LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: REFLECTION ON SCHINDLER'S LIST

To the Editor:

What hit me hardest while watching Schindler's List in one of our movie houses was the screaming of children torn away from their parents -- loaded on trucks and taken away. Who dares describe the horror of a little child separated from his mother? I remember being 4-years old, and I lost my mother in a market place crowded with shoppers. I was horrified. I ran hither and thither crying desperately. My mother, only 10 feet away, hurried to her offspring. And after a few more sobs, everything was dandy again.

But the Holocaust children, God knows, cried their hearts out. And no father or mother, no grandma, came to rescue their darlings. "Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow," Jeremiah the prophet cried out. And there were also cattle trains piled with men, women, and children. And they did not know where they were taken.

The train I was in was also filled with innocent men and we did not know where we were going.

One day, we rode into a dark forest and the sun was setting, and neither my spirit nor soul manifested any great heroism in that hour. He landed in a marshy, wooded area. Days of hard labor followed by digging on a canal.

One morning the guardsmen were gone. The gate was broken down fast. And we started walking home, a stretch of one hundred miles, starved and sick.

How many Jewish people made it home after the Holocaust? Not many, and there lived 6 million in Europe. "Was there ever such a despair and heart-break on earth?" I asked myself. I also pondered the great question: Where was the Supreme Being, God Jehova? Did He not see what happened on his planet earth? That mystery tormented me for a long time. Until, one day I listened again to the radio message from the Jewish Messianic Mission (Jewish people that believe in Jesus as their Messiah) coming from a city in the Deep South.

And loud and clear a woman missionary read this text:

"And behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.

"For mine eyes are up on all their ways:

"They are not hid from my face, neither is their iniquity hid from my eyes." Jeremiah 16:16-17

And loud and clear sounded her voice: "And we believe and confess this word I read points straight to the Holocaust."

I rose from my chair; I walked like a man paralyzed. Not that I did not know the prophecies of the prophet Jeremiah. But I regarded this passage to be smaller holocausts perpetrated by the Assyrians, Babylonians, the Romans, who devastated the countryside, broke into Jerusalem, turned it into a heap of rubble and crucified thousands of the fanatics who started the uprising against Rome. Here one gets the impression that God Jehova, himself, has planned the Holocaust.

And indeed, did not Spielberg's (a German name meaning a play mountain) Schindler's List acknowledge the prophecy of Jeremiah: The people were found wherever they hid.

Oh, what a tragedy the Holocaust was, and that for not walking in the ways of the Lord!

Spielberg tries to show his Schindler's List the world over, and I am all for it. He should, however, add this episode:

When walking down at the end of his film with tears in his eyes -- drop down on his knees, thrust up his hands toward the heavens and repent, crying out to God Almighty for mercy and compassion, for his people and for all mankind.

HERBERT HIRSCHFELD

Cape Girardeau