On Holocaust Remembrance Day I listened to a radio report about the Auschwitz concentration camp, where over a million Jews and others were systematically murdered. I learned something new. Auschwitz had built a swimming pool, not for recreation, but because the insurance company required it for fire protection. It is a staggering reminder of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase the “banality of evil.” While the Nazis killed people on an industrial scale they also made sure to carry fire insurance.
It reminds us that the people operating concentration camps were operating within wider social norms. The camps were organized by a machinery of government that normalized murder, treating mass extermination as if it were perfectly ordinary. Auschwitz and the story of its swimming pool is a timely reminder that those who do terrible things often do them in the name of safety and security.
One thing I have learned about the Scriptures is that you will be hard-pressed to find much language about safety and security in them. Instead, the biblical texts repeatedly command us to care for the needy, give to the poor, heal the sick and work for peace and justice. As the prophet Micah puts it, “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
The history of the Holocaust needs to be taught and learned about afresh in every generation. Unless we study history we run the risk of repeating its worst excesses. During the Second World War, the allies were not quick to save the Jews from their fate. Instead, borders were closed to refugees fleeing the Holocaust, effectively consigning them to death. In 1940 a pressure group was formed in the U.S. called “America First.” Designed to keep America out of the war, it did not succeed. But it did delay American involvement, leaving other countries to fight the Hitler regime alone until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following year.
It’s ironic, but also deeply tragic, that on the very same day that we remembered the Holocaust, this country closed its borders to several countries, including Syria, where so many refugees are fleeing for their lives. Whatever else that was, it was not a Christian act. The work of Christians, like those of other religious traditions, is to work for peace and justice and to respect the dignity of all people. When rulers act against those values, it the duty of people of faith to resist the powerful and stand up for the voiceless and the powerless.
In 1944, Marion Pritchard was living in occupied Holland. A social work student, she decided to help Jews escape being rounded up by the Nazis. One night three Nazis and a Dutch collaborator came searching her home. They didn’t find the place where Marion was hiding Fred Polak and his three children, an infant, a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old. Thinking the coast was clear, the Polaks came out of hiding, but the Dutch collaborator returned. Faced with certain death for herself and the family she was hiding, Pritchard killed the collaborator, and kept the children alive.
Pritchard saved 150 Jews from certain death. In 1947 she moved to the U.S., and continued her work in social work, later becoming a psychoanalyst. In 1981 she was recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and research center in Jerusalem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Pritchard, a Dutch woman, who later became an American citizen, lived in the Upper Valley for many years, and was a member of the church I serve, St. Thomas Episcopal Church, during the 1970s and early ’80s. She died at the end of the last year. In a New York Times obituary Professor Deborah Dwork was quoted as saying: “Not only did she save lives during the 1940s, but she continues to save lives today through her influence.”
As part of how we remember those who died in the Holocaust, we are asked to reflect on who we will influence and how we will save lives. Pritchard risked much to help and save others.
We are not living in ordinary times. And while we are not living in the 1940s, we are living at a time when our actions and voices make a difference. Some religious teachers teach that God blesses the powerful and wealthy. Jews, Christians and Muslims believe teach that God blesses the powerless and the poor.
Christianity has at its heart the story of Jesus going up to the mountain to pray. At the top of the world, Jesus then told his disciples that the blessed are those who mourn, the poor in spirit, the hungry, the meek, the merciful, those who hunger for righteousness, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and those who are persecuted. Jesus was clear. God blesses the disadvantaged, the powerless, the suffering and the marginalized. Today we would include in that list refugees, immigrants, religious minorities and the disadvantaged.
History is important. But so is theology. I leave to legal experts whether stopping wholesale immigration from countries with majority Muslim populations is unconstitutional. From a theological perspective, hospitality to strangers in need is at the heart of the human story. Religious faith requires us to welcome the stranger, to care for the needy, and to serve the dispossessed. In God’s eyes there are no insiders or outsiders, citizens or aliens. There are just people who live together on a shared planet that we all call home.
America is at its strongest when it recognizes that this shared human experience is more important than what we may or may not believe, or where we had the privilege of being born.
The Rev. Guy Collins is rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover and Episcopal chaplain to Dartmouth College. He is the author of Faithful Doubt: The Wisdom of Uncertainty.