call that I must go once more across the waters, not only to
consult with, and give a little encouragement to our faithful
missionaries on the battlefront, but also to see with my own
eyes the terrible conditions which now surround the Jews of
Europe. They are facing the greatest calamity of Jewish history
since the destruction of Jerusalem. I think of Nehemiah as he
was comfortably established in Shushan, the palace, and then he
began to ponder over the lot of his brethren who had escaped
out of the captivity. And Hanani told him, “The remnant that are
left of the captivity there in the provinces are in great affliction
and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem also is broken down and the
gates thereof are burned with fires.” And then Nehemiah tells us,
“When I heard these words I sat down and wept.” And Jeremiah
too wept with bitter tears when the city of Jerusalem was fallen,
and he gives us in Lamentations 3:1–7 a poignant picture of the
agony of Israel:
I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.
He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into
light. Surely against me is he turned; he turneth his hand
against me all the day. My flesh and my skin hath he made old;
he hath broken my bones. He hath builded against me and
compassed me with gall and travail. He hath set me in dark
places, as they that be dead of old. He hath hedged me about,
that I cannot get out; he hath made my chain heavy.
And these are the sorrows that fill our own souls as we read of
the calamities that have befallen the Jews in the present hour
in Austria, in Germany, in Roumania, in Poland. Here is tragedy
beyond the power of pen to describe. A friend in Vienna wrote
us, of course very guardedly, just a glimpse of what had been
going on in that terrible Nazi putsch by which Hitler suddenly
seized Austria. We in America, although undergoing our own
hours of depression and suffering, still know too little of what
are the agonies of this harassed people. On the day of the swift
sweeping down of Hitler upon Vienna, the Jewish population
10 | Never Again: A Holocast Remembered