Americans cannot assume the Nazi atrocities will not happen here. Innocent immigrant round ups are frightening to all Americans

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU former German NAZI

Concentrataion and Extermination Camp

Day of Liberation

Soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front opened the gates of Auschwitz Concentration Camp on January 27, 1945. The prisoners greeted them as authentic liberators. It was a paradox of history that soldiers formally representing Stalinist totalitarianism brought freedom to the prisoners of Nazi totalitarianism.

The Red Army obtained detailed information about Auschwitz only after the liberation of Cracow, and was therefore unable to reach the gates of Auschwitz before January 27, 1945.

About 7 thousand prisoners awaited liberation in the Main Camp, Birkenau, and Monowitz. Before and soon after January 27, Soviet soldiers liberated about 500 prisoners in the Auschwitz sub-camps in Stara Kuźnia, Blachownia Śląska, Świętochłowice, Wesoła, Libiąż, Jawiszowice, and Jaworzno.

Over 230 Soviet soldiers, including the commander of the 472nd regiment, Col. Siemen Lvovich Besprozvanny, died in combat while liberating the Main Camp, Birkenau, Monowitz, and the city of Oświęcim. The majority of them are buried at the municipal cemetery in Oświęcim.

In the Main Camp and Birkenau, Soviet soldiers discovered the corpses of about 600 prisoners who had been shot by the withdrawing SS or who had succumbed to exhaustion.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy” is a quote from the Bible, Matthew 5:7. It is part of a series of blessings known as the Beatitudes.

More to know about the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz

 Recent discovery in Auschwitz speaks volumes:  

Hand-made chess pieces drawn on cardboard. Photo courtesy of The Auschwitz Museum
Echo report published in Aleteia by Sarah Robsdottir

"There's one last human freedom," a survivor of the most infamous Nazi concentration camp of WWII explains, "and it cannot be taken away ..."  This year's renovations in one of the prisoners' barracks at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland revealed a startling discovery. Upon pulling back the floorboards, 30 handmade chess pieces drawn on squares of cardboard were found in surprisingly good condition, despite being over 80 years old.

"Several drawings may be a bit blurry," Elzbieta Cajzer, the Museum's Director explained in a press release on the Auschwitz Museum's website, "but the images of rooks, pawns, bishops, and knights are still easily distinguishable."

The incomplete chess set has been carefully conserved and will eventually be a part of the museum's permanent display. Cajzer also commented on the fact that the chess pieces were obviously designed to be hidden quickly, as such items of leisure were strictly forbidden in the camp where over 1.3 million people were subject to torture, starvation, and unfathomable cruelty during the primarily Jewish genocide known as the Holocaust that took place across eastern Europe during WWII between 1941 and 1945; 1.1 million of these Auschwitz prisoners were murdered, mostly in the camp's gas chambers. An estimated 11 million people were killed in the Holocaust in total.

Information on the museum's website further describes how contraband chess and card games were popular among the inmates because they provided a powerful source of mental respite in a place of abject suffering, but anyone found in possession of such items would be subject to severe brutality, even death. For this reason, the discovery of these chess pieces speaks volumes about the prisoners who were brave enough to create and hide them.

To choose one's own way

Viktor Frankl, a well-known psychologist, philosopher and Auschwitz' survivor, once said: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances -- to choose one's own way."

The prisoners who risked their lives to play chess in secret must have painstakingly chosen bravery over terror and valued human connection over stark isolation.

Their courage and Frankl's sentiment bring to mind several of the Catholic heroes who perished in Auschwitz, as in addition to Jews, many other "enemies" of the Nazi state were sent there as well.

Saint. Maximillion Kolbe was executed in the camp when he begged to trade his own life for another man who was being put to death.

Saint Edith Stein, a philosopher and convert from Judaism, died along with her sister in the camp's gas chamber, but not before she risked her life to minister to fellow inmates. According to eyewitnesses, she was "a beacon of light," spreading peace, hugging terrified women, praying with them calmly, and helping them care for young children.

