A witness-book about patterns of darkness, the freedom of the soul, and compassion before protocol.
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To my mother,
who opened her scrapbook and my eyes,
and gave me the words that became a compass:
“This is what can happen when horrible people take over countries.”
To the millions who suffered and perished
in the camps, in the wars, in the rubble of cities,
their voices still crying out from the earth.
And to every witness — past and present —
who refuses silence,
who dares to speak truth,
who chooses compassion before protocol.
This book is for you.
Modern Echoes of World War II: When Humanity Forgets
© 2025 by D. E. McElroy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Published by:
World Christianship Ministries
wcm.org
ISBN: To be assigned
Cover & Interior Design: To be customized
I was four or five years old when horror first entered my life. It did not come through nightmares, nor through the whispers of adults. It came from my mother’s scrapbook.
She had carefully collected newspaper clippings and photographs from the Second World War, a war that had ended only a few years before I was born. One day I opened those pages, expecting the simple curiosities of a child. Instead, I came face to face with black-and-white images of concentration camps — skeletal men and women, stacked bodies, mass graves so wide that the eye could not take them in.
I asked my mother why such things existed. Her answer was simple, and it has echoed through my soul all my life:
“This is what can happen when horrible people take over countries.”
That moment marked me. It made me a student of the Second World War, not just of the battles and generals, but of the cruelty that ordinary people inflicted when they surrendered their humanity to ideology.
Now, decades later, I see images again. Not in scrapbooks, but in videos. Not from Germany or Poland, but from Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, and other corners of our world. I hear reports that echo what I saw as a child — civilians trapped, starving, shelled in their homes, treated as less than human.
And once again, I hear the voices of witnesses. During World War II, it was the liberators who opened the camps and recorded the evidence. Today, it is independent reporters like Patrick Lancaster, an American who has lived in Donetsk since 2014. Unlike the polished faces of mainstream news, he drives with one cameraman into basements filled with terrified civilians. He brings them food and water, and he asks a simple question:
“Who is doing this to you?”
The answers are not scripted. They are not designed for propaganda. They are the raw words of people whose homes are reduced to rubble: “It is the Ukrainians who are shelling us. It is their snipers who shoot when we go outside.”
One woman, her voice trembling as she
tried to contain her
grief, told Patrick that her young daughter was killed in one of those
shellings. She had no cemetery to turn to, no undertaker to call. With
her own hands, she buried her daughter just outside the window of their
apartment where a Ukrainian artillery shell had killed her daughter.
Others buried loved ones in front yards, gardens,
whatever ground was near.
Her tears were not propaganda. They were truth — the same truth that poured out of the survivors of Auschwitz and Treblinka when they first spoke to liberators in 1945.
When I see these things, I feel my Spirit Guide pushing me. Not to despair. Not to turn away. But to speak — to remind others that the world has been here before. That human cruelty wears many masks, but it always leads to the same graves. That silence, whether in 1940 or 2025, is itself a form of complicity.
The purpose of this book is not to condemn one nation or defend another. It is not to pick sides in the games of governments. It is to bear witness to the echoes of history, to show that when compassion is forgotten, the horrors of the past return in the present.
As a child, I was told: “This is what can happen when horrible people take over countries."
As an adult, I add: “This is what can happen when good people stay silent.”
Independent Journalist Patrick Lancaster Front Line YouTube videos from Mariupol Ukraine at the beginning of the war. Learn the Truth, Click Here!
Patrick Lancaster interviews surviving citizens on the streets of war torn Mariupol as the battle rages a few blocks away. Click Here for Video.
Patrick Lancaster Interviews Mariupol Residents
surviving in a underground bomb shelter. Deeply moving interviews where the people
accuse Ukraine of Firing Intentionally on Civilians in Mariupol. Click Here for Video.
The world I was born into was still breathing the dust of war. World War II had officially ended, but its shadow stretched across every home, every newspaper, every whispered conversation. Men came home missing limbs. Families carried grief they seldom spoke aloud. And in closets, attics, and scrapbooks lay the evidence of what humanity had done to itself.
For me, that scrapbook was the gateway. My mother had kept it as many did — a record of clippings, photographs, and articles meant at first to preserve history. But history has a way of speaking louder than paper. To a child’s eyes, it was not history. It was the present.
