at his second inaugural address where he placed equal blame for the sin of slavery on the North who had been complicit in the slave trade until a few decades before the Civil war. He viewed the war was just punishment to both the North and the South for those sins. In reality, we find our country in wars and with atrocities on all sides. How is it possible that the massacre of 20 innocent children in Connecticut could bring the entire nation to their feet while the killing three thousand children every day with the surgeon’s blade goes completely unnoticed?
“Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man (or nation) by whom the offense cometh.” –“we shall suppose that American slavery (abortion) is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God,– He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war (atrocities) as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war (abortion) and senseless killings may speedily pass away.” –Abraham Lincoln