There are countless other examples of Holocaust victims and survivors who refused to compromise their God-given human dignity in the face of one of the greatest atrocities of the last century -- from Anne Frank to Corrie Ten Boom. And now we can add to this list the creators of a newly revealed chess set, even though we don't know their names or stories. But we can imagine them defying tyranny -- smiling at one another in the middle of the night, their chess board lit by a slanted beam of gauzy moonlight. 

The winner mouths "checkmate," then discreetly pumps his fist in the air.

"He perfectly loved his country" ~ Senator John McCain

Annelies Marie Frank was a German-born diarist. One of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl

Essay by Jeffrey Goldberg published in The Atlantic:

A decade ago, on one of his seemingly countless visits to Iraq, John McCain, who was generally immune to the charms of introspection—“Stop trying to get me on the couch, you shit,” he once said, smiling, when I tried to encourage him toward self-analysis—talked about the dominion of human cowardice, and the story of Anne Frank, in a way that I found startling.

We had been discussing the American war in Iraq, which he supported steadfastly, even after everything went sideways. 

McCain said the cause was just. The execution, at least until the troop surge of 2007, was a disgrace, but this didn’t move him off his principles. “I hated Saddam,” he said. “He ruled through murder. Didn’t we learn from Hitler that we can’t let that happen?” His hatred of Saddam Hussein, like his hatred for all dictators, burned hot; his contempt for Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s first defense secretary, was ice-cold. It was Rumsfeld’s arrogance and incompetence, McCain believed, that helped discredit the American invasion. “He was the worst,” McCain said.

I offered a qualified dissent in response. I supported the invasion for more or less the same reason McCain did—I wanted to see the Kurdish people, the preeminent victims of Saddam’s genocidal fury, suffer no more.

But unlike McCain, I had come to believe that the theory of the American case was no match for heartbreaking Middle East reality. I wasn’t sure that even the most perspicacious secretary of defense could successfully lead an effort to renovate a despotic Middle Eastern country. I suggested to McCain that this sort of grandiose undertaking was not necessarily a core competency of the United States. “But genocide!” he said. “Genocide!” His argument was not only concise, but morally superior. Not analytically superior, but morally, no doubt.

We spoke every so often about the Holocaust, and its supposed lessons (one lesson, he told me once, in a mainly, though not entirely, devilish way, was that Jews should be well armed). He said that, in the post-Holocaust world, all civilized people, and the governments of all civilized nations, should be intolerant of leaders who commit verified acts of genocide. That, he suggested, is the most salient lesson of all.

I told him then that he would most definitely pass the Anne Frank test. He was unfamiliar with the concept (mildly surprising, given that his best friend was Joe Lieberman). The Anne Frank test, something I learned from a Holocaust survivor almost 40 years ago, is actually a single question: Which non-Jewish friends would risk their lives to hide us should the Nazis ever return?

McCain laughed at the compliment. Then he became serious. “I like to think that in the toughest moments I’d do the right thing, but you never know until you’re tested.” I found this to be an absurd thing for him to say. Few men had been tested like John McCain; few men have passed these tests in the manner of John McCain. 

Of all the many stories of McCain’s heroism in Vietnamese captivity, the one I’ve always found most affecting is this one: When presented with the opportunity to be freed—he was the son of an important admiral, and his release would constitute a propaganda victory for the North Vietnamese—McCain demurred; it was not his turn (prisoners were generally released based on their time in captivity), and he would not skip to the head of the line. When he rejected the Vietnamese offer, he knew that intense torture would be his reward. And he did it anyway. His sense of honor would allow him to do nothing else.

I pressed him on this point. “I’ve failed enough in my life to know that it’s always an option,” he said. “I like to think I would do what it takes, but fear will make you do terrible things.”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m pretty sure you’d kill Nazis to defend Anne Frank,” I said.

He smiled. “It would be an honor and a privilege.”

John McCain possessed many sterling qualities; two of the most admirable were on display in this conversation. The first was his visceral antipathy for powerful men who abuse powerless people. A few years ago, I asked him about a fight he was then having with President Barack Obama. McCain wanted Obama to supply Ukraine with weapons it could deploy against Russian invaders. Obama, quite logically, believed that these weapons would be ineffective against the Russian juggernaut, and might actually provoke Vladimir Putin into even more aggressive action. McCain understood the possible ramifications of a decision to arm the Ukrainians. But his sense of honor—and his Hemingway-influenced romantic fatalism—led him to a different conclusion.

