remembering the "Shoah"

May 5, 2005 is in many ways such an important day. Not only is today 5/5/05 (a special day for numerologists no doubt), but it is also 40 days after Easter Sunday, making today technically the day of the Ascension of Jesus (except for the local Churches here in the Bay Area where this celebration will be held this Sunday). Today is also Cinco de Mayo, the National Day of Prayer, and Holocaust Remembrance Day. To celebrate the latter event, I attended a special service here to remember the Shoah, the holocaust of 6 million European Jews over 60 years ago. In that beautiful service in which the Jewish prayer of mourning--the Kaddish--was recited, these well-known and powerful words by Rev. Martin Neimoller, a Lutheran pastor during the Nazi regime in Germany, were also read:

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time
there was no one left to speak up for me.