[USMCVet]

Illustrates that courage and honor are complex things sometimes, but courage and honor nonetheless.

[hershey]

In the end he sacrificed everything, but saved his soul.

[ultima ratio]

The idea that Schindler was the most righteous gentile for saving 1000 Jews overlooks what was done by Pius XII--who saved almost a million Jewish lives. Despite the smear campaign launched by the Soviets in the mid-fifties and perpetuated by Catholic-bashers till recent years, this good man's story is finally getting out--the papal decree that commanded all convents and monasteries to become hiding places for Jewish refugees, the fake baptismal certificates and passports printed by the Vatican to give cover to the refugees, the liturgical vessels of gold melted-down to pay necessary ransoms and bribes paid to Nazis to look the other way as caravans of food left daily from the Vatican to secret destinations...

[normy]

"He was the single most righteous gentile during the Holocaust."

He didn't give his life to stop the Nazis although he risked it. He was no more righteous a gentile than the thousand who died storming Normandy or died in Africa or anywhere else in the effort to defeat the Nazis.

He saved over a thousand yet the American soldier saved the extermination of the whole race.

[stevem]

One of the problems we alway face when we are out recruiting our heroes is that we have to recruit them from the human race. You can often look at a life to see what happens when heroes get tired. It sounds as though Schindler may have shown a knot or two in the midst of the soft wood.

The thing of it is is, when Jesus told the crowd, "Let him with no sin cast the first stone," he was speaking to all of us.

I hope we can always condemn the evil that men do while remaining awed by and aspiring to the heroic.

[wizr]

Amen.