This video starts with a touching story about some of the survivors rescued from Auschwitz. It also brings up a good point by reminding us that while many people were able to celebrate the end of the war, the end came too late for many others because a lot of people had already been killed and a lot of people didn’t have much to go back to. It is good to remember that even though everyone can suffer under a horrible situation some people can be disproportionately impacted.
That doesn’t mean you can’t be grateful for anything good in your life because others may have it worse, but it does mean you should be sensitive to reality and not assume others should recover as fast or as well as you did in the same situation because not everyone is facing it from the exact same context. We cannot pretend, as some do, that oppression has no lasting impact after the worst of state sanctioned violence has ceased. While some people were able to rebuild their lives somewhat, not everyone was able to. Many died from the horrible treatment and poor health they ended up with while living under such suffering.
While the means of public transportation was compromised by damage from the war many refugees still traveled to try to find surviving members of their families. Unfortunately, many did so in vain. How crushing that must have been. Just imagine trying to hold onto the hope of seeing your family again, to sustain yourself under immense suffering just to find out after all you have been through you won’t see them again anyway. And it wasn’t like antisemitism just disappeared; hateful attacks continued. People like to act like racism is just a matter of the past but it is not. The evil starts in the hearts of the people before the government has the power to act on it and it can stay in the heart long after governmental support crumbles. We need to be careful and stand against bigotry and not allow prejudice against anyone to fester in the heart.
