The Holocaust Museum - We Won't Forget

I've always had a great interest in books about the Holocaust, so I was determined to get to the Holocaust Museum while we were in D.C. Christan put Kirk and I on the Metro, and we spent most of the day at the Museum. It was very sobering - it really made me contemplate what I might have done if I had lived at that time. I hope I would have had the courage to help the Jews - like so many in Denmark did - at the risk of their lives. But it seems like so many otherwise good people in Germany, Poland, and all over Europe, turned their heads and did nothing, probably afraid for themselves and their families. I was particularly touched seeing the accounts of a group of University students in Germany who gave their lives trying to stop the craziness. Maybe it hit home because one of the students in the movement was Willi Graf - probably an ancestor to some of the many Grafs in Santa Clara whose ancestors immigrated from Switzerland and Germany. Here's an excerpt: "In 1942 Hans Scholl, a medical student at the University of Munich, his sister Sophie, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and Alexander Schmorell founded the “White Rose” movement, one of the few German groups that spoke out against Nazi genocidal policies. Nazi tyranny and the apathy of German citizens in the face of the regime’s “abominable crimes” outraged idealistic “White Rose” members. Many of them had heard about the mass murder of Polish Jews; as a soldier on the eastern front, Hans Scholl had also seen firsthand the mistreatment of Jewish forced laborers and heard of the deportation of large numbers of Poles to concentration camps. At great risk, “White Rose” members transported and mailed mimeographed leaflets that denounced the regime. In their attempt to stop the war effort, they advocated the sabotage of the armaments industry. “We will not be silent,” they wrote to their fellow students. “We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!" Because the students were aware that only military force could end Nazi domination, they limited their aims to achieve “a renewal from within of the severely wounded German spirit.” After the German army’s defeat at Stalingrad in late January 1943, the group distributed pamphlets urging students in Munich to rebel. But in the next month, a university janitor who saw them with the pamphlets betrayed them to the Gestapo and they were executed. At his trial, Huber concluded his defense with the words of Johann Gottlieb Fichte:
And thou shalt act as if
On thee and on thy deed
Depended the fate of all Germany,
And thou alone must answer for it.