A pastor, who shall remain nameless although an excellent person, commiserated with people who were to go to the diocesan convention in Terre Haute, Indiana. The city is not well known as a place for fun and frolic; it is an industrial city bordered roughly by a residential district and the Indiana State University campus on the north side, the Wabash River to the west and suburban retail sprawl to the south. US 41 is the main north-south drag while the old National Road leads east toward Indianapolis.
The city was quiet today. The students at ISU have gone home. The brutal cold snap earlier this week went east and seasonably mild weather under bright, low sunshine replaced it.
My first destination was the CANDLES Holocaust Museum founded by Eva Mozes Kor. In 1944 her family was sent to a ghetto in Romania, and from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. She ended up in Terre Haute because followed her husband, himself liberated from Buchenwald to the city of her husband Michael’s American rescuer and mentor. With fears that “Never Again!” died with most of the Greatest Generation, I hoped to learn how Americans of good will can head off a repeat of the Hitler years. For should America go mad, who would liberate us?
The second destination was the Eugene V. Debs house on the ISU campus, which was closed.
There were some interesting sites and signs on the trip from Lafayette to Terre Haute, and more interesting things to see on the indirect trip back…stay tuned.
The Lafayette Sentinel 