Day 39 Why go there?

If you have followed our blog you may be wondering why we made such a rapid and extensive detour east to Poland. The reason of course was that we wanted to visit a little town near Krakow called Oswiecim. After a much longer 4.5 hour train trip than we planned (don’t ask) we arrived at Krakow station about 10.30am. After securing our packs in a day locker we boarded a train to Oswiecim at 11am, which arrived at 12.30pm. With no signage but some help from locals we walked about 20 minutes to find the place we came to Poland to visit, the former Nazi Concentration and Death Camp, Auschwitz. We cannot in a short blog really explain the impact of this day but let us try by answering three short questions.

Why did we want to visit Auschwitz? I guess we always felt we had too! Having read about the Holocaust, having thought about the Holocaust, and recognising that somewhere between 1 and 1.6 million people died at Auschwitz we both felt we had to make the effort to see with our own eyes.

What was it like? Well in short it was so much worse than we could ever have imagined. To see authentic photos of the arrival of trains full of people, being treated worse than cattle, was bad enough. To walk past preserved and massive piles of human hair, eyeglasses, shoes, toothbrushes and suitcases made us confront the humanity and enormity of the crimes. To see and walk through the first gas chamber and to confront the efficiency and horror of senseless mass execution was numbing. But all that was nothing compared to our visit to Auschwitz II ( Birkenhau) 3kms up the road. This camp, which housed 300,000 people at one time, was indescribable. The living conditions in this camp made Auschwitz 1 look almost bearable. The day ended with a visit to the ruins of gas chambers and crematoriums 2 and 3, where maybe a million were exterminated often within an hour of stepping off a railway car. Again our emotions were deeply affected as we considered systematically efficient, utterly senseless, evil stupidity.

What did it do for us spiritually? Of course such suffering is always a challenge to any person of faith. But somehow the greater question that we faced was the problem of human evil. How is it that a man like Hess can run such a death camp and then go home (right next door) and play with his children. Indeed you could not hang out the washing from his home without a view of the smoke from the crematorium. Seeing Auschwitz would challenge anyone’s worldview. However any worldview that does not seriously address human evil or believes all humans are basically good is left in tatters.
In the face of such evil we need a faith that addresses concepts such as sin, judgment, redemption, forgiveness and hope.

We arrived back at about 8.30pm to another hostel called Nathan’s Villa where the hot water was cold and the room was rather ordinary. After 8 hours on rural trains, little food and substandard accommodation we thought we had had a tough day. However that was nothing compared to the plight of the Jews, Gypsies, Russian POWs, intellectuals, priests, homosexuals and Jehovah Witnesses (and many more) who had lived and died at Auschwitz.