Prisoner B-3087

Back in high school we learned of the holocaust and the cruelty and heartbreak of that sad, sad, sad moment in time.

I recall, as a child of 15 or so, wondering:

“Why didn’t the world rise up and stop it?”

I also wondered:

“How did so many people become so brain-washed that they would condone such evil?”

And then, I roundly ignored the subject.

For decades!

I didn’t want to read about it, or watch movies about it. It was all simply too horrific to even fathom and so I took the cowards way out by pretending that my ignorance of it all would make it less real.

That changed when I picked up the book:

“Prisoner B-3087”

I read the first five or six chapters in a state of shock. How could men treat other men in such a fashion?

What brings about so much hatred?

Then, my reading of the story slowed. I found that my heart and mind couldn’t take more than a chapter or so a week.

So many died.

Thousands and thousands more were tortured mercilessly.

It’s hard for our brains to even imagine such torture, and many times I’ve wondered why the prisoner didn’t just allow himself to be shot and killed.

The resolve to survive is amazing.

Some 45 or so years after first hearing the story I wonder:

“Why didn’t the rest of the world rise up and stop it from happening?”

Yet, sadly:

I no longer wonder how so many people were brainwashed to condone evil.

They say that history repeats itself.

I didn’t think it was possible when it came to the holocaust.

“That can’t happen today!”

Hell yes it can because a lot of good people ignore the atrocities feeling that if they don’t read about it that it isn’t really happening.

There are HORRIBLE things happening.

Here.

Now.

Will there be another Prisoner B-3087?

Scares me to say, but it is certainly possible.

God help us.