“To them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever” (Isaiah 56:5).
Yad Vashem is the Hebrew name of the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, which I visited. It is a living museum, serving not only as a place of commemoration but also as a centre for research, documentation, and education—a space for dialogue between nations and generations. It exists so that we may all learn together from history and suffering, so that we may understand that barbarism is not a relic of the past and that its horrors are not frozen in time.
A memorial to names turned into numbers
The museum’s architecture is a metaphor carved in stone: two long, straight, gray walls slanting inward toward the center, leaving only a narrow slit of light above. They symbolise the tunnel-like path, the underground destiny of those who lived through times of persecution. Inside, this path winds chronologically through the exhibits—objects, newspaper articles, excerpts from books and personal journals, archival footage, recordings from the Nuremberg Trials, and video testimonies from survivors and eyewitnesses to unspeakable atrocities.
The Hall of Remembrance greets visitors with an eternal flame reaching toward the sky through an unglazed opening in the ceiling. In another circular room, lined with towering shelves filled with files documenting fragile lives cut short, a massive cone-shaped light fixture dominates the space. Inside this cone, thousands of photographs of the victims are displayed, their images gazing upward. Standing beneath it, you can clearly make out the faces in the front rows, but those beyond fade into increasing indistinction—distant, blurred fates, evoking the indifference, the silence, and “the Arctic coldness of the nations,” as described in the very words of writer and victim Benjamin Fondane, preserved there.
The slit of light, a symbol of hope, widens as you exit the building, drawing your eyes once again toward the sky—the only place in our world left untouched, unstained, beyond the reach of human hands.
Details bring into focus identities erased in mass graves lined with quicklime, destinies buried in the ashes of furnaces—family photographs, inscriptions in books, restless journal entries, gloves sewn from blanket fabric in a concentration camp, tiny hidden pencil stubs, shattered eyeglasses. Footage of skeletal corpses being heaped by bulldozers, played on an endless loop, conveys not just the grotesque harvest of death but an even more grotesque preoccupation of the living. A female worker in overalls drags a lifeless, naked woman toward a pit, pulling her by a single leg. Her long hair and still-beautiful, emaciated body, worn down by suffering, remain indifferent to the fresh wounds inflicted by the gravel path. There are years between the roads they traveled to the same destination—death—and yet the first woman’s detachment from this “task” is chillingly inhuman. Even more inhuman is the sight of those caught on film, weapons in hand, threatening their defenseless fellow humans. You see terrified mothers and children with their hands raised, frightened and bewildered by the cruelty of the adult world, unaware of what awaits them—not just in the future, but in the very next moment.
You wonder how a person can become so estranged from their fellow human beings, so devoid of empathy for suffering that they treat others as mere objects or animals—reducing their names to nothing more than numbers inked onto their frail, fading hands.
Yad Vashem stands as an effort to restore humanity to these victims by bringing their faces, personalities, and names closer to our collective consciousness. For visitors from Romania, the memorial offers insight into the persecutions that took place under the Nazi regime on their own country’s soil. Cold historical data and statistics take on an unerasable horror within those walls.
The stranger within
How is it possible for someone who considers themselves a Christian—regardless of time or place—to willingly become the executioner of their neighbour? How does one reach the point of annihilating fellow human beings, reducing them to mere numbers, perhaps even believing, as Jesus foretold, that they are “offering a service to God” (John 16:2)?
One answer can be found in The Deadly Idea, an anthology published by the Institute of Social Theory at the Romanian Academy: “Fascism conditioned its followers to no longer see others as fellow human beings—people like themselves, with the same capacities and the same right to exist and to fulfill their potential.”[1]
And yet, the question lingers: How does one become attached to an idea that may appear noble, humanistic, or at least justified, but is, in reality, murderous—an idea that directly contradicts the very beliefs and values a person, a supposed Christian, claims to uphold?
A possible answer—or at least a thought-provoking perspective—can be found in the observations of the same author, Radu Florian. He cites a shocking statement from the work of Nae Ionescu, an influential interwar intellectual whose ideas shaped the thinking of many of his contemporaries. Florian notes that “the reputation of such a way of thinking stemmed from its appeal to an audience that was hearing exactly what it wanted to hear.”[2]
It seems that beyond the lofty spiritual context, the noble reasoning, and the philosophical perspective, one striking phrase lingers most in the mind: “Love for one’s neighbour is not essential to Christianity.”[3] Florian points out that such a statement dismisses the very foundation of moral principle—the idea that one human being is another’s neighbor.
Extrapolating from this, one might legitimately ask: How much influence do opinion leaders wield under particular psychological conditions—during uprisings, protests, strikes, revolutions? Do they, implicitly or explicitly, provide the final legitimisation of action? When social aggression rises, certain ideas become mere banners, slogans that are no longer questioned but rather embraced uncritically because they elevate or justify the cause: “It’s time for weapons to speak,” “The clock has struck for the old order,” “We are making history.”
