Written by Jessica Klein
Visiting a small town outside of Munich, Germany, I saw a beautiful Bavarian townhouse for sale. It was slathered in fresh white paint, with rows of windows draped in cheery curtains closed against the sun. This is a house that will never be sold. These are rooms in which no one will stay, because in the backyard, as the primary-colored swing set watched toddlers turn into teenagers, mothers and fathers watched hundreds of men and women turn into skeletons.When I got off the S-Bahn from Munich to Dachau, I was surprised to see a bakery. Houses. McDonald’s. In my mind, Dachau was a concentration camp, not a city. It was a barren wasteland. Dachau was where the first loads of dissenters were ushered behind barbed walls and the infamous “Arbeit macht frei” sign. Surely no one lived for 12 years, from 1933 to 1945, with horror as their neighbor. No one’s backyard could be a concentration camp.But I was wrong. Families had lived in these homes and watched empty eyes staring back at them as they looked out their kitchen windows, washing dishes. Of course these homes must have belonged to SS or SA families, or even Nazi sympathizers, mustn’t they? No, they had their own housing, shaped to form dual swastikas in aerial photographs. No, the occupants of these houses were just normal German mothers. Normal German mothers who hung laundry on the line while gunshots rebounded against the wall that made the people on the other side “not their business.”When the camps were liberated, the world asked how it could have happened. How they managed to hide it. Americans wept that if only we had known, we would have saved them. But we did know. Moody Bible Institute Monthly carried an advertorial entitled “I Must Help the Jews!” in May 1933, barely a month after the first prisoners were marched into Dachau.Libya’s leader, the insolently self-titled “King of Kings” Muammar al-Gaddafi, is holding his people as a shield. He has shown himself repeatedly to be a delusional megalomaniac with declarations to his people like, “HIV is a peaceful virus,” and his recent threat to obliterate Switzerland if his nuclear program ever becomes capable of the attack.Gaddafi’s February speech was rambling and troublingly incoherent, and he is an unflinching, unapologetic racist with a history of supporting violent terrorist organizations. More than 1,000 Libyans have died in their pleadings for freedom against an army and a leader who would rather see them dead.America may be wrong to step in between the Libyan people and their government. History may prove that we were conceited to offer our aid. But I would rather history mark me a narcissist than ask how I could have looked out my kitchen window into a backyard filled with helpless eyes and pulled my curtains closed.JESSICA KLEIN is a guest contributor for the Buffalo. She may be contacted atjklein@harding.edu
