I first visited the former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1985. My fellow AIA teammates and I were on a trip around Poland playing basketball, and our leaders decided we should visit the former Nazi death camp. Quite honestly, and I hate to admit it, but my history lessons were sorely lacking in high school and I only knew smatterings of what transpired in this infamous death camp.
We drove through a quaint little town called Oswiecim (Auschwitz in German) and there on the outskirts lay a HUGE plot of land dotted with the remains of barbed wire fences, brick buildings and smokestacks: the infamous death camp of Auschwitz where the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews and other "undesireables". After completing the tour, I remember feeling like someone had kicked me in the stomach and the ache would never go away. Slowly, it did fade, and I proceeded to live my comfy life in the U.S. only giving a slight thought or two to what transpired in a far off land so many years earlier.
It wasn't until I taught my 8th graders about the Holocaust in the late 1980s that the gruesome reality of what took place ripped my heart open again.
Fast forward to the mid 1990s when I began taking groups of high schoolers to Hungary to teach summer English camps; on the weekend between the two camps, we piled onto an overnight train to Poland to expose these American high school kids to the realities of the horrors of WWII death camps. As we passed through the sweet quiet town of Oswiecim again, I couldn't help but wonder why the residents of the town didn't stand up and say anything during the holocaust?
You see, there were furnaces burning humans cranking 24/7, especially during the final years of the war, and stories of ash falling from the sky and coating cars and trees and roads still exist. In addition, the smell must have permeated the air, so why the silence? And what does any of this have to do with the United States today?
I found these "answers":
Why didn't Auschwitz residents help the people in the holocaust?
The concentration camp and the extermination camp were well outside the town and surrounded by an exclusion zone. Also, because if they did, they would probably be captured and sent to the camp as well as the person they tried to save. Not to mention when they got captured they probably would have been whipped.
And another:
Most residents of the town were not involved in the holocaust. Obviously, the Jewish inhabitants were taken to the camp and killed. The camp itself (or rather complex of camps) was surrounded by an exclusion zone.
Here is where it gets interesting and relevant to us in the United States today:
From a German woman… when she was about sixteen years old she said to her grandmother, “How come nobody stopped what was happening with Hitler. How come they didn’t stop them from taking the Jews away?”
And the grandmother said to her, “You don’t understand. It wasn’t one day that we woke up and all of our rights were taken away from us. They took them away from us slowly. And then one day you couldn’t speak out, because if you spoke out you were dead.”
We are not facing standing up for a particular people, although I do believe that day will come, but more significantly, we are facing standing up for ourselves!
As a believer and follower of Yeshua, I am advocating ONE THING: Repentance and turning to the Lord.
If we remain silent, if we continue on in our lukewarm ways of cultural Christianity, if we continue to feed the Babylonian spirit that has invaded our nation, families and individual hearts, we too will be asking the same question our German sister posed above.
Maybe you think I am sounding gloom and doom; Ezekiel is clear: if I, as a watchman of the Lord, do not sound the alarm and warn people, I will be held responsible.
In all of this there is GREAT HOPE! His name is Jesus, Yeshua, and His heart is FOR us, not against us. He is coming again for His pure and spotless bride, and so we must stand up, declare the praises of our King, share His love and His truth, not watered down, and shout it from the mountain tops: WAKE UP AMERICA! The Lion of Judah is coming and our compromise, our flirtations with sin, our bowing to the cultural tide of "whatever feels right is right" has got to stop.
Our King is mighty to save, mighty in love and mercy and forgiveness, mighty to overthrow all that hinders His love from being manifested in our hearts. He will do it because He is a jealous God, longing to defeat the true enemy who has done nothing but lie, steal, kill and destroy humanity. He wants nothing more than His goodness to be manifested in our lives and in our nation; the key is discovering what HIS GOODNESS really is. That goodness is fully encapsulated in One Person: Jesus, Yeshua, the Messiah...a Jewish man who came to seek and save the lost, and is coming back for a pure, spotless bride. HE is the way, HE is the truth, and HE is the life, and no one comes to the Father except through HIM.
In WW II, it was not popular to take a stand for the Jewish people; it could get a person killed.
In 2013, it's not popular to take a stand for Jesus; in many parts of the world, people are being killed for their faith in Him.
We in the United States are faced with this question:
Choose this day whom you will serve: God or man. Ironically, either choice will bring death: death to self, or eternal death.
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