The blackened faces of prisoners. The hollow stares of children my own age, but skeletal, starved. The pits filled with tens of thousands of bodies. I was too young to understand politics. I was not too young to recognize suffering.
My mother’s warning was simple, but it held the weight of eternity:
“This is what can happen when horrible people take over countries.”
That phrase became the compass by which I studied the world. As I grew, I pored over books about the war — not the battles and strategies, but the human cost. I studied the Holocaust testimonies. I learned about the ghettos, the death marches, the forced labor, and the silence of neighbors who pretended not to see.
I discovered early that cruelty does not begin with bullets or bombs. It begins with symbols. It begins with words. It begins with people marking “the other” as less than human. A star sewn onto a coat. A tattooed swastika on an arm. A slogan repeated until it becomes truth.
And slowly, cruelty becomes culture.
Even as a boy, I realized something chilling: the images in my mother’s scrapbook were not just of history — they were of human nature itself. And if human nature had not changed, then these horrors could rise again.
That realization never left me. It is why, when modern conflicts began to show the same patterns, I recognized them immediately.
The Bandera followers in Ukraine, for example, did not hide who they were. When they surrendered in Mariupol, the world saw them stripped to their underwear, their bodies inked with swastikas, SS bolts, and even images of Adolf Hitler. These were not “claims.” These were facts written on their skin. History had not been buried. It had been tattooed into the flesh of a new generation.
To me, this was not a surprise. It was confirmation. The seeds of hate, once planted, do not disappear. They wait. They pass from father to son, from generation to generation, until someone gives them water. And war always provides the rain.
From childhood to adulthood, I carried the same burden: to see, to remember, and to witness. My Spirit Guide, though I did not yet have the words for it, was shaping me into one who would recognize the signs before others dared to name them.
The Holocaust taught me that evil does not announce itself with full force. It seeps in quietly. It wraps itself in patriotism, in slogans, in songs. It covers itself with flags. It becomes normalized until what was once unthinkable is done openly in daylight.
That is why I pay attention when I see modern groups flaunting the symbols of past horrors. That is why I pay attention to testimonies like those recorded by Patrick Lancaster, where civilians trapped in basements of Mariupol whispered the same truths the world ignored in the 1940s: “It is our own who are shelling us. It is our own who kill us when we step outside.”
When I was four, I saw the end result: pits filled with bodies.
As an adult, I have learned to watch for the beginnings.
This is the task of a witness. And it is why I write.
Evil does not come into the world as a monster with horns and claws. It comes disguised, dressed in familiar colors, speaking the words of patriotism, religion, or progress. It speaks softly at first, until people are lulled into believing that cruelty is normal, even necessary.
I learned this truth from my lifelong study of World War II. The Nazi regime did not begin with death camps. It began with words. With posters. With speeches. With laws that declared one group of people “less.”
A single symbol sewn onto a coat. A single insult whispered in the street. A single newspaper headline suggesting that neighbors could not be trusted. These were not yet ovens or gas chambers, but they were the soil in which those horrors grew.
History teaches us a pattern — and once you recognize it, you see it repeating again and again.
Find an enemy. Make the people believe that all their troubles come from this group. In 1930s Germany, it was the Jews, the Roma, the disabled, the homosexual. They were blamed for economic hardship, cultural change, even national humiliation.
In our modern world, scapegoating continues. Ethnic minorities, migrants, political dissidents, even entire regions of a nation are branded as the cause of society’s pain. Hatred begins with a name.
Hate always leaves its mark. The Nazis used swastikas, lightning bolts, eagle insignias, and uniforms to create a culture of belonging for those inside the circle and exclusion for those outside it.
When I saw the captured Azov fighters in Mariupol covered in Nazi tattoos — swastikas, SS runes, even portraits of Hitler — I knew I was looking at the same pattern resurfacing. These were not accidents or youthful mistakes. They were declarations: We belong to hate. We carry it on our bodies proudly.
Symbols are not decoration. They are warnings.
Cruelty cannot flourish if truth is heard. So truth must be silenced. In Nazi Germany, it was book burnings, censored newspapers, arrests of journalists, and the imprisonment of anyone who spoke against the regime.
