In the middle 1960s, a seminary student interned in a Lutheran congregation in Berlin, Germany. This intern was much interested in the history of World War II, since he was born about the time his father was fighting in Germany. However, he soon discovered that most of the members of that congregation did not want to talk about the war. It was too painful. But one day, an uncle of one of the intern’s friends came to see him and shared this personal story.1

He was an engineer on the train from Amsterdam to Auschwitz. He was on the run that transported Jews to their death. Most of the Jews carried in these cattle cars were old men, women and children. (Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, one million were children!) At one of the stops on this journey, when they cleaned some of …