Humiliation

#11, Auschwitz Album Revisited
Oil Painting by Dr. Pat Mercer Hutchens

(Olga Reider & her two Daughters)

Concentration camps for women were especially diabolical. Women and girls endured unbelievable processes of humiliation, including exposure, crude body cavity searches, painful shaves of all body hair, daily mocking or beating, forced prostitution, multiple rapes, rapes with instruments and group molestation. No doubt the three women had experienced one or more before being herded out in the line called “fit to work.”

Degrading defenseless women not only became easy for tough men without a conscience–many of the Nazis found great pleasure in it. What human beings are capable of doing and justifying is a stern warning to all of us to keep our hearts sensitive to God. It is also an indictment of the shameful reality of a worldwide tolerance of humiliation and prostitution of women and girls in our own time.