One Destiny
You shall not hate your brother in your heart. ...
You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge
Against the children of your people,
But you shall love your neighbor as yourself:
I am the LORD.
Leviticus 19:18-19

 

      Editor’s Note: During the Second World War a most terrible tragedy occurred in Europe. Millions of people, most of them Jewish, were exterminated in death camps because the evil men who ruled Europe at that time viewed them as a mongrel race. In their demonic attempt to create a ‘super race’ of ‘Aryan’ people, Hitler and his bloody band put to death all of the ‘undesirable’ men, women and children they could lay their hands upon.
      Words cannot come close to expressing the horror of those years. Even today, over fifty years later, the shock of reading the accounts of what went on in the death camps makes a person reel in horror. How could men have been so cruel? How could they continue to live with themselves, knowing what they had done?
      But this article is not about the atrocities that took place, it is about healing. It is about the need for all people who claim to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, (both Jew and Christian) to lay aside their differences and realize that they do indeed, share One Destiny.
      Sholem Asch was a Polish Jew who was born in 1880. Asch believed that Judaism and Christianity are two branches stemming from one great religion; a religion given by YHVH, the Creator of the universe. Among Asch’s many books are three historical novels which deal with three major people in the Christian faith. The first of these, The Nazarene, deals with the ministry of Yeshua of Nazareth, through the eyes of three different witnesses. A second book, Mary, tells the story of Yeshua from the viewpoint of his mother, while a third novel titled, The Apostle, puts forth the life of the Apostle Shaul or Paul.
      Although not himself a Believer in Yeshua, Asch writes clearly and fairly about all three of these great people. All of his books reflect a profound understanding of Jewish life of the first century CE. These three historical novels of Sholem Asch are great reading for anyone who wants to know what the life and times of Yeshua the Messiah were like.
      Unfortunately, all of Asch’s books are currently out of print. However, many used bookstores do carry them. With so many people becoming interested in the Hebrew roots of the Christian faith, perhaps a publisher will soon decide to reprint his works.
      Our thanks to Mr Randolph Parrish for his work in bringing this edition of One Destiny to our attention. Mr. Parrish has collected a number of other articles which many of our readers may find of interest. Some are available on paper, others on electronic media. He may be contacted by writing to:

      Randolph Parrish
      6813 B. Loma Land
      Scottsdale, AZ 85357

 


 

One Destiny:
An Epistle to the
Christians
by Sholem Asch

(An abridgment of the 1945 edition.)

