Today, December 7, is the date which President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew would “live on in infamy.” On that date in 1941 Japan pushed the United States into the worldwide conflict that we would have engaged eventually. But with the bombing of our naval base at Pearl Harbor, we were jerked into the reality of war brought to our own shores. This current generation can identify a little with what that “greatest generation” experienced because of the events of that other infamous date of more recent memory, September 11, 2001.
Albert Camus once said that “man’s first faculty is forgetting.” God also knows that we are a forgetting race. He gave to the Jewish nation elaborate celebrations that are, in part, visual mnemonic devices to help his people remember what he had done for their nation. And, by remembering, bring honor to God. Likewise, Jesus gave to his disciples the bread and the cup by which they, and we, would remember the sacrifice He paid with his body and his blood poured out on our behalf. Each time I consume the elements am consumed by them. I visualize the Savior beaten and bloodied, hanging on a cross. It is an awful sight. It is a sight that brings tears even as I write this sentence. It really happened! It is not a theological proposition. A real man–the Son of God–gave himself over to a brutal death. For me! I remember. When recalling His death no longer draws tears, I have not truly remembered. It is part of our human condition of forgetting. The impact is gone.
That is why we remind one another to remember.
“Don’t forget the milk.”
“Remember to take your pill.”
“Remember the Alamo.”
“Remember Pearl Harbor.”
“Remember 9-11.”
When we forget, we lose the power for good that memory effects. Remembering brings the power of the lesson to bear on today’s need.
This morning I read the story of Luba Gercak. She grew up in a shtetl, a Jewish community in Poland. She married a cabinet-maker while still in her teens and expected a quiet and peaceful life. When the Nazis invaded Poland, her world was upended. Her husband was taken to Auschwitz. Her three-year old son was ripped from her arms and sent to be killed. I wept. I didn’t tear up. I cried like child torn from his mother. Or, perhaps, a mother torn from her child. I pictured one of my three-year old grandsons being pulled from his mother’s love and sent to die. Somebody really did this. A human being took an innocent three-year old child and sent him to be killed. The story could be multiplied by the thousands. People committed unthinkable acts of atrocity upon others who had not long before been neighbors.
Luba later saw her husband’s dead body being dragged behind a Nazi truck. She wished only death for herself until God gave her a purpose for living.
She was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany. One day she heard a child’s cry. She found that a group of Dutch children, 52 in all, had been yanked from their parents and landed there, without plan for their future. She first shamed her fellow inmates into allowing the children to share space with them. Then she urged an SS guard to allow her to take care of the children. She would beg, borrow and steal whatever she could find to keep the children fed and alive.
On April 15,1945 the Allied tanks rolled into Bergen-Belsen and liberated those captives of the holocaust. Anne Frank died at this same camp. But of Luba’s 52 children, only 2 had succumbed to the death that was a constant reality at the camp.
Luba later married and move to the US. But she never forgot her children. They never forgot her. On a bright April day in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation from Bergen-Belsen, some thirty of her children gathered on the steps of the Amsterdam city hall to honor Luba. She was given the Netherlands Silver Medal of Honor for Humanitarian Service from Queen Beatrix. The greatest gift she received that day was seeing her children living successful lives. The operative word being “living.”
One of those children is Stella Degen-Fertig. She was too young while at Bergen-Belsen to remember Luba. But her mother never let her forget. “I have thought of you all my life,” Stella told her through tears. “My mother always told me she had given birth to me, but that I owed my life to a woman named Luba. She said that I was never to forget.” Then she whispered in Luba’s ear, “I never have.”
So let’s remember. Let’s remember what evil lies in man. It didn’t begin with Hitler. We recall the slaughter of innocents 3,500 years ago when the Egyptians tried to end the Jewish race. It happened again in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. It happens in some form or another every day somewhere in this world. Humans kill other humans with no reason.
Let’s also remember the Luba’s of the world. People who, sometimes in the middle of insane inhumanity, act as palliative antidote to malevolent violence and malignant apathy.
Remember the teacher who took the extra time to make sure you understood.
Remember the relative who set an example for you of unilateral love and grace.
Remember your mother who sacrificed her well-being that you might have enough.
Remember those who ran into burning buildings to help others get out.
Remember those who strapped on their boots and walked into the face of terror in order that we might live free.
“Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Hebrews 12:3).
How do people learn? How do we know? How do we know how we learn? How do we learn what we should know? Alright, enough of that. But I do want to pursue the question of how people really learn, and what it means to learn.
You hear it often. From coaches. From parents. From preachers. I have said it. 
