After reading a story about racism I walked across the living room
to look at a photograph, tucked into the corner of a larger picture,
of three jewish women martyrs freedom fighters captured by German
troops when they destroyed the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw Poland during
the Second World War. The picture is a memorial.
The women, dressed in odd pieces of clothing, do not look defeated
or frightened, there is only a look of exhaustion on their faces and
a sense of alertness in the poise of their bodies. They are
waiting. I know with a deadly certainty, and sadness, that they were
ruthlessly murdered shortly after the picture was taken.
They have been gone these many decades. The place in the ruins
where their blood spread across the stones has been built over, new
building now stand on the hallowed ground, and what remains of them
is this picture on my wall as a reminder of the danger of virulent
racism and hatred.
The soldiers, not in camera view, who pressed the triggers of the
guns, smashed the rifle butts into the waiting faces and gave the coup
de grace, to these brave martyrs women were also victims, in a sense,
because they had been taught this hatred as children. And that
hatred took them to that infamous moment in time when they stood
with smoking weapons, the acid smell of gun smoke in their nostrils,
over the dead bodies of the women crumpled at their feet, their blood
spreading between the shattered stone of the Jewish ghetto.
The Catholic Church knows if they can reach a child, with the
word of God, at a early age then they are theirs forever - and this
also stands true if they are taught to hate. Thus those that have
been taught hatred, with love destroyed, without a God, can be found
murdering Indian women, and children at Sand Creek, or at the
lynching of a Mexican in the southwest or a blackman in the deep
south, giving orders at My Lai or obeying orders of a insane man
Hitler in the ruins of Warsaw.
As the assassins of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Megar
Evans, as policemen brutalized minorities in the ghettos of the
richest country in the world, there were many people behind the scene
of these atrocities that by their silence, by looking the other way,
by sneering behind the backs of people they hated, gave the nod to
the murderers, and by this very act become accessories when the shots
shatter living flesh, the clubs fall, and the rope is thrown over the
limb.
The pictures of the three women in the living room are there to
remind me that the spiritual deaths of the German soldiers and the
physical death of the victims are intertwined. At the moment the
women are murdered a lesson is taught, if we care enough to
remember, and the souls of the soldiers are destroyed. The bullets
plunge into the bodies of the women, and transforms the into martyrs
and their deaths become a example to the world of what hatred and
racism will eventually do - if not remembered.
If forgotten then the cycle of hatred starts again. As
demonstrated in Bosnia, and Rewanda, or when 23 police officers
brutally beat a unarmed Rodney King not realizing that their assault
have always been the prelude of the vicious hatred that was
responsible for the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi 1955 and
the three jewish martyrs in the ruins of Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw in
1945.
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