“Parochialism” is a put-down word. People raised in a parochial setting are supposedly limited to a single, narrow perspective of life. They can’t see the big picture.
I’m grateful for at least one aspect of the parochialism
inherent in being raised in the Fifties in the
In my freshman year of college I randomly selected
“Anti-Semitism” from a list of possible research paper topics. “Where have I
been all my life?” I wondered, as I read horrid news reports of the
discrimination Jewish G.I.’s encountered when they returned home from the war
against Hitler’s forces in
In the years since, the grim truths of the Nazi Holocaust
have haunted me. The ovens of
Writers like Corrie ten Boom made the horror of the Holocaust more real for me. I’m not sure why, but the paragraphs in The Hiding Place that bothered me most were the ones where she described the incredible passivity of the Jews when the Nazi storm troopers came to take them away. “Why didn’t they run, or scream, or resist in some way?” I cried out. Like sheep, led to the slaughter, those incredibly talented people lined up to die.
So I took immense pleasure in my friend Victor Knowles’
description of a plaque he saw at the Sobibor Death Camp on the border of
According to this bronze plaque on the stone wall near the
entrance to Sobibor, Jewish prisoners revolted on
“Yes!” I exulted when I read of their rare courage. That’s the kind of pluck I would have expected from a proud people being slaughtered by the millions.
Then I look homeward and marvel at how much we Christians are like those German Jews. For we, too, watch with passive silence while millions are killed and their bodies are burned following abortion.