The Price for Silence (48" x 36")

The Price for SilenceOr "The Chickens Always Come Home to Roost."

Docent Guide

The painting deals with the obvious consequences of inaction. The "price for silence" is loss of one's own rights, almost in a mechanistic way as visually described by a machine taking away rights from the Jews and then from the Germans. One of the best commentaries on this was by  Martin Niemoller (1892-1984):

First they came for the Communists,
  and I didn't speak up,
    because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
  and I didn't speak up,
    because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
  and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
  and by that time there was no one
    left to speak up for me.

Niemoller also declared that he "would rather burn his church to the ground, than to preach the Nazi trinity of 'race, blood, and soil.'"

Niemoller, however, also was tainted. He had been a U-boat captain in WW I prior to becoming a pastor. And he supported Hitler prior to his taking power. Indeed, initially the Nazi press held him up as a model... for his service in WW I. [Newsweek, July 10, 1937, pg 32]

But Niemoller broke very early with the Nazis. In 1933, he organized the Pastor's Emergency League to protect Lutheran pastors from the police. In 1934, he was one of the leading organizers at the Barmen Synod and Declaration, which produced the theological basis for the Confessing Church, which despite its persecution became an enduring symbol of German resistance to Hitler.  At one point he declared that it was impossible to "point to the German [Luther] without pointing to the Jew [Christ] to which he pointed to." [from Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict]

Rev. Martin Niemoller was protected until 1937 by both the foreign press and influential friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he preached. Eventually, he was arrested for treason. Perhaps due to foreign pressure, he was found guilty, but initially given only a suspended sentence. He was however then almost immediately re-arrested on Hitler's direct orders. From then on until the end of WW II, he was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Near the end of the war, he narrowly escaped execution in both Sachsenhausen and Dachau Concentration camps.

For more on Niemoller, see web site: Who Was Martin Niemoller?