by Christine Pettit
I was recently challenged by the words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. When giving a speech as part of the Millennium Lecture series hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1999, he stated, “Mankind needs to remember more than ever… A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent.” It is amazing to me that the same “species,” so to speak, that is responsible for the exploitation of women in Thailand, is the same “species” that can ultimately bring them justice… as long as we don’t let indifference stand in the way of our response to their plight. I am moved by the concluding words of Wiesel when he explains where his hope came from as he suffered in the Nazi camps:
“And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that what we were suffering were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once. I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?”
These words challenge me to my core. As I selfishly long for comfort and ease in life, there are children who are starving. There are women being taken advantage of in the most grotesque ways imaginable. There are Christians being denied the right to worship together. There are millions who have yet to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. Perhaps these men and women and children are holding on to the miserable consolation that we simply do not know of their sufferings. Why the indifference?
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