The Price of Silence in the Face of Injustice

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.

This version of a well known poem by Rev. Martin Niemoller (taken from TIME Magazine, Aug 28, 1989) is one of many slightly different versions. The author of the poem is often not mentioned, but I think it is important to note the words come from a man who declared that he “would rather burn his church to the ground, than to preach the Nazi trinity of ‘race, blood, and soil.’”
Niemoller’s position in the church and influential friends protected him until 1937. Eventually, he was arrested for sedition. He was found guilty, but initially only given only a suspended sentence. He was almost immediately re-arrested on Hitler’s direct orders. From then until the end of World War II, he was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps where he narrowly escaped execution.