God Shed His Grace on Thee

I began this day before Memorial Day attending church where my stepson goes, a little white Baptist church in rural Florida. Filled with kind and devout people, all singing "American the Beautiful" and nodding to a sermon on God's grace. We spent the rest of the warm day enjoying holiday sales and napping. Our day ended watching "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," an experience of the Holocaust seen through the eyes and slowly comprehending mind of an 8-year-old German boy, the son of a Nazi official running the nearby concentration camp. As the movie closes on the suddently quiet doors of a gas chamber, locked shut upon little Bruno and his Jewish friend, holding hands, naked and dying, I remembered visiting Dachau, watching the Germans turn their heads as they walked by, bier= drinking friends silent and grumpy at the subject. I recall Psalms 98:3 which began my sunny, spring morning and indeed I rejoice for there is hope. "He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God." I read back to Psalms 7:10, "The Lord loves those who hate evil..." I thank those who have died fighting evil and continue to give their lives in this battle. For it is Men who must win this war. The Universe won't expel evil for the labor is ours. We must fight for our God to triumph. In writing about the worldwide conflicts where thousands of innocent civilians were killed, Sebastian Junger wrote,"Only military action by Western forces — or the threat of military action — brought those conflicts to a stop.Were those military actions immoral? Were they more immoral than standing by and watching?" (the link won't work, sorry)
http://www.sebastianjunger.com/profiles/blogs/should-we-be-in-afghanistan

Vel D'Hiv

This amazing book had just been recommended to me by an Amazon World Literature sale e-mail; I put it in my shopping cart but on the same day my mother-in-law loaned me a copy to read before passing it on to the other Esmerelda, my sister-in-law Down Under, Esmerelda-in-Residence (link @ bottom of page). Sarah's Key is an absolute page-turner. The narrator is searching for clues to a particular Jewish girl whose family was killed in the second French round-up up of the Jews in 1942, known as the Vel D'Hiv and commemorated by Pres Chirac in 1955. The little brother died alone hiding in a cupboard and she kept the key and the secret with her until she died. As most of it takes place in Paris, I'm already drawn in that I wish I owned an apartment in Paris or a cottage in Normandy. But the story itself is brought and slowly and painfully and beautifully to its end. It never made it out of my house to the poolside! My first Army duty station was Ludwigsgurg, Germany, in 1985. Being in a combat support hospital and thus more of a truck driver than the promised Operating Room Technician, I tended to find ways to hide and I can still see that same library section where I tried to understand what happened, how Jewish animosity was born, even delving into the Crucifixion. After developing a lifelong revulsion, anger and sympathy, I landed on an example I use in trying to evoke the same. Would you sacrifice your family for the Jewish family hiding in the attic? You don't know do you? Any more than you know what it would take to lash on a suicide belt to blow up a bus full of women and children. Pray you never have to learn.