Striving to forgive

Dr ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS , a Swiss-born psychiatrist, who died in 2004, was renowned for her pioneering work on Death & Dying including identifying the stages of grief. She was also influential, with others, in the establishment of the hospice movement caring for dying children.
It may be that a profound influence for the development of this work began in 1946 when she visited a concentration camp in Maidanek, in Poland, where she met a young woman whose story affected her greatly.

On this National Holocaust Day 2025, the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, her story of that meeting is best told in her own words

“It started in Maidanek, in a concentration camp, where I tried to see how children had gone into the gas chambers after having lost their families, their homes, their schools and everything.
The walls in the camp were filled with pictures of butterflies, drawn by these children. It was incomprehensible to me. Thousands of children going into the gas chamber, and this is the message they leave behind–a butterfly. That was really the beginning.

In this concentration camp there was a Jewish girl, and she watched me.
I hope you understand, I was a very young kid naturally, who hadn’t gone through any windstorms in life. When you grow up in Switzerland, there is no race problem, no poverty, no unemployment, no slums, no nothing. And I went right into the nightmare of postwar Europe.
So I asked her, how can men and women, like you and I, kill hundreds and thousands of innocent children, and the same day they do that, day after day, they worry about their own child at home who has chicken pox. It just didn’t compute in my brain, you know, being very innocent and ignorant.
This young woman had lost all her brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents in a gas chamber. She was the last one they tried to squash in, and there wasn’t room for one more person, so they pulled her out.
What she didn’t understand was that she had already been crossed off the list of the living. They never got back to her. She spent the rest of the war years in this concentration camp swearing that she would stay alive to tell the world about all the atrocities that she witnessed.
When the people came to liberate the camp, she said to herself, “Oh my God, if I spend the rest of my life telling about all these horrible things, I would not be any better than Hitler himself.
I would plant seeds of hate and negativity.”
She made at that moment a promise to whoever she talked to, God presumably, that she would stay in the concentration camp until she could learn to forgive even a Hitler. When she had learned that lesson, then she would be worthy of leaving.
Do you understand that? The last thing she said to me was, “If you would only know that there is a Hitler in every human being!” If we can acknowledge that Hitler and get rid of it, she said, we could then become like, what we now would say is, Mother Theresa.”

May that young lady’s story help us to hear a message we need to learn and to give thanks that her story led to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to pioneer palliative care for suffering children.

[** You can learn more about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the Website of the EKS Foundation.]