Arbeit Macht Fret

My response to learning about the Holocaust.

In your wildest dreams did you ever imagine people being murdered due to their religion? I never imagined it, but true. Adolph Hitler set out to wipe out the Jewish population. He and his Nazi men killed hundreds of thousands. They were torturers. They sent Jews to first Ghettos, but that wasn't enough.  They took them and put them in prison camps.  The gates to every camp read "Arbeit Macht Fret", work will make you free, but this was a lie. The more they worked, the worse they became, the closer to death. Many weren't even worked. They were killed upon arrival. You children, elderly, and many women were gassed in chambers. Only those 'fit to work' were kept around. Some wished for a fate that was quick. Even I would trade a long life of starvation and misery to a quick death. How did they fall asleep at night? I lay awake for hours, wondering. When I do fall asleep, I have nightmares. I wasn't even there. I wasn't alive then. How could someone so horrible live knowing they were torturing so many? Were they truly that evil? I will never know. THOSE who died didn't deserve such a fate. None of them did. WHO could be so horrible?  I will never know. I simply CANNOT imagine. I  REMEMBER the Egyptians. The romans wiped them all out. The Germans did not remember what happened in THE PAST. History repeats its self. So many deaths have been committed. They ARE remembered by me. I won't forget them. They were CONDEMED to die, by someone else's will. TO kill oneself is horrible, but to kill another is even worse. Hitler did not kill one, but REPEATed it over and over again. So many. Murdered. I cannot imagine. One day here, the next gone.  IT is the worst thing I have ever learned about. And possibly, the worst ever in our history. I simply cannot imagine.  

Author's Note

Do you agree?

Reviews

[Steve]

I really understand your fustration, I feel it to, and what you have written is so very important. Last night I
couldn't sleep for remembering the awful, unnecessary firebombing of Dresden, a city of the very young and the very old, packed by refugees fleeing the Russian advance. A history teacher once told me how he thought 'evil' existed only as a media concept, but I have seen and heard of enough horrors particulary in the last century to disagree.