THERE IS an apocryphal story of a man in Nazi Germany who did nothing the night when he heard the stomping of the storm troopers’ jack-boots and the cries of the Jews they had come to persecute. He excused his passivity by explaining, “After all, I am not a Jew.”
He remained a noninterventionist when they came for the Catholics, and then again when they came to drag the gypsies away to the concentration camps. On the former occasion, he explained, “After all, I am not a Catholic,” and on the latter, “I am not a gypsy.”
The night the storm troopers came for him, he complained that when he cried out, nobody came to help him.
If we are not there for others, who will be there for us?