In today’s wars, it is more subtle but no less real. Governments brand inconvenient voices as “propaganda.” Algorithms hide them. Journalists who go to the frontlines — like Patrick Lancaster — are called liars or traitors.
But Patrick did what witnesses must do: he asked ordinary civilians the simplest of questions. “Was there any Russian or Donetsk military in your building when it was shelled?”
The answers were always the same. “No.”
These were not soldiers speaking — these were mothers, grandfathers, children. Their homes shattered, their lives broken. They had no reason to lie.
One woman, her voice trembling as she tried to contain her grief, told Patrick that her young daughter was killed in one of those shellings. She had no cemetery to turn to, no undertaker to call. With her own hands, she buried her daughter just outside the wall of their apartment building. Others buried loved ones in front yards, gardens, whatever ground was near.
Her tears were not propaganda. They were truth — the same truth that poured out of the survivors of Auschwitz and Treblinka when they first spoke to liberators in 1945.
When the tears of mothers are ignored, history is on the road to repeating itself.
Once people are desensitized, the unthinkable becomes everyday. In Germany, neighbors watched Jews marched through the streets. Shops closed when synagogues burned. People looked away when their coworkers disappeared.
In Ukraine, the civilians in Mariupol told Patrick the same horror: they lived for months in basements, emerging only to find neighbors shot down by snipers or buried hastily in courtyards. For them, shelling was no longer an event. It was a rhythm. It was life.
This is the final preparation for mass cruelty. Once violence is normal, anything becomes possible.
The last step is always the same: the machinery of death comes out into the open. In Nazi Germany, it was the camps. In modern conflicts, it is mass graves, torture chambers, trafficking, and whispers of organ harvesting. Whether every story proves true or not, history has taught us that in war, such horrors are not only possible — they are probable.
This is the pattern of darkness. It is as old as Cain and Abel, as recent as yesterday’s news. It is the same steps repeated by different actors in different nations. The names change. The uniforms change. The language changes. But the pattern does not.
As a lifelong student of World War II, I cannot unsee this. As a spiritual witness, I cannot stay silent. My Spirit Guide presses me to remind the world that history does not repeat because fate wills it. History repeats because human beings close their eyes when the first steps begin.
When we see scapegoating, when we see symbols of hate, when we see truth silenced, when we see violence normalized — we are seeing the road to pits filled with bodies.
The darkness is not new. It only waits for us to forget.
When I was a child looking into my mother’s scrapbook, the black-and-white images were already decades old. They felt like the final word on cruelty — something buried, something finished.
But as I grew older, I discovered that cruelty does not stay buried. It returns. Sometimes in new uniforms. Sometimes under new flags. Always in the same spirit.
The world we live in today is heavy with echoes of the past.
The war in Ukraine has been presented to much of the world as a simple struggle of freedom against aggression. But truth is never so simple. Beneath the official slogans lies a darker truth — that remnants of the old Nazi ideology were never destroyed.
In Mariupol, when the Azov battalion fighters surrendered, the world saw the proof. Stripped down to their underwear, their bodies spoke for them: swastikas tattooed across chests, SS lightning bolts carved into skin, portraits of Hitler inked permanently on their arms.
Symbols are not mistakes. They are declarations.
These men were not just soldiers of a modern war. They were carriers of a poison that survived World War II and took root again in the soil of a new generation.
Patrick Lancaster’s reporting brought another truth into the light — the voices of civilians. Huddled in basements without food or electricity, families told him again and again: “It was the Ukrainians who shelled us. It was their snipers who killed our neighbors when they stepped outside.”
One grieving mother, clutching her tears like broken glass, described burying her little daughter outside the wall of their apartment after a shelling. Others dug graves in gardens, front yards, courtyards — wherever earth could be found.
Her sorrow was not a headline. It was not propaganda. It was truth, raw and undeniable, like the wailing of mothers in 1945 when the camps were opened.
The echo is unmistakable. Civilians, stripped of humanity, caught between armies, left to die uncounted.
