Harper Lee reminds us that “the one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
That truth lives in the story my dad carried with him throughout his life.
His mentor bore a grizzly tattoo on his left arm. A five or six-digit number burned there by the Holocaust. A number meant to reduce a man to inventory. Auschwitz was built to erase names, futures, and conscience itself. Yet that man refused to let the mark finish the job. He lived past the brutality. He worked and he mentored a callow Don Shepley into a long, honest career, and in doing so turned an act of absolute cruelty into a quiet gift. That man molded a young draftsman and mechanical engineer. Giving him a solid foundation in a long railroad career.
That is the part that should stop us today and make us ponder.
Every person murdered by the nazis wasn’t just a victim. They were a teacher not yet met, a mentor not yet given, a kindness not yet passed along. The world didn’t just lose lives...
... it lost generations of guidance, craft, patience, and wisdom.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day isn’t only about remembering how evil looks when conscience is abandoned by the crowd. It is about honoring those who, even after surviving hell, chose to live as proof that conscience still matters, and mourning all the good that never got the chance to happen.
That number on his arm was meant to dehumanize him. Instead, it became a reminder of how much one human life can mean to another.
And that is something no majority gets to vote away.
