Auschwitz

Today the world commemorates the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camps in Oswiecim, Poland.

I sit here trying to define the feeling that weighs heavy on my heart, but I can't find the right words. In 1997, I went with a group on a missions trip to Poland, and we visited Auschwitz--and Treblinka on another day. Auschwitz was the German name for the town of Oswiecim, where the barracks for the Polish Army was converted into a concentration camp in 1940. Later, when the ovens at Auschwitz were unable to keep up with the demand, the Germans built another camp at Birkenau, practically next door. Birkenau, sometimes called Auschwitz II, was designed for efficiency in the killing and burning of bodies.

Our group entered Auschwitz on a morning that was pouring rain, and it seemed right that it was. The hardest part of the visit was all of it. The Nazis who had run the camp saved everything of value from their victims. It was all sorted: shoes, luggage, kitchen items, crutches and prosthetics, and hair. Before the Russians liberated the camp, all these sorted items were shipped back to Germany, where the German citizens were told that the other European countries had donated these items to the cause. The human hair was used in making stiff fabric, which was then given to the Germans.

The Nazis had tried to destroy the evidence of what they were doing at Auschwitz (as they had successfully destroyed Treblinka), but the Russians came too quickly. So the museum still has display cases of the sorted items that were awaiting shipping when the soldiers arrived. One of the members of our group wore a leg brace and used a cane from having had polio when she was young. The display case of the prosthetics and medical devices were a vivid reminder that had she been living in Poland at the time, she would likely have "donated" her leg brace to the Nazis. And in the display case of hair, a thick dark braid lay atop the other hair. It took my breath away, because I wore my hair in a braid on that trip.

In another part of the musum is a piece of art that captures the essence of what the victims experienced there. It speaks for itself.

The biggest lesson I took from this visit to Auschwitz is one I don't hear very often when people speak of the Holocaust: Deep in the heart of each one of us lies the capacity to commit this kind of atrocity. There was nothing special about the Germans that made only them capable of Auschwitz. Indeed, proof of the universality of evil has shown itself in Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union, and countless other places and times. We are, none of us, immune. It is the way we are shaped by our upbringing, by society's pressures, and ultimately by the grace of God, that we are able to rise above evil and do good with our lives.

May we always remember what was done at Auschwitz, and may that remembrance spur us to prevent its happening again.