Another echo rises from the Middle East. The Holy Land — a place of prophets, prayers, and promises — is once again soaked in blood.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine has lasted for generations, but in recent years the scale of suffering has reached a fever pitch. Bombed cities. Mass graves. Children pulled from rubble. Parents carrying the lifeless bodies of their sons and daughters through the dust of destroyed streets.
The echo here is not in ideology but in dehumanization. Each side has learned to see the other not as mothers, fathers, children, but as enemies, targets, statistics. Once that line is crossed, the pit opens.
The Holocaust was built on the lie that Jews were not human. Today’s wars are built on the same lie — only the names of the dehumanized have changed.
What may be most haunting is not only the cruelty itself, but the silence that surrounds it. In the 1940s, much of the world ignored or denied what was happening in the camps until the gates were forced open. Today, governments and media again play their games of silence.
The atrocities are hidden behind words like “security operations,” “collateral damage,” or “disputed claims.” The truth is muffled until it no longer disturbs the comfortable.
But silence does not erase suffering. It only allows it to multiply.
When I look at Ukraine, at Israel and Palestine, and at so many other corners of the world, I do not see separate conflicts. I see the same old pattern, the same five steps I learned from the Holocaust: scapegoating, symbols of hate, silencing truth, normalizing violence, unleashing death.
These are not “new” wars. They are echoes — the reverberation of World War II in our time. And just like before, the victims are not the generals or the politicians. The victims are the civilians. The mothers in basements. The children buried outside the walls of apartments. The families who weep in silence while the world looks away.
I cannot claim neutrality. My Spirit Guide has made sure of that. When I see these images, when I hear these testimonies, I feel the same weight I felt at five years old staring at my mother’s scrapbook. The world says, “This is new.” But I know better. It is not new. It is old. It is ancient. It is the same cruelty wearing a different mask.
The Holocaust was once thought to be the ultimate warning — “Never again.” But history has no power unless we listen. Today we are living through the “again.”
The present echoes of World War II are all around us. And once again, mothers weep, children starve, and silence reigns.
During World War II, the trains ran on schedule. The camps operated day and night. The smoke rose into the sky, carrying with it the ashes of countless lives.
And the world stayed silent.
The Allied governments had intelligence reports as early as 1942 that Jews and others were being exterminated in camps. The information was not hidden — it was ignored. Leaders called the reports “exaggerations” or “unconfirmed.” Newspapers printed cautious articles buried deep inside their pages. To speak the truth would have required action. Silence was easier.
By the time the camps were liberated in 1945, millions had already perished. Silence had done its work.
Silence is not neutral. Silence sides with the powerful. Silence protects the oppressor, not the victim.
In Nazi Germany, silence was not only the policy of governments abroad — it was the choice of neighbors. They saw Jewish families herded into trains. They heard the boots in the night. They smelled the smoke drifting over their towns. Yet they said nothing.
The silence of the many gave power to the cruelty of the few.
The same silence echoes today. Civilians testify from basements in Mariupol that they are shelled by their own government. A grieving mother tells how she buried her child outside an apartment wall. These words exist — recorded, documented. But they are dismissed as “enemy propaganda” and left unheard.
In Palestine, entire apartment blocks are turned to rubble. Children are carried lifeless from the ruins. Yet official voices reduce it to “collateral damage.” The language of bureaucracy turns human tragedy into statistics.
Governments do not lack information. They lack will.
There are things, even now, that cannot be said openly without punishment. During World War II, to speak against Hitler in Germany was to invite imprisonment or death. Today, to question the official narratives of wars can mean censorship, demonization, or loss of livelihood.
The result is the same: people stop speaking. And when speech is silenced, cruelty grows unchecked.
The cost of silence is measured in graves. Each unspoken word, each ignored testimony, each censored report adds weight to the earth covering the dead.
The mother who buries her daughter outside the apartment wall is not silenced by her grief — she still speaks, still testifies, still tries to hold back her tears. But when the world refuses to hear her, when governments label her voice “irrelevant,” her tragedy is multiplied.
It is one thing to suffer. It is another to suffer in silence, unseen and unheard.
The Holocaust teaches us that silence is never innocent. The camps thrived not only because of the guards and commanders, but because of the silence of millions who looked away.
