A War to Remember

In the small city of Soest, Germany, a church that was built on the year 1150 was damaged seriously during the 1945 war. The local people, during the post-war restoration, decided to keep the bullet and mortar holes on the surface of huge post at the left side of the altar as a stern and sad reminder of the atrocities that some of their countrymen have done – the unparalleled evil that roam-free during that time.

The sin of some is not the sin of all.

Open discussion or debate about the Nazi era has been banned and made illegal throughout Germany. Swastikas or any Third Reich symbol or posterity are outlawed. But while the outside world would smirk at this notion that Germans were also victims of the war they started, this is a stated historical fact. Many German males refused to join their inhuman conquest for world domination but were forced to by the military. So for others, like Joseph Ratzinger (our beloved Pope Benedict XVI), hiding in the forest or running to other countries was their only option to avoid being jailed or killed. Many families were separated from their fathers or brothers who kept hiding from their own countrymen. Some ended in tearful reunions years later but most have lost tracts of their loved ones.

And when the Allied forces have started their bombings and invasions of Germany at the later part of the war, it was the local German people who took the brunt of the military upheavals. The dam reservoir of Soest was bombed and hundreds of Germans who were living in close-proximity of armament factories drowned and died.

As our host narrated those terrible stories, I can’t help but feel sorry for all the innocent souls, whether they were Jews or Germans, that suffered at the hands of those Godless people. I can recall some harrowing scenes from the movie “Schindler’s list” and I got goose-bumps all over.

But on hindsight, it is more pitiable for those persecutors who have never found the chance to repent from their sins and in all likeliness are suffering eternal damnation for their deeds.

Yes, only the absence of God will result to a blank and cold heartedness of a person. Only a proud and arrogant heart can refuse God’s tears of mercy towards His beloved people. We, the Filipinos, have shared the same horror during the Japanese invasion. This is what happened during the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda during the 1990’s. This is what is happening in the on-going genocides of Sudan.

Let us offer a short prayer to our Lord to help mankind finally put a stop to all these mass-killings in the name of religion and other geo-political differences, and not to allow us people to be led again into this horrible path like the holocaust.

Please Lord, never again.