Coronacrisis en Hand van God

De laatste jaren hebben wij meerdere economische, ecologische en gezondheidscrisissen gehad. Met de huidige gezondheidscrisis, welke heel de wereld treft vindt Wim Rietkerk, emeritus predikant in de Nederlands Gereformeerde Kerken, dat elke crisis een teken is van het naderende koninkrijk van God, zoals een wee dat is bij een vrouw die op het punt staat om een kind op de wereld te zetten. Die vergelijking, die de apostel Paulus in de Bijbel maakt, geeft hem hoop.

‘Het gaat in een crisis dus niet om het lijden van een stervende, maar juist om het lijden dat hoop geeft op nieuw leven.’

 Volgens hem zucht de schepping naar het openbaar worden van de kinderen van God. Een crisis als diegene die wij nu mee maken is voor hem een teken van het naderende koninkrijk. Ook is het een teken dat God de wereld herstelt.

'God herstelt deze wereld, maar dat gaat door de diepte heen. Alleen wie zijn leven verliest, zal het behouden. Jezus stelt het ook niet optimistisch voor: je zult met Mij de drinkbeker moeten drinken.'

 Hij is er wel bewust van dat God geen veroorzaker is van het kwaad, maar dat alles in de verantwoordelijkheid ligt van ieder op zich.

‘Dat God de mens zelf de verantwoordelijkheid geeft, kan tot vreselijke wreedheden leiden, zoals Auschwitz laat zien. Het is blasfemie om te zeggen dat God hierin de hand heeft. God kan ervoor zorgen dat iets wat Hij verafschuwt, toch tot iets goeds leidt, maar Hij is nooit de veroorzaker van het kwaad. De hand van God kun je dus niet zien als een vermindering op onze verantwoordelijkheid.

Toch denk ik wel dat God hier aanwezig was - in de lijdenden. Elie Wiesel beschrijft hoe er een jongen werd opgehangen, waar iedereen naar moest kijken. Terwijl de mensen zijn doodsstrijd zien, vraagt iemand: waar is God? Daar, waar die jongen hangt, antwoordt een ander. Zo is het. God snakte hier zelf naar adem en vereenzelvigde zich met de lijdenden. Zoals Jezus aan het kruis, wanneer Hij zich door God verlaten weet.’

Bij crisissen en erge rampen vragen steeds veel mensen af waar God blijft of waarom God zo iets toe laat. 

'Waarom Hij het toestaat, bijvoorbeeld. Ik denk omdat anders een van de meest bijzondere dingen in het christendom om zeep zou worden geholpen: de vrijheid en verantwoordelijkheid van de mens.’

Dat het vijf voor twaalf zou zijn is duidelijk voor Rietkerk. Ook al is het moment nog niet aangebroken,  werpt het zijn schaduw vooruit, in de tekenen van het koninkrijk die nu al zichtbaar zijn.

'Dat vind ik een mooi beeld, want als je de schaduw ziet, weet je dat de persoon volgt. Die schaduw bestaat ook uit de weeën waarover Paulus schrijft. Dat is pijnlijk en die weeën worden ook steeds heftiger naarmate het einde dichterbij komt.’

Nu zijn er natuurlijk wel vaker christenen geweest die denken dat de komst van het koninkrijk voor de deur stond. Waarom zou het nu wel zover zijn?

‘Zeker weten doen we dat nooit, maar ik denk dat je nu wel ziet dat crises mondiaal zijn. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan corona, maar ook aan het milieu. Daarnaast is het evangelie bijna overal verkondigd. Ten slotte denk ik aan Israël, dat weer een eigen land heeft.

Maar we weten het niet. Het is alsof we naar een klok kijken met enkel een lange wijzer. Is het vijf voor twaalf, of pas vijf voor zes? Desondanks denk ik dat er goede redenen zijn om aan dat eerste te denken. Het zou zelfs weleens kunnen dat ik het nog ga meemaken; daar reken ik in ieder geval wel mee.’

 

By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #2 Holocaust deniers and twisters of the truth

In spite of the numerous eyewitness accounts to the horrendous events that took place during the Holocaust, many today still deny its very existence.

The loss of six million Jewish people in the Holocaust confirms that when anti-Semitism festers, the ultimate result can be catastrophic.
We should be aware what happened after 1918 and how there grew a hatred against certain groups of people, starting with Jews, then Roma, continued by the prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses and all that  contradicted the way the government foresaw the best community to live in. All refuters or protestors had to be silenced, and because non of the onlookers dared to react it became quite easy to continue to deport people.

Today, as global anti-Semitism rises, we must go beyond solemn moments of remembrance and speak out against anti-Semitism (hatred toward the Jewish people and Israel) and anti-refugees as well as any hatred against other people or religious groups. After World War I many thought it would never again, but just a few years later in 1939 a new and even more horrible war was at the doorstep of Europe that was going to fall in pieces.

When Europe got to hear what Nazi Germans did to Jews, nobody wanted to believe it, at first.

Regarded as exaggeration and Polish war propaganda, a lot of the reports sent to different news agencies and governments were simply not believed

Despite “strong demands” by the Polish and Jewish resistance for Britain or the US to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz and other death camps,

 “the military’s attitude was: ‘We’ve got to concentrate on military targets, not on civilian things’,” 

said Davies, an authority on Polish history.

“One of the targets that the (British) military did bomb was a synthetic fuel factory near Auschwitz”

 in 1943-44, he added.