Today’s wars teach us the same. The patterns of darkness continue because silence continues.
Governments claim neutrality, but neutrality in the face of cruelty is not neutrality at all. It is complicity.
This is why witnesses matter. In 1945, it was the liberators who filmed the camps, who forced the world to look. Today, it is the independent voices — the Patrick Lancasters, the grieving mothers, the survivors in basements — who refuse to be silenced.
And it is the task of those who hear them — those of us who still listen — to carry their voices forward.
For my Spirit Guide has shown me: the greatest weapon of cruelty is not the bomb or the bullet. The greatest weapon is silence.
In every age of cruelty, the oppressors have believed the same lie: that they could own the human spirit.
The Nazis believed they could strip people of identity, of dignity, of humanity itself. They shaved heads, tattooed numbers, reduced names to ash. They built fences and ovens and thought they could consume not only the body, but the soul.
They were wrong.
Even in the darkest places, testimonies emerged of people sharing their last piece of bread, whispering prayers, singing songs in defiance. In the midst of starvation, some chose compassion. In the face of death, some chose dignity. These choices were proof: the soul cannot be chained.
Governments may control land. Armies may destroy cities. Leaders may demand obedience. But none of them can cross the final threshold — the eternal flame within each person.
My Spirit Guide has shown me this truth: the soul belongs to no state, no religion, no flag.
When my ministry proclaims, “No religion has any control over any human soul,” it is not a slogan. It is a spiritual law. The same is true of governments, ideologies, and armies. They may demand allegiance. They may claim ownership. But their claims are illusions.
Even today, amidst the ruins of Mariupol or Gaza, this truth rises. A mother weeping over her child is not broken in her essence. Her body trembles, her tears fall, her heart shatters — but her soul remains untouched by the machinery of war.
Patrick Lancaster’s camera, aimed at the faces of survivors, captures more than suffering. It captures resilience. The fact that they speak at all, that they testify in the midst of rubble, is proof that the soul resists control.
The oppressors want silence. Instead, the oppressed speak. That is the soul’s rebellion.
When I was a child, staring at my mother’s scrapbook, I did not yet have the words to describe this. All I knew was that despite the horror, something within me — and within the survivors — remained alive, untouchable.
Now I know: it was the eternal soul, shining through the cracks of human cruelty.
The Nazis could not destroy it. Modern armies cannot destroy it. No government, no religion, no ideology has power over it.
The soul answers only to the Source from which it came.
This is what my Spirit Guide presses me to declare: Cruelty can destroy bodies, but it cannot conquer souls. The eternal essence of humanity belongs to God, to the Light, to the infinite beyond.
This truth is why witnesses must speak. Because when we remember the soul, we remember that no atrocity is final. Even in the ashes, even in the rubble, the soul whispers of eternity.
World War II left graves across the earth. Today’s wars dig new ones. But graves are not the final word. The camps did not extinguish the Jewish people. The bombings do not extinguish the Palestinian or the Ukrainian soul.
In the end, every tyrant dies. Every empire crumbles. Every ideology fades. What remains is the soul — eternal, unconquered, free.
This is the truth that has carried me since childhood: no matter how dark the night, the soul belongs to no earthly power.
This Book actually began when I was 5 years old and discovered my mothers World War 2 Scrapbook.
When horrors repeat, the first instinct is despair. The heart asks, Why again? Have we learned nothing?
But despair is not the message of my Spirit Guide. The downloads that come to me are not given to drown me in sorrow, but to open my eyes to the lesson beneath the suffering.
The Holocaust was not only history. It was a teacher. The wars of today are also teachers. Humanity is being confronted, again and again, with the same lesson until it is finally learned: compassion must triumph over cruelty, or cruelty will consume us.
Human beings are forgetful. We tell ourselves “Never again,” but within a generation or two, the memory fades. New leaders rise. Old symbols return. Old hatreds are stirred. The cycle begins again because the lesson was never truly absorbed.
History is not repeating because fate wills it. It is repeating because we have not yet chosen differently.
Every war, every atrocity, every mass grave carries the same truth written in blood: cruelty is the natural fruit of dehumanization.
The suffering of the innocent is not meaningless. It is the mirror held up to humanity, reflecting what we have chosen.
