Ian & Jocelyn Barker

We watched one of the most disturbing, but riveting documentaries I’ve ever seen. It is called “The Last Days” and it is about 5 Norwegian Jew Holocaust survivors. It interviews them today as they remember what it was like to be in the camps and what their reflections are today.

One lady talks about how she saw two children fall out of a train or a wagon and how a German soldier picked them back up and slam them against the side of the car before throwing them back in. She said, “And that was when I stopped talking to God.” Another man visits the ovens with his son and breaks down weeping. He wonders how humanity can be so inhumane. They interviewed a few American soldiers as they remembers the day that they liberated one of the camps. They were unaware of what was happening and were in shock when they discovered what it was. The images that they showed during this sequence were unbelievable. I didn’t know that human bodies could survive while being so emaciated. One soldier remembers capturing the head of the camp and being spat at in the face. He said that he killed him.

This was a very difficult documentary to watch because the Lord is forming a message of comfort in me. But the comfort is not what they consoled themselves with. Near the end, the survivors talk about God and His part in the Holocaust. “I don’t blame God, I blame man.” “It’s hard for me to give any place to a higher authority in this.” A woman speaks to visitors at a Holocaust museum. She asks, “What wrong did we do to deserve this?” That’s the hard question. Was it God? Did He create the Holocaust? Or did He give us the freewill to make a good life for ourselves in the midst of evil? What are we as the Church supposed to say to victims of genocide such as this? To victims of any disaster? Jesus told people that they had better repent lest they suffer the same fate as those who had been crushed by the towers.

It pains me to watch something like this because I know that the Lord is preparing me to speak to a people in my lifetime who will suffer unlike anything the world has ever seen. Or to prepare my children to speak to them. The Holocaust is not something that is behind us, but it is coming again. That’s the scary thing and I don’t think I have the heart to look at a person who is in a concentration camp and tell them that God has allowed this because He wants them to repent and love Him. He is a jealous God who is both angry and loving at the same time. God help us.