Gustave Le Bon once wrote, “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduces them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master.”[4]
This is how ideologies such as Nazism, fascism, and the Legionary movement took root—not as genuine quests for truth, but as collections of ideas designed not to enlighten, but to serve as tools for action, shaping reality to suit the interests of specific groups.
The stranger beside you
But how does one come to embrace an extremist, inhumane ideology in times of peace? In the absence of conflict, what fuels the contempt for fellow human beings—contempt so deep that it can lead, even if only in the realm of thought, to their annihilation?
Decades ago, a seven-year-old girl, half Hungarian, was told by her Hungarian relatives that their family had been “tainted by their mother’s marriage to a filthy Wallachian.” In the 1990s, a top-ranking sociology graduate openly declared his desire to move to South Africa to fight because, in his words, “a good Black man is a dead Black man.” At the Yad Vashem Museum, surrounded by overwhelming evidence of how human beings can turn into beasts when stripped of love for others—the love that stems from faith in God—a visitor remarked, “We need a Hitler for the gypsies.” It is this kind of toxic thinking that compelled me to write this article.
Such ideas, once heard—perhaps from a so-called mentor, a respected figure, or even a beloved relative—become dangerous if they take root, even in a dormant, unexpressed state. When external conditions allow, they can spread like an epidemic within certain groups, ultimately leading to destruction. The ideas of those who wield influence over others have a peculiar life of their own. They are conceived in the mind of an individual who may later forget or abandon them, but they take hold in the minds of followers and admirers. Over time, they bear their bitter fruit, passing from person to person—until, in the end, they stain all of humanity.
From a devout yet ritualistic, cold, and judgmental Christian, all that may remain is the hollow shell of a pseudo-Christian, capable of any form of fanaticism. Such a person becomes a champion of divisions and cliques, crafting endless criteria by which to see others as outsiders—people who are not like him, who do not think as he does, act as he does, or resemble him in any way. Therefore, in his mind, they do not deserve what he deserves. He is good; the outsider is bad. And so, this enemy must be cast out, eliminated.
Following this flawed logic, he will seek out leaders, influencers, and speakers who validate his perspective and legitimise his actions. And as his freedom to act grows while his sense of responsibility diminishes, he may become a tyrant. Shielded by anonymity or the cover of a mob, he will endorse—or even carry out—those murderous ideas, ultimately proving what had long been true: he was already a killer in thought.
Memories cannot be borrowedRadu Florian was not only a scholar who studied the horrors born from ideas turned into acts of murder—he was also a victim of them. In the summer of 1941, as a child, he was among those crammed into one of Moldova’s infamous “death trains,” where thousands of Jews, including his father and brother, perished. These were livestock transport trains, their ventilation openings sealed shut, packed with human bodies in agony after enduring brutal beatings at the Iași Prefecture. The trains were sent aimlessly along the railway for days, their only purpose being to await the inevitable deaths of those trapped inside. Through the eyes of a child, he bore witness to the cruelty—and even the perverse delight—of officials, police, and military personnel, both from the occupying German army and Romania’s own forces. “In just a few years—not even a decade—these ‘men’ were made to forget every ethical value and moral principle (…). Fascism rapidly achieved horrifying results, stupefying people, desensitising them, and transforming them into a machine designed for the systematic extermination of innocent human beings.”[5] |
Self-knowledge through knowing Him
The prophet Jeremiah once said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Millennia have passed since this unsettling question was first asked, yet the bloody history of humanity proves just how vulnerable we remain to the hidden, latent evil within us. Neither the prescriptions of humanism nor the psychological strategies of self-discovery have managed to eradicate it.
Yad Vashem represents only a small fragment of the universal memory of the horrors humans have inflicted upon one another. Yet it is enough to make you step back into the light with a deep sense of shame for belonging to the human race. What becomes unmistakably clear in all these storms of human history is that where human dignity is lost, there are no true victors or vanquished—only executioners and victims. And for anyone caught in such an absurd and brutal struggle, the only way to preserve dignity is to choose the side of the victims. That is why, in 1942, my grandfather waited with his bags packed and his unshakable faith in God, prepared to be taken from his home and deported—guilty of nothing more than being a Protestant Christian.
Perhaps, after so many centuries of bloodshed, we might finally awaken from the illusions of false Christianity and triumphalist humanism. The key is to recognise that we do not truly know ourselves—that we have misplaced our trust in the sinful nature of humans, mistaking it for human greatness. We cannot ignore or distort the message and will of the One who knows us completely without causing harm both to ourselves and to humanity as a whole. If we allowed ourselves to be guided by Him, we would gain wisdom and strength, no longer resembling the blind leading the blind in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting.[6] We would understand that the only true battle worth fighting is against our own fallen nature—a lifelong struggle. And in this fight, we would find unity and compassion for those around us, recognising their struggles as our own. A true Christian understands why Jesus Christ tells us that this fragile world is not to be coveted, conquered, or endlessly divided—but overcome (John 16:33).
