Endless Atrocities

The Holocaust and More.

Freud wrote that humankind has a death instinct. Was he wrong?

When will mass murders of men, women, and children end? The genuine tragedy of the war between Israel, Hamas, and Islamic fundamentalists is that the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza are brother Semites. I do not believe most of the world understands this, but it is part of the reason so many American Jews support the people of Gaza. They are us, and I say that as a fellow Jew and Semite. I visited Israel and met Arabs, and it was startling because they look just like me. Elohim, El, and Allah are all names for G-d and all are rooted in a similar belief system. We do not have a Judeo-Christian heritage. Instead, we have a Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage.

In 1944, Michael Flack wrote this poem while he was in Terezin.

On May 6, 1947, the government of the Czechoslovak Republic established a memorial in Terezín to preserve and maintain the places of suffering in the form they were during the Nazi regime. Michael Flack was a survivor.

"That Bit of Filth in Dirty Walls," Michael Flack, 1944

And all around barbed wire,

And thirty-thousand souls who sleep

Who once will wake

And once will see

Their own blood spilled.

I was once a little child,

Three years ago.

That child who longed for other worlds.

But now I am no more a child

For I have learned to hate.

I am a grown-up person now,

I have known fear.

Bloody words and a dead day then,

That’s something different than boogie men!

But anyway, I still believe I only sleep today,

That I’ll wake up, a child again,

and start to laugh and play.

I’ll go back to childhood sweet like a briar rose,

Like a bell which wakes us from a dream,

Like a mother with an ailing child

Loves him with aching woman’s love.

How tragic then, is youth which lives

With enemies, with gallows ropes,

How tragic, then, for children on your lap

To say: this for the good, that for the bad.

Somewhere, far away out there, childhood sweetly sleeps,

Along that path among the trees,

There o’er that house

Which was once my pride and joy.

There my mother gave me birth into this world

So I could weep…

In the flame of candles by my bed, I sleep

And once perhaps I’ll understand

That I was such a little thing,

As little as this song.

These thirty-thousand souls who sleep

Among the trees will wake,

Open an eye

And because they see

A lot

They’ll fall asleep again….

"Children of Rwanda," by Reverend Francois Murenzi

Known and unknown are the children of Rwanda

Victims of war and genocide,

Though not with us now we know you’re at peace,

We who survived will remember you.

Ten years onward our hearts still troubled

By lack of justice for survivors,

Help our leaders, bringing peace and hope,

Also preventing the same tragedies.

Will you join me now, remember lives lost,

Will you join me now, pleading to all,

To learn the lessons, that at any cost,

Genocide must end, forever more

First They Came," By Pastor Martin Niemoller

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

(It is always the children who suffer worst in war.)

For the descendants of family members lost in the Holocaust, I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to witness Hamas terrorists murder Israelis living near the border of Gaza. 

And then there are the Amercan Black African people who were captured by slave traders in Africa, shipped to the Americas including its islands and sold as property to toil on plantations.

We can go back to ancient times where the bible and historical documents and stone carvings tell of wars atrocities of those times. Atrocities are as old as humankind. My question is, when will it stop? Is it only after a nuclear war that all life on planet Earth is wiped out?