The Children and The Elderly - "Unfit"

Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, has recently posted a web album of photographs taken at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.  The image of human beings waiting to be processed through the  checkpoints leading to death is chilling in its banality.  Why did the SS even take these pictures?  They don't seem to serve any purpose other than a record of an ordinary day at the death mill.

 

Women waited in line with their children, not knowing where they were headed.

The elderly and the handicapped were shuffled off to one side to await their fate.  According to the Yad Vashem text, they were so exhausted and in shock that they could not comprehend what was in store.

These pictures provide a stark representation of the fate of the weakest among us when the strong decide whose life is worthy of living.  The criteria at the death camps was the ability to work.  If you were not fit for work, you were immediately sent to the crematorium.  The only exception to this rule was if you fit a criteria for medical experimentation such as having a physical deformity.

We may not have pictures, but there is a holocaust of the deformed, the handicapped and the "unsuitable" that goes on every day in our country.  We just don't want to be reminded .  May we never lose sight of the depravity that follows when a society allows one human being to decide whether the life of another is worthy of living.

(h/t Powerline)