One day, I accompanied my mother to a regular meeting of her Holocaust-survivors group. My mother was part of this group because of her history as a survivor. A dozen or so elderly survivors met regularly to encourage one another and serve as witnesses to each other’s histories. I was the only young person at this particular meeting, and I was eager to hear and honor their stories.
A close friend of Mom’s presented her newly released autobiography that day. She was a survivor of the Łódź ghetto in Poland during the war. The Łódź ghetto was a Jewish district that was closed off by the Nazis such that the residents had no freedom to leave the area. Later, more Jews from other areas were also shipped in. It was overcrowded, and there was no running water or sewer. The people could not work, and the winters were devastating. The residents were systematically starved, with people falling down dead in the streets daily.
My mother’s friend spoke in that understated, deliberate grey tone that was familiar to me—that’s how all the elders spoke of horrific things. She said many things that were deeply troubling, but at one point, she said she was grateful to the doctors in the ghetto for their willingness to perform abhortions on the young ladies who got pregnant. For them, sexual intimacy provided an island of consolation in the midst of the extreme horrors of their confined life, but bringing a child into such a circumstance was considered a cruelty.
I was shocked and also torn upon hearing this, and I have thought about it for many years since. This woman’s position makes a perverse sort of sense in the context of the Łódź ghetto in Poland during the war. Abhortion makes sense if you live in upside-down world. In upside-down world, death and life are turned on their heads. Death is a mercy, and life is a punishment.
Today, we live in another sort of upside-down world but without the rationale of the ghetto. Death is sold as a mercy for the elderly who have fatal illnesses. For those who are suffering from depression. And of course for the most vulnerable among us, our children—as though being born into some level of poverty or dysfunction disqualifies these little ones from the right to a chance to overcome and live meaningful lives. Birth rates are plummeting. Young people are not having children because they don’t think children should be brought into this bad place we call the world to suffer. They are finding consolation in sexual intimacy as though they were living in some horrific circumstance when really they are the most privileged generation to ever have existed on the planet. Antinatalism is real. “We have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing into existence new members of species that cause (and will likely continue to cause) vast amounts of pain, suffering and death” (Benatar, a leading proponent of antinatalism, 2012).
At my mother’s Holocaust Survivors’ meeting, I was deeply challenged. I could not devalue this woman’s testimony. This had been her life, and I had come to honor it. But I struggled.
Then, I looked around our meeting room. I noticed that high up on top of a tall cabinet nearby was a stack of Bibles that seemed to be keeping watch over the group. The Word of God was intact there, looking down on these elders who had nearly been included in that number of our brethren who perished at the hands of a twentieth-century Haman. But God allowed a remnant to survive. And of that remnant, He allowed some to find the Jewish Messiah.
I cling to that book just as my ancestors did. I see a continuation of that book in the New Testament, and I embrace the Messiah that is fully revealed in that book. The Book of the people has kept the People of the Book through many upside-down seasons of history because God is faithful to His promises. The Nazi Holocaust was just one of a long history of holocausts, with one of the most recent being the holocaust of abhortion. My mother survived the Nazi Holocaust. Her grandchild (my child) did not survive the abhortion holocaust. But God’s Word stays right-side-up and makes perfect sense, and it says that Messiah Jesus is our hope for freedom from sin and our true consolation in an upside-down world.
(If you are wondering why I spell the word abhortion this way, I invite you to read this post.)
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