Editorial: How the Holocaust happens

This will not be easy to read. And it shouldn’t be.

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In a universe adjacent to ours, Baptists are a distinct ethnic group. This is strange to us, because anyone can be a Baptist in our world. But other universes have other rules.

The most distinctive thing about Baptists in this other universe is the way they clean up.

While everyone else takes a shower, Baptists take a bath. And they are despised for it.

Those who shower don’t know much about those who bathe except that they are very serious about their baths—religiously so.

One day, one who showers spied through a window a bather mother pushing her child all the way under the surface of the water. Without waiting to see what happened next and thinking it silly, the spy ran off to tell a friend about the “Dunkers.” And the name stuck, because Dunker they could understand, while Baptist was so … foreign.

The Dunkers were derided for drowning their children—which never happened—and for sitting around in their dirty bath water—which had some truth to it.

But the jokes turned cruel. “Dunker” sounds so much like “dung” if you’re talking fast or not listening carefully. It’s not a great leap from turning up one’s nose at “Dunkers” to being completely disgusted by “Dungers.”

In time, the anxiety about Baptists grew so high among those who shower, they became convinced Baptist bath water would pollute their pristine showers. But what to do?

You see, in that other universe, some differences don’t show up on a person’s face or in a person’s name or speech or public behavior. It is difficult to know who showers and who bathes. Often, it is more suspicion than fact.

But a group of those who shower discovered a way to out those who bathe—using the water meters. The water meter of one who showers steadily rolls throughout the shower. But a bather? Their meter spins quickly for several minutes and then suddenly stops.

The shower group called a secret meeting. It had to be secret. They couldn’t let the bathers know what was coming. They devised a plan and quietly set to work.

It started slow but gathered steam. Finally, all the Baptists were gathered up and marched out of town and down the hill to the water treatment plant, where they are forced to live among the fetid open ponds. It’s a temporary solution. A more permanent one is whispered about.

It sounds ridiculous, unless you know the history of our own world.

Not that long ago

Eighty years ago this week, the Soviet army liberated the Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz, an irony not lost on those who knew of Stalin’s atrocities.

My grandfather, who died in 2007 at age 83, served in World War II, first in North Africa, then Italy and then in the Pacific Theater, earning two Bronze Stars. He lost hearing in one ear when artillery went off next to him. The hearing aid he wore was a constant reminder to my family.

To know Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago has a certain resonance to me. How much more resonance it must have to the liberated and their children and their grandchildren.

The closest I’ve come to any direct experience with the horror of the Holocaust was a visit to the concentration camp at Dachau on the outskirts of Munich, Germany. It was October 1989. I was a teenager then.

Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp, opened in 1933. It was the prototype.

The fence was still there in 1989. At least one of the prisoner barracks was still there, preserved as a reminder. And the crematorium.

I saw piles of shoes, clothes, personal items—the things taken from the prisoners, still saved as a reminder.

I saw photos and documentation of the scientific experiments conducted on prisoners in the camp. Inhumane, unconscionable things. The stuff of horror movies. The stuff of evil. As a teenager—and not a particularly innocent one, at that—I didn’t know people did those kinds of thing to other people … and while those other people were still alive.

The Holocaust is horrific, grotesque to the point of absurdity. Agreeing such a thing is evil beyond the pale, some deny it ever happened. If only it never had. But such is all too common in the history of this world.

Consider the Uyghurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Armenians in Anatolia, the Darfuri in Sudan. Or the Holodomor in Ukraine. And let us not forget “Indian removal” in the United States.

This is just a representative list.

All too common

These horrors have happened, are happening now and will continue to happen because of our penchant to think less of those who are not like us, to dehumanize them, to demonize them, to label them a threat.

These horrors have happened, are happening now and will continue to happen because too few of us take seriously the biblical instructions to consider others as better than ourselves, to love our “enemies,” to care for “the least,” to take up our cross and deny ourselves.

Or because we want to get around these instructions by limiting what “others,” what “love,” what “denial” actually mean.

Or because we don’t see extreme cases happening in our neighborhood. And if we don’t see them happening here, can we really know they’re happening anywhere? Can we really be bothered by what is not our problem?

Or because we’re too afraid to stand against it, however minor or extreme it may be. We agree with the names, the labels, the suspicions, the jokes. Or we don’t want to be disagreeable among our friends, our family, our colleagues. We know, and we look the other way.

And that’s how the Holocaust happens.

But it doesn’t have to happen. It doesn’t have to get started at all.

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.