      In the young manhood of our people, when it was imbued with lusty shepherd strength, our fathers, rocking in the humps of their camels across the desert, saw the stars in the sky. The stars became transparent windows, and they saw the Almighty of all the universe, and they fell on their faces before Him, stretched out their hands and cried, "Thou art our God!"
      From that time on, my people holds fast to the vision of one living God over all the world and over the whole of humanity, Who alone is worthy of being praised, and sanctified, Who alone is capable of giving salvation. The vision of an omnipotent God for all people was steadily before Abraham’s eyes from the beginning. The Jewish faith did not develop from a family to a tribal one, from a tribal to a world faith, but had pretended from its earliest beginnings to be the only and all-encompassing one. That is why the Jewish God is such a jealous God. He does not tolerate and will not admit any other deities besides Himself He is the One and Only, the Sole-Existing, and everything else is idolatry, impurity, and vice.
      A little less than two thousand years ago, there came into our world among the Jewish people and to it a personage who gave substance to the illusion perceived by our fathers in their dream. Just as water fills up the hollowness of the ocean, so did he fill the empty world with the spirit of the one living God. No one before him and no one after him has bound our world with fetters of law, of justice, and of love, and brought it to the feet of the one living Almighty God as effectively as did this personage who came to an Israelite house in Nazareth in Galilee--and this he did, not by the might of the sword, of fire and steel, like the lawgivers of other nations, but by the power of his mighty spirit and of his teachings. He, as no one else before him, raised our world from “the void and nothingness” in which it kept losing its way and bound it with strong ties of faith to the known goal, the predetermined commandment of an almighty throne so as to become a part of the great, complete, everlasting scheme of things. He, as no other, raised man from his dumb, blind, and senseless existence, gave him a goal and a purpose and made him part of the divine. lie, as no other, works in the human consciousness like a second, higher nature and leaves man no rest in his animal state, wakens him, calls him, raises him, and inspires him to the noblest deeds and sacrifices. He, as no other, stands before our eyes as an example and a warning, and demands of us, barries us, prods us to follow his example and carry out his teachings. Through his heroic life, he casts us down like dust before his feet. No one but he sheds about himself such an aura of moral power, which has molded our world and oar character; and no one’s strength but his own has reached into our time, being the most potent influence in our everyday lives, inspiring us to goodness and exalted things, being the measure and scale for our deeds at every hour and minute.
      Many of us who, for one reason or another, are unable to believe in--or whose religious nature cannot conceive of--the physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth on the third day after his cmcifixion, must nevertheless admit, that in a moral and spiritual sense the Nazarene rises from the dead every day, every hour, and every minute in the hearts of millions of his believers.
      If Jesus was not actually restored to life three days after his burial, then he was resurrected every day, every hour, and every minute in the first three hundred years after his death. What must remain an eternal mystery to those who are blind and deaf enough not to believe in miracles is the spread of Christianity during the first three hundred years. There was not enough reason for the pagan world to violate its own nature and to stifle its Zeitgeist with what was--for it--so foreign, so unrecognizable, so antagonistic, so Asiatic a faith. If the Nazarene was revolutionary in blazing a new path for the Jewish spirit, then his teachings, his essence, were not only incomprehensible to the Graeco-Roman spirit but were the opposite of everything which it considered to be the mission and the purpose of humankind. If the pagan peoples suffered from the need of a change in religion, they could have found enough material for it within their own spiritual realm. It was possible, within the framework of their own customs, thoughts, and conduct to work out a religious ethic through the teachings of the Neo-Platonists and the Stoics. And surely it is childish and naive to explain the phenomenon by the fact that the apostles of the new faith made its acceptance easier for the pagans though making compromise with the old Jewish law. In the face of the danger in which the pagan placed his very existence, what effect could it have had if he imbibed the new belief with milk, as the apostle expresses it, or with vinegar? What attraction could the compromise with Jewish law have had for him when acceptance of the belief--with or without compromises--made the newly converted Christian a candidate for the distinction of being thrown to the beasts in the arena?
      I, as a Jew, whose every move is bound up with the God of Israel, want to know nothing of any historical wonder, of any faith, save only the wonder and the faith which radiate from the God of Israel. The wonder is revealed to me in two ways: first, the miracle of the preservation of Israel; second, the miracle of the spread of the JudaeoChristian idea in the pagan world. The whole thing to me represents a single, divine event. I see in both phenomena the single will of the God of Israel. Not only because I consider my Christian brothers as the spiritual children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but also because I see in pure Christianity an entirdy justified share of faith in the God of Israel--through the Messianic idea--equal to my own Jewish faith. The preservation of Israel and the preservation of the Nazarene are one phenomenon. They depend on each other. The stream must run dry when the spring becomes clogged, and Christianity would become petrified if the Jews, God forbid, should cease to exist. And just as the spring loses its value, becomes spoiled and moldy when it has lost its mission and does not water the stream, so would Jewry itself become petrified, barren, and dry if there were no Christendom to fructify it. Without Christendom, Jews would become a second tribe of Samaritans. The two are one. And notwithstanding the heritage of blood and fire which passionate enmity has brought between them, they are two parts of a single whole, two poles of the world which are always drawn to each other, and no deliverance, no peace, and no salvation can come until the two halves are joined together and become one part of God.
      Whoever works, strives, and desires that this may come to pass is on the side of God. Whoever does otherwise belongs to the other party.
      This is my spiritual credo. On this foundation I have built my house. For this I have sacrificed everything. With it I stand and with it I fall.
      That is why, as a Jew, as an "outsider", I claim the right to call you my brothers, believers in the Messiah, and, as brothers, to talk with you openly and freely. As children who have the same parents, children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Christians, Jews, believers in the Messiah, give me your attention, because a brother speaks to you in the name of millions of your brothers.

      In the dining car of the reserved train that runs from Berlin to Warsaw--a special train for high-ranking military men and government functionaries of the German Reich--there sat an extraordinarily high official whose sudden appearance in the car had evoked tense attention from the military men and dignitaries seated comfortably around the table that was being served. The official himself, whose modesty was well known, did everything both by his unobtrusive behavior and his amiable smiles (which were painstakingly forced from his nearsighted eyes and small mouth) to bring his companions back into the easy humor in which he had found them on entering the car. He did not succeed, however.
      His position as chief of the Gestapo, his reputation as a pitiless, bloodthirsty, cruel man, his close ties with the Fuhrer--all this kept not only the military men but his retinue, his aides who accompanied him everywhere and formed a guard to protect him, in an attitude of alert watchfulness. Under the pressure of fear which his personality radiated from itself, the orderlies served the food with trembling hands, which communicated the nervous tension from the waiters to the guests.
      On the second day, Gestapo Chief Himmler in the company of his official retinue rode through the crowded streets of the Warsaw ghetto to examine it before its destruction.
      What did the Gestapo Chief see?
      That which was called the Warsaw Ghetto was concentrated in the poorest, most overpopulated Jewish quarter. The population of the Ghetto contained now, according to official figures, upwards of five hundred and fifty thousand human beings. People who had spent their whole lives under civilized conditions, were driven out overnight from their homes, which they or their fathers had built, from the cities and countries to which they had belonged for hundreds of years and scores of generations; were transported under the most inhuman conditions to Poland and thrown into the Dantean hell which was called the Warsaw Ghetto.
      At that time, in the Ghetto, more than twenty souls lived in a single room which in normal times would have accommodated only one or two.
      The Ghetto was cut off and isolated by a thick wall from the poorest streets of the city of Warsaw. German police and Gestapo men, armed with rifles and machine guns, guarded the wall. To leave the ghetto without permission meant to be shot without trial. A small portion, healthy young people whom the Germans used in their war industry, got skimpy rations--just enough to sustain the soul. The rest of the population--the old, the women, the children--were sentenced to a slow death of starvation.
      All education for children and grownups was forbidden; all social life and its pastimes were strictly interdicted.
      And yet the Ghetto went on, organized itself, and continued to spin the thread of life, which even the sharp German sword had not been able to cut. If one was unable to live in freedom, in Gods shining sun, then one crept under the earth. In the labyrinthine corridors of the old houses, work continued, a fruitful cultural activity which could only be carried out by a people that had survived the persecutions and the sufferings with which Jewish history is so amply filled, a people that is destined by the Almighty to live forever.
      The Jewish student youth gathered the children together. In the courtyards, war gardens had been planted, and there, in spite of the Gestapo, regular classes for the children were conducted.
      In the darkened rooms, cut off from electric light, evening courses were given for adults.
      Musical concerts were held which ghetto artists gave for their ghetto brothers. Lectures by learned men and writers were read on scientific and literary themes. A regular technical school was conducted with advanced courses given by experienced teachers and savants.
      In secret bakeries Jewish bakers baked bread out of the white flour smuggled into the ghetto; often the flour came from the Gestapo, which sold it dearly to the Jews, Jewish women stood in secret community kitchens, and with their accustomed skill, with family sorcery which they inherited from their mothers, cooked meals and soups composed of nonexistent materials. Other women and old men sat in attics or cellars and sewed and patched old clothes.
      And meanwhile death did its work. There was a contest between the Angel of Death and the Gestapo as to which could surpass the other.
      When Himmler and his retinue, in strongly armored cars, made their early morning inspection tour though the streets of the ghetto, they noticed, among the sick children who were playing there with the living corpses, also the dead corpses, which had been ejected, stark naked and covered only with papers, from the houses of the ghetto. But this was not enough for the German powet--the Jews were not dying fast enough; so the Nazis overtook the Angel of Death and left him behind.
      "Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani?"--"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" That same cry was heard on the streets of Warsaw from hundreds of souls who, with their crosses, were being whipped on the way to Golgotha.
      "Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani?"--with this difference, that the cry on Golgotha was heard in the company of the swords and spears of the Roman idolaters, while the cry on the Warsaw streets sounded among clubs and bayonets of people who had been converted, who called themselves Christian folk.
      "Ropes of death have encompassed me, and toils of the pit have overtaken me. I meet with sorrow and trouble. I then called on the name of the Lord. I pray thee, Lord, release my soul."
      "My tears have become my bread by day and night as they say the whole time, ‘Where is thy God?’"
      And the answer which the Christian martyrs once made to themselves as they waited for death in the cellars of the Roman arenas, a death which they heard in the roaring of the lions--that same answer and consolation were now given by the Jews one to another as they joined hands together.
      "Why art thou bowed down, my soul, and why must thou murmur within me? Trust in the Lord, for I will praise him, my supporter and my God."
      "Whither shall I turn from Thy spirit? And where shall I escape from before Thy countenance?"
      In the death trains which stretched from the streets of the Ghetto to the places of execution were all kinds of Jews. There were Jews who, from birth, had not known that they were Jews, whom Hitler instructed in the Judaism in which their parents had failed to instruct them. They did not know or understand the meaning of their life, still less the meaning of their death. There were Jews from Germany, Jews who had reckoned themselves Germans throughout their existence. Many of them considered themselves Aryan and campaigned within the very ghetto walls for the recognition of their Aryan status. They looked upon their Jewishness as a mistake, as an oversight on the part of authority. There were Jews from Amsterdam and Antwerp who thought themselves Hollanders and Belgians. Notwithstanding these differences, all of them were thrown into the same pot.
      And suddenly everything becomes understandable, realizable, clear, and beautiful. Suffering acquires a reason, an explanation--it is the highest price exacted for one’s faith. The Jew from Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Berlin, Frankfurt, becomes simply a Jew. The Jewish Aryans, the Jews who are half-Aryans but want to become whole ones, have disappeared. There are no longer nationalist or assimilated Jews, no longer Jewish Bundists or Zionists; no longer religious or irreligious Jews. There is only one kind of Jew--the plain, unadorned Jexv, the son of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who goes on his eternal way, the way of everlasting Zion, the way of the salvation of Israel.
      We do not know what will become of the German people. The German people will live again after the war, will even return someday perhaps to the moral standard set in the days of Goethe and Schiller. Certainly the German people will become again a portion of the civilized world, and we all hope and wish for that time to come quickly, when German genius--and who dares to deny it?--may become as productive for the welfare of humanity as it has been for its destruction. But whatever the fate of the German people as a whole, every German will bear the mark of Cain on his forehead forever. And as it was with Cain, so to every German for the remainder of his days on earth the question will be put, "Where is thy brother Abel?" Where are the European Jews? And as the Lord said to Cain, so to every German will be said these words, "What hast thou done? The voice of thy brothers blood cries up to Me from the dust."
      Because the earth will not cover up the spilt blood of Israel.
      And for this desecration which Hitler made of the Jews, for this choice which he conferred upon them, for the freedom with which he could slaughter a whole people, for this crying sin, the guilt is carried, the accessory guilt if not the full one, by the whole Christian world.

      I have hurled a terrible word. My deepest feelings rebel and protest against this horrible charge. My hands trembled in writing it down. Yet whatever the pain and anguish it may bring me, I must let it stay. Because the sin which Hitler, the Nazis, and the whole German people have drawn upon themselves could never have been committed--at any rate, in the measure and form in which it was committed--if it were not inspired, if it were not sanctioned, or at the very least allowed by the criminal silence of a wicked world, shot through with Jew-hatred, with indifference to human wrongs.
      Anti-Semitism is not a movement. It is a disease. He who is infected with it is unable to have an orientation, a judgment, or an opinion which is the result of logical thinking or of actual facts. The anti-Semite has no proof, no opinion, no consciousness even, because proof, opinion, and consciousness are attained through independent thought. He has no independent thought, he is imprisoned within the magic circle in which his sufferings have immured him. He has no will of his own. He is ruled by his disease, the name of which is anti-Semitic insanity.
      No one has exposed so clearly the blindness, the lack of judgment, the disease of hatred as did Tertullian, who lived at the end of the second and the beginning of the third century, and who described in his Apology the blind hatred of the Romans for the first Christians.
      According to Tertullian, Christians were hated to such an extent in those days that "a Christian, you would have believed, is a man guilty of every crime, a foe to the gods, to the emperor, to the law, to morality, a sinner against the laws of nature...
      "It is not the man who is guilty of the specific crime; the guilt lies in the name alone. Since ‘Christian’ is the appellation of an offense, it is not absurd that the offense should lie within the name itself." Are not these words well suited to the Jews today?
      "There is such general hatred, blind hatred towards the name that everyone who has any mud to throw upon it is readily believed--’Caius Sextus is a good man; a pity that he’s a Christian.’ Another says, ‘I’m surprised that Lucius Titus who’s so bright has suddenly turned Christian.’"
      How many times does it happen to every one of us to hear the same tune, with this difference only, that the word "Christian" is exchanged in the mouths of Christians for the word "Jew"? And to whom are the words of the Christian apologist of the second century better suited than to the Jews of today?
      "Our triumph has both the glory of martyrdom and of eternal life. Though we are annihilated, yet we win the battle. When we are beaten, then we are victorious. In the very mouth of destruction, we are saved.
      "Though we are damned by you, we are nevertheless raised and accepted by God."
      There was not a single slander invented by the lowest Greek and Roman pamphleteer against the first Christians which the Christians themselves did not later carry over against the Jews and the Jewish faith. How many victims fell, how much Jewish blood was spilled, how much trouble, pain, how many nights of fear, anxiety, terror, were caused by the false accusation repeated through century after century that the Jews required human blood for their rituals, an accusation which the Roman pamphleteers had made against the early Christians!
      He who would have become the hope of Israel; he who was called upon by God to become the redeemer, promised by God to their fathers; he whom the prophets had foretold as the consolation and reward of all their sufferings and troubles; he who was to have raised Israel to its greatest heights, to become the crown of all their strivings, the light of the world--became instead the source of death and destruction for Israel. "How can we believe that Jesus is the Messiah when he has become the origin of everything evil and wicked that has come over Israel, since his name appeared in the world?" is the painful cry heard in Jewish writings through the centuries. What wonder that the Jews have refused so stubbornly to drink from the well which has contained nothing but poison for them? The responsibility for this lies with those who have contaminated the spring of God with the poison of Satan and of death.
      Is it not an irony, a piece of the devils wit, that a society which dared to clothe itself with the sacred name of him who is called "the king of the Jews" should set itself the task of becoming the chastening rod for the Jewish people? And the consequence of this was that the name which should have evoked joy and song in the Jewish heart evoked instead deadly anxiety and torturing fear. Jewish blood freezes in ones veins when the blood and tears brought by that name to the Jews are remembered.
      When Jesus the Nazarene appears to his disciples for the first time after his resurrection, the first question which they ask of the Messiah is, "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" The restoration of the kingdom of Israel was so important a condition of the messianic faith that the apostles could think of nothing else as the first thing that the Messiah would do when he came back to life but to inaugurate the reign of Israel.
      But of all this--the role of Israel in the new faith, of its honor, of its preparation for the advent of the Messiah, of its place in the messianic hierarchy--nothing whatever is said now, no hint of it is instilled into the hearts of believers. Of the twelve disciples, all Jews, all but one faithful followers of Jesus, only Judas, the unfaithful, became to Christians the symbol of the Jewish people. It would be more fitting to have chosen James, the faithful pious Jew, whose Epistle might well have been written by one of the Old Testament prophets.
      Gradually the church began to rid itself of the entire burden of the heritage she had gotten from the Jews. Jewish holidays were neglected, as were also Jewish customs and Jewish ritual laws. The days were shifted--the Sabbath was removed from Saturday to Sunday.
