The Redhead of Auschwitz. A True Story

by Nechama Birnbaum

“You never, ever really know who the real person is. People are good at pretending. They are sweet and nice and then when they don’t need you anymore, who knows what they can do. You never actually know a person all the way. People know how to dress their souls up, put some makeup on. They can act polite when everyone is looking but you can never be sure.”

“All destruction comes from thinking about others as different than you. To be cruel to someone, you cannot think of them as yourself. So, we make them a stranger in our eyes. As if we don’t all have the same blood in our veins, as if we don’t breathe the same air. No one can be cruel unless they really view someone as different but that rips the world apart. We cannot be different. We are all part of the same God. We are never alone.”

“Think of it as the greatest gift of all. You don’t wait to see what kind of life you lived or what kind of person you became, you choose for yourself no matter what you are going through. You don’t wait for life to happen to you, you happen to life. With every move you make you can choose to make it what you want, what you believe in, even if it is the harder choice.”

I said I was going to go home, but when I was buried underground, I was not sure I believed it anymore. I was tired and breaking apart. Now I sit here among the flowers, and I know there is a God and there is life still to be had. I am going to go home. I am going to live.

If you are reading this now, you are alive, and for you, too, the world was created for you alone. All the beauty of the world was created just for you, and for each one of us.

Evil does not only happen when a person is abnormally bad. Evil happens when good people do not see the good in other people. Evil happens when we judge each other. Evil happens when we put ourselves higher than others. Evil happens when we stand by someone else’s evil and do not speak up.