A Tribute

I cannot put photos...
my heart is heavy laden. Having finished a novel entitled Night by Elie Wiesel, I sit reflective. The novel chronicles a fourteen year old Jewish boy, deported with his family, father, mother, sisters to Auschwitz concentration camp.

Living peacefully for most of the war, the German troops eventually invaded their safe haven breaking their peaceful delusion of safety. Carted away in nailed railroad cars the family arrived only to be separated, never to see each other again. Smoke filled the air, furnaces. Ovens to exterminate the "inferior" race, God's own chosen. Elie and his father survive two years of labor and slow starvation. They witness their own hardening hearts, decaying hope, dying faith. Food becomes their only concern, that and each other.

When the Russians encroach upon their camp, all prisoners and the SS troops flee marching in cold snow for hours. Weak prisoners are shot. Elie and his father fight death as it haunts, tempts, offering quiet, offering relief. Surviving half alive to another camp Elie saves his father from the "selection", the line headed to those smoke stacks. Sick, his father is entered into the hospital where the doctors offer no help, rather accusing patients of laziness. Within a matter of days he dies, taking his son's reason to live. Four months. April 1945. An American Tank arrives at the gates.

Elie Wiesel wrote his story and own a Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech he urges for Israel's security urges the world not to forget, urges attention to other such events in the world.

My heart is torn, it cries silently, shedding tears for the masses of human bodies, souls, starved, brutalized, exterminated. Why? One man. One day in heaven the Lord will bring justice. May our Nation turn its eyes upon its' own mass killings, its own citizens, its own flesh and blood, her unborn children.