AVisit to Nazi Occupied Poland

My daughters and I spent time in Nazi occupied Poland this weekend via Netflix. We watched several movies, some documentaries and a revealing film made by the Nazi’s.
We hid in a small attic crawl space with 13 Jews. They could not stand or speak or move. They felt like the rats that also occupied their small space. They could not bathe or wash their clothes. Their toilet was a communal bucket. They had no privacy whatsoever. It was 2 ½ years of hell but they thanked God for every moment because they were alive!
We worried along with the young Christian girl who kept them alive. She put her life on the line for what she felt to be right. Immediate shooting was the consequence for hiding Jews. She put her faith in God asking for and receiving help for each obstacle she had to surmount. When asked she said, “I didn’t do anything special.”
We then lived in one of the Polish ghettos with one million other Jews. It was crowded. Each family was allowed two rooms. Each home was occupied by several families mostly unknown to each other. People starved to death and were thrown out into the street for pickup by the body crew. They were then slid down a slide into a mass grave to be bulldozed over.
We walked among those who knew that their life could end at any moment just on a soldier’s whim. We watched as slowly both Germans and Jews lost their humanity. “You cannot live with such things and allow yourself to feel” was one survivors comment. “We just stopped feeling.”
We felt the pain of families torn apart, the fear of the unknown, the despair of helplessness and the terror of the trains. We watched the smugness of the German leadership during trial still sure that they were right. They had done nothing wrong.
We saw footage of the skeletal remains of people, both dead and alive. We looked into eyes that were no longer recognizable as human. We saw the eyes of trapped animals, willing to chew off their own legs if needed to attain freedom.
We watched as Auschwitz was planned, designed and built to be a killing factory so that the work would be more efficient - the work of eliminating the entire Jewish population. We watched the still overwhelming numbers of dead fill the screen.
And my daughters asked questions that after 70 years can still not be answered. They wanted to know- WHY? They wanted to know- HOW? Mostly, they wanted to know- COULD THIS HAPPEN AGAIN?
One of the statistics that struck me was the estimation that less than 1% of the non-Jewish population in all the occupied countries did anything to help. Less than 1%! Would that figure be any higher today? I don’t think so. And that disturbs me the most. Have we really learned anything? As the last of that generation pass away, I’m afraid that no- we haven’t.
The people of today think stress is being late for a coffee date or a pedicure. Put to a real stress test would we crumble like a house of cards or are our foundations stronger than we think? Would we step up to the plate or hide in the bleachers? What would you do? That’s the view from my side of the street, what’s yours?