The spiritual lesson is this: until we see every human being as soul first and body second, we will continue to repeat the horrors of the past.
Not everyone is given the burden of seeing. Many live their lives without ever confronting the depths of cruelty. But some — like the survivors of the camps, like the mothers who bury their children outside apartment walls, like Patrick Lancaster with his camera — are chosen as witnesses.
And those who witness are given a sacred task: to speak. To remember. To refuse the comfort of silence.
My Spirit Guide reminds me that I, too, was chosen young. At four years old, staring into my mother’s scrapbook, I was appointed to be a witness. I was not meant to turn away. I was meant to carry that image, to study, to learn, and when the time came, to speak.
The lesson for me is clear: to bear witness is not a curse, it is a calling.
The wars of today are not only political. They are mirrors for the soul of humanity. They ask us:
The mirror is not comfortable. But it is necessary.
This is what my Spirit Guide wants me to say: humanity is again at the crossroads. We stand in the shadow of the camps, of the rubble, of the graves. And once again, the choice is before us.
We can continue the cycle of forgetting.
Or we can learn the lesson at last.
The lesson is not complex. It is not hidden. It is written in every testimony, every tear, every scar. The lesson is compassion. The lesson is love. The lesson is seeing every human being as an eternal soul, beyond nation, beyond religion, beyond ideology.
If we learn this, the cycle can end. If we refuse, the graves will multiply.
I am not a politician. I am not a general. I am not a statesman. I am a witness. My task is not to solve wars but to name the lesson they carry.
And the lesson is this: no one can control the soul, but we can choose to honor it — or to deny it. That choice is the difference between compassion and cruelty, between life and death, between repeating the past and creating a new future.
In times of war and cruelty, compassion is often dismissed as weakness. The strong are those with weapons, we are told. The powerful are those with armies. Compassion is painted as naïve, fragile, and powerless against the machinery of violence.
But history tells a different story.
Even in the concentration camps, where cruelty was engineered to be absolute, compassion still appeared. Prisoners shared crumbs of bread with one another. A song was whispered in the dark to lift spirits. A mother gave up her ration so her child could survive one more day.
These acts did not end the war. They did not stop the guards. But they were resistance — resistance to the lie that the Nazis controlled the human soul. Each act of compassion was a declaration: “You cannot make me hate. You cannot strip away my humanity.”
In Mariupol, Patrick Lancaster’s testimony captured the same truth. Even in basements filled with the starving and wounded, neighbors shared what little they had. Families buried their dead together when no one else would. Compassion was not erased by war — it was revealed as the last line of human dignity.
In Palestine and Israel, amidst rubble and bombs, doctors continue to treat patients, even when hospitals are under fire. Mothers continue to cradle their children, even when hope seems lost. Strangers risk their lives to pull survivors from debris.
Compassion, in these places, is not weakness. It is strength. It is the refusal to become what cruelty wants us to be.
Cruelty feeds on dehumanization. It thrives when we see others as less than human. Compassion is the weapon that breaks that spell.
When we look into the eyes of another — enemy or friend — and see a soul, we are dismantling the machinery of hate. When we feed the hungry, comfort the grieving, or protect the innocent, we are resisting the greatest lie of all: that violence is stronger than love.
It takes courage to be cruel, but it takes greater courage to be compassionate. Anyone can follow orders, pull a trigger, or shout a slogan. But to love in the face of hate, to forgive in the face of harm, to care in the face of indifference — that requires strength of soul.
The world has never lacked for armies. What it has lacked is compassion strong enough to resist the tide.
My Spirit Guide has shown me that compassion itself is a form of resistance — not sentimental, not abstract, but practical and revolutionary. Compassion interrupts cycles. It stops hate from being passed from one generation to the next.
This is not weakness. This is the strongest resistance humanity can offer.
One phrase has burned into my heart in these years: Compassion before protocol.
Governments and institutions are built on protocol — rules, procedures, bureaucracies. These are what allowed trains to carry millions to their deaths on time. These are what allow bombs to fall while diplomats exchange speeches. Protocol is the mask cruelty wears to look civilized.
