Lessons from My World War II Heroes Part Four: Every Life is Precious
The movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days portrays the final few days of the life of Sophie Scholl, a young German woman who was arrested after she and her brother Hans distributed leaflets telling the truth about the war and the Nazis’ crimes. At one point in the movie, Sophie’s Nazi interrogator refers to mentally disabled children as “unworthy lives.” Sophie responds, “Every life is precious.” And that’s another of the themes I see again and again in the lives of my World War II heroes, people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie ten Boom, Diet Eman, Hans Poley, and others. Unlike the Nazis, who sought to exterminate anyone who did not conform to their image of the “ideal Aryan,” these heroes believed that every life was valuable. Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch watchmaker who was imprisoned for helping Jews, told the German officer questioning her, “God’s viewpoint is sometimes different from ours—so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given...
