The trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau – We were picked up in a mini-bus and joined about 12 others to be driven the hour and a bit to the camps.  The museum has been developed over the years in order to help make sure that we never forget what happened, and that it never happens again.

Our guide was wonderful – thought-provoking, sensitive, knowledgeable.  Our group listened and wept and wondered.  How could this be? The pictures in this post didn’t come from me.  I couldn’t take photos.  It seemed almost disrespectful.  I needed to be in the moment – needed to absorb and see my surroundings with my own eyes – not through the lens of a camera.

I know there is evil in the world.  I know there are bad people and people who are followers and people who are sadistic and psychopaths, but how can you get so many to follow?  How can so many do so much evil? How could this happen?

The sad thing is, is that other genocides HAVE happened.  How? Why? What corrupts ‘man’ so much that we feel it is allowable, even encouraged, to think one is better than another?  That some people are sub-human?  That they should be wiped off the face of the earth?

According to an article in Der Speigel Online, in 2005, then-UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, spoke of how the world has NOT stopped genocides since the Holocaust.  At the end of WWII, it was said that ‘never again’ would the world allow such horrors, and yet it has stood by and more than once, failed to prevent or halt genocide.

SOME of the atrocities include:

Bangladesh – 1971 – 500,00 and up to 3 million people murdered

East Timor – 1975 – 1999  – 200,000

Cambodia – 1975 – 1979 – 1.7 million

Guatemala – 1981 – 1983 – 200,000

Bosnia – 1992 – 1995 – over 200,000

Rwanda – 1994 – over 800,000

Darfur – 2003 – ? – over 300,000

Are we headed there again?  In North America… with the new party in Germany … with similar sentiment rising in other First World Nations – are these ideas growing? Being fostered? Fed? Encouraged?

I fear for our world.

Where does it end.