The Longest Echo

by Eoin Dempsey

History is not past, but merely an extension of the present, to which all people are tied.

It was ironic that the Nazis’ worst enemies, the communists, had saved many of them from paying for their war crimes.

“Why would the Catholic Church want to help fleeing Nazis?” “They had the same enemies. The Nazis were fanatical anticommunists, and the Church was terrified of the Soviets rampaging across Europe and destroying their church. That’s how it began.”

Who knows how many among you sitting here tonight might have done the same thing in their places?”

“The simple truth is that it takes unimaginable strength to be different. To break away from what your peers are doing is one of the hardest things for anyone, be that person a child in the schoolyard or a twenty-one-year-old SS man trying to gain the trust of his fellow soldiers.

It’s easy, convenient even, to paint these men as evil. To write them off as monsters and to think we’re inherently better than them.

It’s harder to realize that there’s a little bit of that same monster in all of us,