Seeing

The entrance to the memorial center is through a train boxcar like those used to transport Jews to the concentration camps. Cramming your standing group into the corner square marked on the floor of the boxcar, you can barely breathe amid the crush of bodies. You begin to sense the Nazis’ utter disregard for humanity. Inside, pictures of victims’ bodies piled high, efficient death showers, smoking ovens, and hollow-eyed survivors make your heart weep.

In the circular memorial room, there are two walls of white marble stones carved with names of perished family members on one wall and names of Gentiles who risked their lives to save the persecuted Jews on the other wall. We read the names of Corrie Ten Boon and Oskar Schindler. I ask the children, “Had you been in Germany, would your name be on this wall?” Thinking of the ovens, we are silent and privately pray that we would have been courageous.

In the center of the room, a slab of black marble memorializes the murdered. Fourteen marble pillars surround the slab, each bearing the name of one of the infamous camps: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and so on. Six lights at the head of the slab signify the six million Jews killed, while a bronze hand reaching out from under the lights signifies hope. Above the hand, we later learn, is a box of bones taken from one of the camps after the war by Mike Jacobs, so he and others will never forget what happened there.

Understanding

When we enter the memorial room, Mr. Jacobs is talking to another family group. He invites us to come closer and listen. He has a story to tell. At age fourteen, Mike saw the Nazis march all the Gentile schoolteachers out of town to the cemetery and shoot them. Nazis eliminated any thinking, influential people. Shortly thereafter, all Jews were required to wear the Star of David on their coats for identification. Then, they were restricted to one area of the city known as the ghetto. Finally, they were loaded into boxcars and taken to face the gas chambers.

Mike tells how, because he was young and strong, he was assigned to clean out the ghetto after the Jews were removed. He saw Jewish babies, left behind by parents who hoped they might be saved, thrown from apartment windows. Once, when Mike and two other boys were digging, he heard a shot ring out, and the boy to the left of him fell dead. A second shot and the boy to the right of him fell dead. Mike kept digging. “Somebody up there was looking out for me.”

After an hour of numerous stories, culminating with our speaker’s liberation at nineteen-years-old and seventy pounds, he rises to lead another tour. I take his hand and thank him for sharing his story with my children. To the children he says, “Take my hand and shake it, so you can tell your children that you shook the hand of a survivor of the Holocaust.  There will not be any of us left when your children come. It will be up to you to never let the world forget the Holocaust, for if they forget, it can happen again.”

Applying

In the car, I reminded the children that the first people murdered in the concentration camps were not the Jews, but the homosexuals, criminals, and gypsies. As humans, we speak volumes about our character by the way we treat the undesirables in our society. Though homosexuality is wrong, and criminals deserve punishment, never should we tolerate wholesale extermination of any human beings. I reminded them, also, that the Jews were not immediately gassed. First, they were marked, then separated, and then they were systematically exterminated. Christians must ever be vigilant to any government repeating such an atrocity against any people. The key to watchfulness is to know history and to recognize that great atrocities come in small increments, little by little.

The post Living History: The Holocaust Memorial appeared first on Texas Home School Coalition.

Stunned, I moved toward the gate to board the plane.

Once seated, I drew out my legal pad and began to list my obligations:

• Teaching home school as well as overseeing a ten-year-old and a sixteen-year old.
• Writing a 200-page book for the third KONOS-In-A-Box, due at the end of February (I had just finished the second book in November.)
• Teaching an American history class one day a week to eight students, ages ten to sixteen, which included all their history, writing, literature, and art.
• Teaching a KONOS “Cooperation” unit on the systems of the body once a week to seventeen students, ages six to twelve (True, I had great helpers, but I was in charge of all the teaching and planning.)
• Writing three 750-word articles within the next two weeks.
• Designing a new brochure for KONOS by the first of February.
• Planning my menu for our KONOS Rep weekend and beginning to prepare in that direction (We have 20 reps who come to our home in February for a weekend and eight meals, which I prepare with help.)
• Helping my mother in Amarillo, who was going through trials following the death of her husband.
• Being available for my two older sons, who are in college, as well as for my mother-in-law, who had just buried her 100-year-old mother.

I did not bother to list the givens, such as the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the driving, the gardening, the preparing for Y2K!! Then, of course, I had to replant the pansies that the four dogs had dug up and paint the back hall before the reps came. Also, my speaking engagements begin early this year, in April. Never mind that I had had my gall bladder out three weeks ago, had gone right into having Christmas dinner for thirty, and had entertained 150 kids on New Year’s Eve! Did I qualify for being over committed? No, I qualified for being committed!!

I got off the plane at 5:30 p.m. Wade met me, and, while we ate at La Madeline’s, amid tears I resolved to carve away at my obligations. By 9 p.m., Wade and I had called all my students and canceled the second semester of both my classes. It was a very difficult thing to do, since I love the children and love teaching them, yet Oprah’s show–of all things–had convinced me that I needed to cut back!

My encouragement to each of you is, not to watch Oprah, but to reevaluate your personal obligations as you begin the new year. As I was canceling my classes, one of my friends, who had helped me with my little kids’ class, commented, “I cannot believe you are actually taking your own advice.” She was referring to the seven-hour KONOS Creating the Balance video where I enumerated a wife’s and mother’s priorities, in order.

As women, our first priority is to the Lord, second to our husbands, third to our children, and then to our extended family and friends. One would think that if I had taught a principle to home schooling moms for seventeen years, I would certainly practice it myself! Not so. The Christian walk is a constant struggle to stay in His will, keeping His priorities, not ours.

Talk show TV is seldom an encouragement to do the Lord’s will, but maybe whales and burning bushes are communication tools of the past. If Oprah knowingly or unknowingly touts principles concurrent with biblical truth, maybe we should hear the message and act.

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