A picture in a World War II history book will always haunt me. It is not of D-Day or of our assault on Iwo Jima. It is a picture of German civilians being forced by advancing American soldiers to view the remains of the bodies of Jewish women who had starved during a 300-mile march forced upon them by the retreating Nazis.

The German civilians walk by, glance, then look away from the upturned faces of the dead.

When residents of Weimar, Germany, were forced to tour nearby Buchenwald, they said they did not know of the horrors that existed in the Nazi extermination camp. The stench of death and the odor from the crematories covered the countryside, but the residents insisted they did not know.

They did not know.

We know about abortion, don't we? But did you know that outfits like Planned Parenthood, under the guise of helpfulness and "prevention" and all sorts of alluring Web pages, set a record last year by aborting 264,943 babies - 5,095 children a week? Did you know that the womb is the most dangerous place in the world for human life? It is a business, this killing of babies.

"Babies," by the way, is a word Planned Parenthood doesn't use.

I understand why they don't. You see, we are not to recognize what is happening. If we were to truly recognize the utter depravity of it all, we would surely gasp and choke, and try to convince ourselves we did not know, we couldn't have known.

But we do know - we just prefer to look away.

Tom Tock

Dwight