Unleashing Courage

I first learned about the Holocaust at as a child in Hebrew School. Our teacher was an elderly woman named Judith, with graying blond hair and numbers tattooed on her forearm. She wept as she told her own story—evicted from her house, separated from her family, and forced to endure long marches from one camp to another. I was horrified and awed by her journey.

“Never again,” Judith said. “This can never happen to our people again!”

This didn’t sit well with me. Of course this kind of atrocity should never happen again. But I wanted to know how it happened. What forces were at work that allowed millions of people—including the Pope and the U.S. President—to see genocide going on right in front of them, but do nothing about it? That was unimaginable to me.