Theos-Talk Archives (June 1995 Message tl00051)

A thought .... Liesel writes:

> I can write this with sympathy, and I know it's true that the
> Germans too suffered, but it's most difficult for me to give them
> "an understanding as perfect as the sympathy which he gives a the
> sufferer." I've stood in the middle of Frankfurt (in 1972),
> listened to an ambulance syren chasing by, & having to tell
> myself these aren't Nazis.  And I wasn't even there for very
> long.  I heard all the stories from my family when they came to
> the US bit by bit.  It had a terrible impact, and I think most of
> us German Jews who are left have trouble seeing where the Germans
> hurt.  It's difficult to practice the Virtue of Harmlessness, but
> that is demanded of Theosophsts.  Well, I'm trying.
>
> Liesel

This "Virtue of Harmlessness" sounds a bit like the Christian
idea of turning the other cheek.  Seems to me that some might use
"turning the other cheek" as an excuse for "looking the other
way."

Here in England at the end of WWII the government sent out
newsreel footage containing the full pictorial horrors of what
the liberating troops filmed when they went into Bergen-Belsen
for the first time - the piles of corpses, the pitiful state of
those still barely alive, the German guards being made to carry
the dead to mass graves, etc., etc.  This was given a "U" for
"Universal" certificate by the British Board of Film Censors we
had then, which meant that every child in Britain could go see
it, and we all did.  It should be shown again _every year_ and be
compulsory viewing.  This is a reality of which we "evolved"
humans are still capable, and which, I suspect, is still around
in different ways.  And some idiot will try to tell me that all
those Jews and others must have deserved it for some unknown
"karma" generated in previous lives.  B...sh.t.