The film for this week is a touching and thought provoking documentary on forgiveness, even when it seems impossible to forgive. Forgiving Dr. Mengele fallows Eva Kor, one of the twins experimented on by Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz along with her sister, as she explains her journey towards forgiving Mengele for what he did and her reasoning behind that decision. She wanted people, especially fellow victims of Mengele, to understand that while she forgave him she in no way forgot what he did. That she remembered is evident with her creation of the Candles Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute, IN. This documentary and her decisions have raised a lot of debate among Holocaust survivors, they wanted to know how she could forgive him and still claim to remember. They also felt that she was dishonoring her sisters memory to some degree, because she had been effected her whole life by his experiments before passing away, by forgiving him and they also didn’t want to feel pressured into forgiving him themselves when most felt that was impossible. This film really causes the viewer to ask themselves, if they went through the same thing, would they be able to forgive? It’s hard to say really, While watching this I could understand both sides. As a Christian, I want to be able to say I would, but I have never gone through the torture that Holocaust survivors, more specifically the Mengele twins, have so I can’t really say for sure if I could bring myself to do it. I do believe though that keeping anger and hatred for a person inside can, potentially, destroy all joy in a persons life. No matter how those questions might be answered for each individual, this film is definitely one worth watching in order to see, and understand, both sides of the spectrum.
Forgiving Dr. Mengele Review
I cannot wrap my mind around the cruelty of the human race. How are there so many sociopaths such as Dr. Mengele ….how can hate be so embedded that it can manifest itself in the ultimate form of evil? Destroying a whole race of souls. I am wondering if schools teach what happened here anymore, and if we all know that we could be turned in to victimizers..or victims given certain circumstances. We must be diligent to understand the ability of the human being to eat it own. My heart breaks for the victims of the holocaust. It is so painful to see, yet we must lest it be repeated as it already has………
Yes, and evil has its origin in rejection of God and his rightful and benevolent rule over us. When man rejects God and His ways, he makes himself to be his own god. Pleasure in this world and this life then becomes his only purpose. This leads to selfishness and desperation, and eventually to anger and despair. This anger against God then turns into hatred of mankind made in the image of God.
Satanic forces then have the legal right to live in the hearts and minds of those who choose to embrace this hatred. Those who have this darkness within will always make war against the people of God – first the Jew, and then the Christian.
The wrong lesson of the Holocaust is that it was caused by racial and ethnic pride and by nationalistic patriotism. That was a lure for the German people, but it was not the root cause. If that were true, Hitler and Himmler would not have made a alliance with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. There was a Muslim division of the S.S., even though the Arabs are Semites. The NAZI movement was about destroying the Jews and then purging Germany of Christian influence. The founders of Nazism hated the God of the Bible and despised His commandments. It is impossible for a true Christian to hate the Jewish people. Christians are commanded to love Israel and to bless the Jewish people.
So, it is true that “all of us” have the capability of having hatred within us. But it can only grow if we rebel against the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The actions of the holocaust and the silence of those who looked the other way and failed to oppose it must never happen again (Nie Wieder!). But it can happen again, if we fail to recognize its root cause. And I see this root cause in the socialist-secular-humanism rising in Europe and America, as well as its ally, radical Islam.