      If it was easy for the Greek or the Roman to forswear idolatry in going over to the new belief in a Messiah, it was not at all easy for the Jew to acknowledge a faith in his Messiah, which brought nothing but suspicion to him and a mockery to the beliefs of his fathers--because the church, in order to attract the Roman and the Greek to the fold, not only made compromises with the Mosaic Code, but became more and more estranged from Jewry, denied all connection with it, debased and brought shame upon the Jews.
      Notwithstanding the fact that the Messiah was the Messiah of the Jews, that the fulfillment of Jewish hopes and of Jewish prophecies were ascribed to him, that the Messiah carried all the blessings of Israel, he was nevertheless painted as the victim of Israel. No one but the cursed Jews was to blame for his sufferings and death, which were a necessary condition for his messianic mission.
      In any case, the legend of the Jewish crucifixion of the savior became the source of limitless, torturing, and senseless hatred toward the Jews. The legend about the Jewish crucifixion of the Messiah has cost millions of Jewish lives. It carries a long streak of blood after it, right down to our own time. It has become the microbe of hate in the spiritual body of Christianity. It has caused and still causes daily trouble for the Jews. It brings tears to mothers, anxieties and terrors to children. I myself have suffered throughout my childhood from the accusation of blood guilt. Every Christian holiday was transformed by the legend into a day of fear and sorrow for the Jews.
      But greater than the damage it did to Jews, greater even than the destruction of Jewish lives, was the damage and destruction it wrought upon spiritual lives.
      The condition has been created that the church, on the one hand, has preached hatred toward the Jews, has poisoned the minds, the hearts, and the souls of its adherents with the most horrible legends concerning them, has attributed everything evil to the Jews, has mocked at his faith, derided his sufferings, laughed at his tears; and, on the other hand, has wondered why the Jew does not embrace Christianity which despises him, why he declines a faith which robs him of his dearly bought hopes, his reward for all the miseries he has gone through--the Messiah, in other words--and turns him over to his bloodiest enemies; a faith which has provided him with the role of a Judas and given him the position of the Wandering Jew. From one side, Christians have hounded Jews, and from the other side they have sought to make him accept their faith. He has been subjected to every penalty of the law, every kind of persecution and misery; his cries unto God have been interpreted as stubbornness, his self-immolation for his faith has been regarded as the work of Satan. They could do anything to the Jew--they could make his life one long chain of tortures, confine him in crowded ghettos, release him to the fury of the mob, which was constantly goaded into a rage against him, restrict his rights, degrade his dignity as a man, throw him into the bonfires lighted by the monks--but his trust in God could not be broken, because it was not against the weak, tortured Jew that the sword of the church struck--oh, the weak Jew could have been overcome easily enough by the sword--but it struck instead against the impregnable armor of the destiny of the eternal Israel, and therefore it had to break.
      If you believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, then you must also believe that the fact of his being born among the despised and lowly Jews instead of among the mighty, victorious Romans--a circumstance which would no doubt have been much more convenient for Christianity--was no accident, no historical caprice, but that it was God’s will that the Messiah be born under these particular conditions and not under some other ones. The coming of the Messiah was something that had to be prepared: a whole line of patriarchs was necessary, all standing under the eye of a living God, promises, prophecies, merits, election both as to suffering and deliverance--in a word, the whole heritage of the Jewish people, which the church at the beginning had accepted as the unconditional necessity for the preparation, the creation, and the appearance of the Messiah.
      Because of this, the existence of the Jews was postulated as a necessary condition for the origin of Christianity and the church. But though he was flesh of their flesh, soul of their soul, had come to them and for them, the Messiah from the very beginning was endowed by the church with attributes which it was unnatural for the Jewish spirit to accept. "Think not that I am come to destroy the Law, or the Prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill." Bound up with the Torah, which had become second nature to him, the Jew correctly saw the Messiah not as the disrupter of the Mosaic Law but as one who would build upon it. The church, which accommodated itself to the habits and customs of the pagan peoples, offered the Jews a messianic idea which was entirely foreign and incomprehensible to the Jewish mind.
      But the church needed the Jews to bear witness to its truth. It was impossible to win them over by means of kindness, then it was necessary to try outrage and murder.
      And so the long Jewish martyrdom begins.
      Christianity does not carry the sole responsibility for the Jewish tragedy. Mohammedanism did not distinguish itself any more nobly towards the Jews. Maimonides and his family had to suffer at the hands of the Musselmen all the persecutions, tortures, agonies, and wanderings which Abarbanel suffered from the Catholic Church at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. We have only to read the letter of consolation from Maimonides to the Jews of Temen to get a small idea of what the believers in the prophet did to the Jews. But what do I have to do with Mohammedism? Did Mohammed pretend to be the Jewish Messiah? Is Mohammed a product of the Jewish spirit? Is Mohammed a fulfillment of the Lords promise? Did Mohammed assure anyone at any time of anything but the sword? Was it Mohammed who preached the Sermon on the Mount? Did Mohammed create the culture and civilization of which I am a part, and in the realization of which I see the greatest good fortune of humanity? What have I to do with the desert tribe? The Christians are my brothers.

