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“Don’t let what you’ve seen here change who you are, my love. Don’t let the evil that the SS scum have inflicted imprison you. You will survive this—I’ll make sure of that. And when you do, you must live the most wondrous life, beyond any of our simple imaginations. Don’t let their hatred live. Leave it behind, and you will have won.”
“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.”
“It wasn’t a policy of the Church at large, more like a penchant of certain clerics who had sympathies for the Nazi or Ustaša cause. The Church never sanctioned those clerics, but the pope never condemned their actions either. The maverick priests and bishops running the ratlines did so without interference from their colleagues.”
and she heard his words to her again. “Don’t let what you’ve seen here change who you are, my love. Don’t let the evil that the SS scum have inflicted imprison you. You will survive this—I’ll make sure of that. And when you do, you must live the most wondrous life, beyond any of our simple imaginations. Don’t let their hatred live. Leave it behind, and you will have won.”
“There were some men who did refuse to murder innocents. Their punishment never approached the hideous acts the men who didn’t refuse perpetrated. The men who refused orders were castigated, moved on, given slop duty, or, at worst, and this was on rare occasion, put into punishment units. They were never lined up, in a cemetery,
huddled together, terrified, as my sisters, my mother, my aunt, my cousins, and my neighbors were. They were never murdered in cold blood, as my family were.”
“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.
the only real way to stop that monster is to make sure that those with the ideas to destroy that which is good and true don’t attain power. Because once they do, and people start to believe their lies, and stop thinking of their fellow human beings as that—as human beings—then they are capable of anything,
