January 27 is when many countries mark Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day 80 years ago, the Soviet Union liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in Poland en route to Germany. Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and author of the Holocaust memoir Night, was a prisoner in Auschwitz. Could the Holocaust have been prevented? Night offers insight into that haunting question.

The memoir’s first page introduces Moishe, a poor Jew from Wiesel’s hometown of Sighet, Romania. During World War ii, Adolf Hitler gave the territory around Sighet to Hungary, and in 1942, Hungarian police shipped Moishe, who lacked proper documents, off with other foreign Jews in a cattle car for the Gestapo to murder. Moishe was forced to dig his own grave; then he was shot in the leg and left for dead. He survived, returned to Sighet, and warned people what the Germans were doing. Some thought he wanted attention. Others thought he had gone insane. Everyone, including Wiesel, ignored his warning.

By 1944, the situation in Eastern Europe was horrendous, and Wiesel considered fleeing. Hungary’s monarchist government was still granting Jews exit permits to travel to British Palestine.

“I had asked my father to sell everything, to liquidate everything, and to leave,” Wiesel wrote. But young Elie’s concerns were brushed off.

Later that year, the fascists overthrew the monarchists. Hungary’s new leaders treated Jews far worse than the old regime. “Yet we were still not worried,” Wiesel wrote. “Of course we had heard of the fascists, but it was all in the abstract. It meant nothing more to us than a change of ministry.”

Nazi Germany sent troops to consolidate fascist power. Life was uncomfortable, unfair, dangerous. Yet still, many Jews endured, adapted and shrugged off the danger. Wiesel summarized their sentiments: The Germans will not come this far. They will stay in Budapest. For strategic reasons, for political reasons. Finally the Germans entered Sighet.

The Jews carried on. “The Germans were already in our town,” Wiesel wrote, “the fascists were already in power, the verdict was already out—and the Jews of Sighet were still smiling.”

This wouldn’t last long. The authorities soon arrested the Jewish community’s leaders, confiscated valuables, and stuffed the Jews into ghettos. Even still there was a chance of escape: The ghetto was unguarded. “One could enter and leave as one pleased,” Wiesel wrote.

Maria, the former maid of the Wiesels, came and begged the family to let her hide them in her village. Wiesel’s parents stayed put. So did Elie. So did his sisters.

Then the day came. The fascists forced the Wiesel family and other Jews out of the ghetto and into cattle cars. The train departed for Auschwitz.

Only Elie survived.

The Jews of Sighet could have escaped—before Moishe’s warning, before the exit permits stopped, before the fascists took over Budapest, before the Germans came, before the ghetto was guarded—before hateful men sent them, their families and their people into mass murder factories. Going to a death camp was not a foregone conclusion. Yet so many of them ignored every single opportunity.

But Wiesel didn’t write Night for his generation. He wrote it “[f]or the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow.” He wrote that he did not want his past to become their future.

We too are living in a prelude to worldwide cataclysm.

Large nations with indescribable weapons and deep hatreds are maneuvering for and outright threatening to plunge the world into a global nuclear war. Many Western governments are becoming dysfunctional, leaderless or totalitarian. The pillars of our comparatively stable world order are being dismantled one by one.

Like the Jews of Sighet, we are all staring tribulation in the eye. And even if we live cushy lives right now, even if we think the world’s geopolitical turmoil is too far away to impact us, we are not out of reach from the coming global storm.

God reveals Himself as the ultimate Authority over everything that happens on the planet (e.g. Daniel 2:21; 4:17). Moreover, He promises not to let circumstances overwhelm His true followers (1 Corinthians 10:13). But He only promises protection to those who humbly turn to Him in repentance and faith (Isaiah 59:1-2).

“All mankind has rebelled against, rejected and turned from God and His ways!” the late theologian Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in The United States and Britain in Prophecy. “There can never be peace on Earth until all nations will have been turned to God and His ways, ruled by His supreme government! All mankind, right now, is caught in the vortex of this swiftly accelerating crisis marking utter destruction of this world’s man-built, Satan-inspired civilization.”

Our civilization plunging into violence and chaos is a matter of when, not if. This time, no government emigration certificate provides a way of escape. The only place of protection is with God. But He will only send so many warnings before disaster strikes.

Jesus Christ said in John 9:4: “I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work” (New King James Version). This world is heading toward the blackest night ever, a time that Jesus Himself prophesied as “great tribulation” (Matthew 24:21-22). There is only so much daylight left to make a decision. “But,” as Mr. Armstrong wrote, “you must make your own decision—and to neglect doing so is to have made the wrong decision!”

What will your decision be?