Seriously, I have no idea why, but reading and hearing and seeing and knowing about the Holocaust keeps me filled with a sense of guilt for even having been alive and well during that time of unspeakable cruelty in the history of human evil. Our American propaganda during WW2 left me with an ineradicable lifelong contempt, mistrust of Germany. We had no television in those days but as said before, I remember the horrifying newsreels in the theaters as Allied forces came upon and liberated the death camps, pictures of rail boxcars crammed with dead human bodies.
Why my almost lifelong sense of guilt I do not know or understand except that the horror was so overwhelming as to spread guilt universally across the earth, no degree of assuagement possible until the death of the last human on earth who was alive on 7 May 1945 when Germany surrendered.
A nation only since 1871, Germany, then, again, now, and always the center of antisemitism stirring throughout Europe and the world, should, at the end of WW2, have been dissolved as a nation, citizens stripped of rights, and a section evacuated of population and recreated as Jewish territory instead of what was done to Palestine. Germany today should be no more than a memory, a world history book chapter of failed experiment in humanity.
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/impossible-essential-task-writing-poetry-after-auschwitz?fbclid=IwAR1hpiTsm3KgzyA6LE0t-VbxyXSt8PCicCkQn9BtwzIZuqKXkrwfaNYgEH8
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/first-person/standing-remains-death-camps-poland?fbclid=IwAR3BNwO3_4vxWlyKnUhXtbzMhgTysEGh2SN1yK8EDAeZy57AK-tgI5cbk3A
Why my almost lifelong sense of guilt I do not know or understand except that the horror was so overwhelming as to spread guilt universally across the earth, no degree of assuagement possible until the death of the last human on earth who was alive on 7 May 1945 when Germany surrendered.
A nation only since 1871, Germany, then, again, now, and always the center of antisemitism stirring throughout Europe and the world, should, at the end of WW2, have been dissolved as a nation, citizens stripped of rights, and a section evacuated of population and recreated as Jewish territory instead of what was done to Palestine. Germany today should be no more than a memory, a world history book chapter of failed experiment in humanity.
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/impossible-essential-task-writing-poetry-after-auschwitz?fbclid=IwAR1hpiTsm3KgzyA6LE0t-VbxyXSt8PCicCkQn9BtwzIZuqKXkrwfaNYgEH8
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/first-person/standing-remains-death-camps-poland?fbclid=IwAR3BNwO3_4vxWlyKnUhXtbzMhgTysEGh2SN1yK8EDAeZy57AK-tgI5cbk3A