Holocaust Remembrance Lectures Result of Polish Study Trip

GREENSBORO – This past June, Rev. Ed Sunday-Winters of the Greensboro United Church of Christ and Jeff Pierpont of Walden went to Poland on a Holocaust study trip under the auspices of the Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Jersey, the Simon Wiesnthal Center, and the

Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre. They joined people from nine different countries

and visited sites of the ghetto uprising in Warsaw and of concentration camps around the

country, with local guides and guest lecturers explaining the history of this massive crime

against humanity before and during World War II.

Numbers are numbing, but before the Nazi Blitzkrieg invasion in the fall of 1939, there were three million Jewish people living in Poland. Today there are barely 50,000. At first roving Nazi

death squads systematically forced Jews from their homes out into the countryside and shot all

men, women and children in mass grave pits or crammed them into sealed trucks and killed them

with carbon monoxide from the exhaust. The Nazis burned down synagogues, confiscated

property, and even tore up Jewish gravestones to use as road fill. They began building slave labor

and concentration camps but by the middle of WWII (1942-43) these became extermination

factories for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” murdering Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals,

political prisoners and many others from all over Europe. The scale of this evil is impossible to

comprehend, but one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that it began “with making somebody less

than human”, as Primo Levi, a survivor of a concentration camp said, “It did happen and it can

happen again.”

Rev. Sunday-Winter showed pictures of what remains of a number of concentration camps

such as Treblinka, Birkenau, Krakow and Auschwitz. Some particularly poignant images were of

one of the wooden railway freight cars used to transport people to the death camps, at a train

station in Radagash, a milk can in which the writings of people in the ghetto uprising under siege

were saved, and the many sculptural memorials to the victims of the Holocaust.

The fundamental question that can never go away is, how can anyone do this to other

people? Most ordinary citizens in Poland and elsewhere in Europe sadly went along with this

hideous crime, or at least were passive about it. In truth, as is typical in totalitarian countries, most of these atrocities were committed secretly and covered up. But there was a small minority of people with the courage to oppose the Nazis and save Jewish people at the extreme risk to their

own lives, such as Oskar Schindler (see the film, “Schindler’s List”). Apparently some 6,000 Catholic priests died in concentration camps, but most of the religious institutions were co-opted by the Nazis.

At the end of WWII, with the liberation of the concentration camps by Allied forces, the full

extent of the Holocaust was revealed and, following the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals

and the founding of the United Nations, the universal call was, “Never again.” But, typically,

genocides have occurred repeatedly since then.

Interesting questions and comments from the audience explored the history of anti-Semitism, our own genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans, contemporary racist movements and the war in Gaza. Where is the learning curve? We need to be warned against demagogues in this country and around the world who build their political careers on fear and hatred.

The next talk in the Greensboro Summer Lecture Series will be by Zorian Ivakiv-Gray on

pollinators on August 1, followed by the Rev. Ed Sunday-Winters on August 15, speaking about

Christian Nationalism, both at Greensboro Church at 7 p.m.