~"Where do we go to escape the end of the world?"
I know I haven't written anything about anything yet, so it may seem odd that I am starting with this, but Auschwitz is still at the front of my mind and I feel like I need to start here. I will post about teaching and youth events and all the awesome things that happened in the Czech Republic some other time.
I honestly cannot convey the emotions that Auschwitz invokes, but I don't think that it is entirely necessary to do so for me to make my points. This is a can of worms, no doubt. I just want people to think about things that have been forgotten. I apologize in advance because my thoughts on the matter are all one big conglomerate in my head and it is very hard to get everything out in any particular order that makes sense. I will try to make my thoughts and sights available as they happened and then talk about what I took away from the experience.
The first thing that I thought as I walked through the infamous gate with the words "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" stamped overhead was, "This is a bad place." The air is heavy and it feels like death. There is no other way to describe it. Even more disconcerting was later when the same feeling hung over Birkenau, a wide open field with only low structures. The air felt thick to breathe. Some of Auschwitz I's buildings have been converted to a museum, so most of the two hours that we spent there were spent going in and out of these buildings. The first few of these had multiple placards with information about the camp, but interspersed were glass cases with artifacts from the forties. There was an urn serving as a monument for the people murdered at the camp. There were cases thirty feet long, ten feet deep, and ten feet tall filled with shoes, cases with luggage, cases with pots and pans, cases with children's shoes and dolls and toys. There was a case with all the prosthetic limbs, crutches, etc. confiscated from those with need of them. We were told that anyone handicapped and everyone who could not work (excluding Jews) were immediately taken and killed. Probably the worst of the displays was a case spanning the entire room that was filled with human hair cut from the prisoners as they were processed. After this we were taken outside and shown the firing wall where prisoners were executed. The building next to this wall also served as the camp's prison building. A legend as we walked into the basement informed us of the common causes of death for the people kept in these rooms. Some of the cells were the size of the desk I am typing this on. Into these were dropped four people from above. They would die of suffocation overnight. The much more common cause of death was starvation in the majority of the cells. Following the tour of this building we walked across the camp to the original gas chamber and crematorium. We walked in and out of a room which hundreds of thousands of people only entered, thinking they were going to take a shower to be disinfected. This concluded the first part of the tour and we walked back to the visitors' center to travel to Birkenau. The second part of the camp was built with purpose rather than the repurposed barracks that made up Auschwitz I. The purposes were limited to mass housing and mass killing. The gas chambers and crematoriums at this camp were all destroyed before the Allies arrived, but seeing the rubble was quite enough.
I think I am going to leave it there for the description; there are a thousand other places you can read about the camp. There are three things I want to mention that were hitting me while I was there, or have hit me since. I had twisted my ankle pretty badly a few days before playing soccer with the gypsy boys. Another girl on the trip had hurt her foot as well. We got the opportunity to talk on the flight back to the U.S. As we were both walking around, we were compelled to let ourselves keep hurting. The thought crossed both of our minds that we would let someone cut off our injured feet if it could have saved just one person. I was thinking about that and the end of Schindler's List and realized how selfish we can be even when we are discussing sacrifice. The thought should not be, "I have to give this up." It should be, "Why didn't I give up more?" That is the place from which the ability to serve others comes.
The next thing that struck me was a reaction to a normal Christian reaction to hardship. The "God had a purpose" rationale is far too over-used in situations like this. Don't mistake me, though. That is absolutely true. Unfortunately, this statement has become a vehicle of neglect for many people. God wept for these people, for infinitely longer than anyone on earth can. That does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that we should not grieve and weep for them. On the contrary, if we truly claim to desire God's character to be our own, how can we dismiss his sympathy?
Lastly, people tend to move past the Holocaust and say, "Genocide is happening every day in Africa. We need to focus on that." Again, I agree wholeheartedly. There are some big differences though (at least in my opinion). I think they are best illustrated in the character of Adolf Hitler. This was a man who is arguably "the best communicator in the history of the world" (thanks Britt). He was able to convince the large majority of a society to follow him in a pursuit of perfection here on earth by the destruction of an entire race. This of course was not just any race, but the Jewish race, God's chosen people. There is just something innately spiritual about that course of events than we cannot escape from. I don't have any idea what it is, but I know it's there.
Anyway, those are just a few of the ridiculous number of things I have been thinking about since I got back. More to come.