continued


The Darkest of Days

      "The following account is taken from a book (Konin: A Quest, 1955), by Theo Richmond. It quotes an eyewitness of events that took place in his village in Poland. The eyewitness was forced to gather the clothing and belongings of the victims. He describes two pits, the bottom of the larger one being covered by a layer of quicklime.

"[The Gestapo] ordered the assembled Jews to strip--first those who were standing near the large pit. Then they ordered the naked people to go doxvn into both pits and jump into the larger pit. I could not describe the wailing and the crying. Some Jews were juniping without an order--even most of them--some were resisting and they were being beaten about and pushed down. Some mothers jumped in holding their children, some were throwing their children in, others were flinging their children aside... .This lasted until noon and then a lorry came front the road and stopped on the path by the clearing. I noticed four vat-like containers. Then the Germans set up a small motor--it was probably a pump--connected it with hoses to one of the vats and txvo of them brought the hoses from the motor up to the pit. They started the motor and the two Gestapo men began to pour some liquid, like water, on the Jews. But I am not sure what the liquid was. While pumping, they were connecting horses to the other containers, one by one. Apparently, because of the slaking of the lime, people in the pit were boiling alive. The cries were so terrible that we who were sitting by the piles of clothing began to tear pieces off the stuff to stop our ears. The crying of those boiling in the pit was joined by the wailing and lamentation of the Jews waiting for their perdition. All this lasted perhaps two hours, perhaps longer."

      (from an article; Pre-empting the Holocaust by Lawrence L. Langer, in The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1998.)

Back

Next