Kim Wilbanks

This is a post I don’t want to write.  I would rather write about my empty nest experience or reminisce about my days as a young mom.  I would rather share my feelings about my daughter’s upcoming wedding.  Anything but this.

I can’t ignore the subject that keeps invading my thoughts.  I can’t squelch that gentle nudging in my soul.

It started with a post on Facebook a few weeks ago concerning the recently released Planned Parenthood videos.   

An image from 8 years ago came into my mind.

My family traveled to Germany and Austria in the spring of 2007.  We spent a few days in Munich and on one of those days, we took a side trip to Dachau.  It was my first visit to a former Nazi concentration or work camp.

Being a history buff, I was familiar with this camp and the other infamous concentration camps of Nazi Germany.  In my imagination, they were always located out in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization.  I was surprised that we only had to travel about 20 miles from Munich to Dachau and even more shocked to discover how close the camp was to the small town of Dachau.  The atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps were taking place in the townspeople’s backyards!  Right under their noses!

Visiting Dachau was a powerful, sobering experience.  As I walked around the exercise yard, the rebuilt example of the barracks and the crematorium, I could only imagine the horrors that occurred there only six decades earlier. 

The most poignant images to me were the photographs and newsreels from the days following the liberation of the camps by American troops.  These soldiers made the townspeople come into the camp to see what was taking place while they lived out their lives less than 2 miles down the road.  Many of the residents were shocked about the activities of the camp.  I still see the image of two women, handkerchiefs held to their faces, weeping over what they were horrified to see.

I wonder.  How would we react if we were forced to walk by and gaze at the atrocities occurring right under our noses today.  What if we had to witness the handiwork of an abortionist.  What if we were compelled to look over the shoulder of the one dissecting a tiny human, like nothing more than a specimen from a 10th grade biology class.  What if we had to be in the room when a toddler became the “star” in some depraved person’s pornographic film or when a teenaged girl was forced to spend the evening working for her handler.

Would we weep?  Would we mourn?  Would we cover our faces in horror?

Or would we just turn away, pretend none of it exists and go on with our comfortable lives?

Brothers and sisters . . . we need to wake up!

Americans . . . we need to wake up!