“When people want to fight for their freedom, we have to be there with them.” As one of his aides later explained, “He believes it’s better to die fighting than just die.”

I asked McCain, Is this the American way? “It should be,” he said. “It always should be.” (McCain’s amanuensis, his former chief of staff Mark Salter told me recently, when I asked him if McCain is more frustrated by Putin’s existence or by the fact that some Americans—I had in mind one American in particular—don’t seem to understand Putin’s nature, “There’s always a Putin somewhere in the world, and you’re meant to oppose them with all the skills God gave you.”)

The second quality on display in our conversation was self-doubt—or, at the very least, self-knowledge. It is almost impossible, in our era, for politicians to keep from becoming hollowed out (assuming they weren’t hollow to begin with). There is no reward in American politics for public displays of self-awareness or self-criticism. And yet, John McCain understood human nature, and his own nature, enough to state the plausible: that in moments of great testing, it is possible for any human, including the bravest human, to fail.

McCain, of course, failed in various ways, large and small. I think that many of his failures will be forgotten by history, except for the fact that he tended to catalogue them himself, and then recite them publicly.

Once, on a lightning-fast trip to Hungary (all of his trips seemed lightning-fast; as The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin recalls, McCain’s aides would refer to his overseas adventures as Bataan Death Marches), I raised the subject of imperfection—not his, but America’s. McCain was visiting Budapest to buttress the democratic opposition there, and to fire a warning shot at the country’s autocratically minded president. I asked him if it ever felt hypocritical to argue for a set of values that we live in America only aspirationally. “We get things wrong all the time,” he said. “It’s true. But the ideals are great, they’re perfect. They’re something to aim for.”

John McCain was far from perfect. But as his former campaign adviser Steve Schmidt said Saturday night, shortly after McCain died, “He perfectly loved this country.”

A man apparently devoid of any redeeming qualities currently occupies the Oval Office. It is important to remember that America is also capable of producing leaders like John McCain.

Rosa Parks - One small act that changed our world for the better: National Cathedral Tribute

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

  ~Anne Frank

Anne Frank did not live long enough through the heinous discrimination of the Holocaust to see the world changed for the better, like she innocently envisioned in her quote.  Anne Frank died in 1945, in Bergen-Belsen.

Rosa Parks, considered the First Lady of Civil Rights, lived from February 4, 1913 to October 24, 2005, long enough to fulfill Anne Frank's vision of an improving world, where discrimination is overcome by respect.  It was one simple act of non-violent civil disobedience on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, that raised the long dormant racial social conscience of our nation and inspired the Civil Rights Movement.  In spite of years of turmoil to overcome racial discrimination, the world has become a better place for Negroes, since the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery public transit bus, because of her Negro race.

In honor of her courage, the National Cathedral in Washington DC recognized Rosa Parks with the dedication of a sculpture of her created by Chas Fagan and stone carver Sean Callahan, located on the Human Rights Porch.

I wish more churches would honor modern heroes who were tested by the challenges of their times, especially as America is divided by political theory, ie, conservative, ultra conservative, moderate and progressive. Right now, we need heroes to honor, people who make the world better.  In fact, people unite during dedication ceremonies, where plaques, memorial benches and sculptures remind us to live our lives in the spirit of Anne Frank, Rosa Parks and others who have believed and acted so the world can be a better place.

Isn't it wonderful to be able to enter a sanctuary where we might even recognize and identify with the likenesses of people who have made the world a better place? Holy statues are lovely, but a mix of saints and locally inspirational heroes are a Godly mix.

At the time, Rosa Parks probably didn't know she fulfilled the vision of Anne Frank on December 1, 1955, when she did not waste a single moment to help change the world.

Each of us has the capacity to improve the world today. We're able to put aside personal ideologies for the sake of compromise and work together to change our world.  Indeed, every human being has the responsibility to make the world a better place, but we may need another heroine of ordinary status to raise our conscientiousness, like Rosa Parks and Anne Frank.