Do Not Forget

As the awareness of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut last Friday begins to lose its edge of disbelief and settle around us into acceptance, I keep thinking about what I felt when I first visited the Nazi Concentration Camp of Dachau in Germany several years ago.

I’ve never had an easy time putting into words what came over me as I walked through that place, taking in the horror, the absolute inhumanity of the atrocities committed there against innocent living beings. Babies, children, teenagers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, grandmothers, grandfathers. All individuals, with hearts and souls.

It was beyond anything I knew how to process.

And that is the case for what was done to those twenty beautiful children. To the six adults who acted in their defense and gave their lives as a result. And to the mother who no doubt loved her son only to have her life taken by him.

It’s unfathomable. Unthinkable. Unconscionable.

But it’s not impossible. If we have learned anything by recorded human history, it is that the depths of human cruelty can be boundless. Certainly, it was in Dachau, Germany. And it was in Newtown, Connecticut.

Innocents. Victims. Beautiful lives extinguished in a moment.

Do we call it madness? Anger? Hate? Is there a difference?

I think of the monument at the Dachau Concentration Camp. Do not Forget.