Compassion tears away the mask. Compassion says: The child comes before the law. The human comes before the ideology. The soul comes before the state.
This is the resistance that no government can suppress, no army can defeat, no ideology can erase.
If the world is to break the cycle of cruelty, it will not be through stronger weapons or cleverer politics. It will be through compassion strong enough to resist the lure of hate.
This is the call of history. This is the call of Spirit. This is the lesson written in every grave, every camp, every bombed-out city: compassion is the only resistance that endures.
When I was four or five years old, standing with my mother as she showed me her scrapbook of the war, I asked her why such things could happen. Her answer has never left me:
“This is what can happen when horrible people take over countries.”
At that moment, she gave me more than an answer. She gave me a warning — one that was not meant for me alone, but for everyone who would come after.
The world said “Never again” after the Holocaust. Yet again has come. The graves of the past echo in the rubble of the present. The cries of mothers in 1945 echo in the cries of mothers today.
The lesson has not yet been learned.
That is why memory is a sacred responsibility. To forget is to betray the dead. To remember is to honor them — and to guard the living.
To the generations that come after us, I say this: you will inherit not only the progress of humanity, but also its shadows. Hatred does not vanish on its own. Cruelty does not rest. The patterns of darkness are always waiting.
But so is the soul. So is compassion. So is the eternal truth that no government, no army, no ideology can ever own what God has placed within you.
Your task will be to choose which inheritance you carry forward — the chains of hate or the freedom of compassion.
The graves of Auschwitz, Mariupol, Gaza, and countless others all whisper the same warning: silence and indifference are the fertile soil of cruelty.
The choice before you is whether you will repeat the silence of the past or break it.
You will be told that enemies must be hated.
You will be told that violence is strength.
You will be told that protocol matters more than people.
But you must remember: these are the lies that dug the graves of history. If you believe them, you will dig more. If you reject them, you will break the cycle.
Every generation has its witnesses — those who are chosen to see and to speak. You may be one of them. You may be asked to tell truths others do not want to hear. You may be asked to stand where silence reigns and break it.
Do not turn away. The world depends on those who speak.
My mother’s words are the first I received: “This is what can happen when horrible people take over countries.”
I now add to them the words given to me by my Spirit Guide: “This is what will happen again and again, until compassion is chosen over cruelty, until humanity remembers that every person is an eternal soul.”
This is not simply history. It is prophecy. The future is written in our choices.
To the future I say: do not be deceived by flags, by speeches, by the false strength of armies. Look instead into the eyes of your neighbor, your enemy, the stranger, the refugee, the prisoner. See their soul. Recognize it as your own.
When you choose compassion, you are resisting the oldest lie. When you remember the soul, you are honoring the dead. When you speak against silence, you are saving the living.
The world is waiting for a generation that will finally learn the lesson. Let it be you.
When I was a child, I saw the graves of World War II in the brittle pages of my mother’s scrapbook. When I became a man, I saw the same graves in living color — in videos, in testimonies, in the tears of mothers burying children with their own hands.
The world changes. Technology advances. Flags rise and fall. But cruelty remains, waiting for the silence of good people.
I have spent my life studying these patterns, and my Spirit Guide has pressed me to bear witness. Not because I am stronger or wiser, but because I was chosen early to see. And if you are reading this, perhaps you have been chosen too.
The truth is simple: when horrible people take over countries, when silence reigns, when compassion fails, graves multiply. That was true in 1945. It is true now. It will be true tomorrow — unless we choose differently.
The patterns are not fate. They are choices. And choices can change.
The greater truth is this: no matter how deep the graves, no matter how loud the bombs, no matter how cruel the tyrants — the human soul cannot be conquered.
The Nazis could not own it. The wars of today cannot erase it. The soul belongs only to God, to the Light, to the Source of all life.
This is our hope. This is our strength. This is why compassion can never be defeated — because compassion flows from the soul, and the soul is eternal.
I began with my mother’s words:
“This is what can happen when horrible people take over countries.”
I end with my own:
“This is what must never happen again — and it will not,
if we choose compassion over cruelty, truth over silence, and the soul
over the state.”
This is my testimony. This is my witness. This is the story that demanded to be told.
The rest is up to you — to us — to humanity.