Although British warplanes flew over the death camp itself, incredibly, no orders were given to bomb it.

Professor Dariusz Stola, an expert on the history of Polish Jews, echoes this assessment.

“Military leaders didn’t like civilian politicians meddling in their business,”

he said.

For Allied military leaders, bombing Auschwitz, or its supply lines

 “was looking like a humanitarian operation and they didn’t want it,” 

said the former head of the Warsaw-based Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of all Nazi Germany’s death and concentration camps and the one where most people were killed. And it is the only one to have been preserved as it was when it was abandoned by the Germans fleeing the advancing Red Army.

Operated by the Nazis from 1940 until 1945, Auschwitz was part of a vast and brutal network of death and concentration camps across Europe set up as part of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” of genocide against an estimated 10 million European Jews.
Once Europe’s Jewish heartland, Poland saw 90 percent of its 3.3 million pre-war Jewish citizens killed under Nazi German occupation between 1939 and 1945.

Even after the liberation of the first camp by Russians, other camps had to be seen by Americans, to have more people to come to the  realization that the unseen horror could really have been something which had to overcome thousands of people.

We must never forget those who suffered during the Holocaust. For the sake of the Jewish People and all people everywhere, we must never forget what happened so that it will never happen again.

We should listen to the voices of the survivors of those inhuman detention camps and should see what is going on at the moment in Europe and the United States. Everywhere around us we can see politicians who want to be very popular and who do not mind twisting the truth or even to tell lies to enlarge their popularity.

Again people shall have to choose if they are going to stand by and be silent or if this time they shall react in time!

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Preceding

By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #1 Finding a solution to a created problem

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Find more about this terrible political and human offence: Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question):

1. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
2. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
3. Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
4. Is it really true that Anti-Semitism will never be tolerated? 
5. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking

By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #1 Finding a solution to a created problem

In a series of articles we can look back at an industrialized killing machine that took the lives of nearly 6,000 people a day. 75 years ago for those who were still (somewhat) alive on the 27th of January 1945, there was a liberation from the horror camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, but not from the atrocities they had to witness and the horror which would haunt them for the rest of their life.

Of the estimated 1.3 million people — at minimum — who were deported to the concentration, labour and extermination camp Auschwitz, between 1940 and 1945, at least 1.1 million were murdered, through mass exterminations, starvation, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.
Gross of the survivors still suffer the effects of the trauma they experienced during the Holocaust.

How the Nazi Killing Machines Developed

In the part of Europe which could not keep up to the agreements mad in Versailles after World War I fertile soil was created for economical and political unrest. Ideal to undermine the government was speaking along ideas the majority of the people had, giving certain people the fault or cause of all the misery.

Creating a scapegoat, the popular political figures had to make sure they could win more votes and as such knew they had to get away with the "problem" they had showed to the people. Best was also to create a pure people, done away with all what did not fit the picture of a good Arian soul.
Speeches creating hatred against one group of people, at first, took care lots of Germans started to believe that those who lived in big houses and had lots of shops, were the bad guys who had to be eliminated and their places given to the real Germanic race.

It took not many years before the lies about the Jews were accepted as a real truth to be handled. So people turned against the Jewish inhabitants and wanted them away. The Nazi government forced the Jews from their homes and herded them into railway cattle cars.

Initially, however, the Germans used killing groups called Einsatzgruppen (task forces) to round up and massacre entire Jewish communities.

Rivka Yosselevska, who testified at the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961, was one of a few who survived the Nazi massacre of 500 Zagrodzki ghetto Jews (near Pinsk in Belarus) in August 1942. Yosselevska lost her daughter, mother, father, and sister, as well as other relatives in the slaughter. She said her daughter had asked her when they we were lined up in the ghetto,

 “Mother, why did you make me wear the Shabbat dress; we are being taken to be shot.”

At the mass grave, she asked,

 “Mother, why are we waiting? Let us run!”

Yosselevska said,

 “Some of the young people tried to run, but they were caught immediately, and they were shot right there. It was difficult to hold on to the children. ... The suffering of the children was difficult; we all trudged along to come nearer to the place and to come nearer to the end of the torture of the children.”

Although Yosselevska was shot in the head, she lived. For three days, she lay among the dead. The farmer who found her, hid and fed her. He also helped her to join a group of Jews hiding in the forest where she managed to survive until the Soviet army arrived in 1944.

Eventually, the Nazis decided that shooting as a method of mass killing was too expensive and inefficient. It required killing to be done one bullet at a time. And it demoralized the troops.

The Wannsee Conference Decides the Final Solution

In 1942, Nazi Party officials met near Berlin at the Wannsee Conference to discuss the “Final Solution” for the destruction of European Jewry. There they coordinated the deportation of Europe’s Jews to extermination camps that were already operating or were under construction in German-occupied Poland.

As many as 11 million Jews were to be transported to these killing centres, including residents of countries not then under Nazi control, such as Ireland, Sweden, Turkey, and Great Britain.

They decided that the mass transportation of these populations would be accomplished by train.

The SS and the police coordinated with local auxiliaries or collaborators in occupied territories to round up the victims and transport them to the death centres. In charge of all this was SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, who was later to meet his demise at the end of a rope in an Israeli prison.

To disguise their intentions, Nazi authorities referred to these deportations as “resettlements” to labour camps in the “East.” In reality, they were killing centres for mass murder.

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Find more about this terrible political and human offence: Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question):

1. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
2. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
3. Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
4. Is it really true that Anti-Semitism will never be tolerated? 
5. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking