Last night before I went to bed I asked God to help me see things from His perspective when I was doing the tour, because I knew I would be seeing some really crazy and awful things. I was expecting for it to be overwhelming, to the point where I couldn't really absorb everything I was seeing.
And that's exactly how it was. It was just surreal. You can't believe these things actually happened, even when you're there and the evidence is right in front of you. I saw so much, but the whole time I felt mostly detached from it, like the reality couldn't sink in.
Auschwitz had three parts total. The tour takes you to two of them (the third part was like a sort of sister work camp that the Nazis destroyed before the liberation by the Soviet army in January 1945, so they don't take you to that site). Auschwitz, the first part, was originally a military base that was converted into a concentration camp in the earlier part of the war. It has all brick buildings (around 30 barracks buildings total) and is the part with the famous gate that says, "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Brings Freedom"). There was bad overcrowding and awful punishments here, but only one prototype gas chamber and crematorium which were converted from an old ammunition bunker. This is the crematorium with the ovens that you see in pictures; it is the only gas chamber/crematorium which was not destroyed by the Nazis before the liberation. All the museum exhibits are here, located inside some of the old barracks, or "blocks." The second part of the camp is Birkenau (hence the full name "Auschwitz-Birkenau"), which was the larger part built a bit later. This was the extermination camp. It is the part with the famous brick gate tower and the railroad tracks. (Sorry for no photos--I'll upload lots once I get back to Hamburg.) This section of Auschwitz was huge, with rows and rows of barracks and five gas chamber/crematorium buildings. All the crematoria are piles of burned rubble now, because the Nazis hurriedly attempted to destroy them before the liberation came, and many of the barracks are gone now too. But there are some brick and a few wooden barracks that are still standing, and we were able to enter them and see how crowded and inhumane the living conditions were. The far end of the railroad tracks, between two of the destroyed crematoria, has a memorial with plaques in over ten different languages.
I think the craziest things I saw were:
- The punishment cells and execution yard in Block 11 of the original camp
- The makeshift gallows where 12 male prisoners were hanged in July 1943 in the original camp
- The giant rows of pit toilets in the latrine at Birkenau--I can't imagine what the stink must have been like!
- The bunk beds in the wooden barracks in Birkenau--the conditions were so cold, crowded, and unsanitary.
- The mug shots of early prisoners, mostly Polish and Hungarian Jews, displayed in the hall of Block 11 (in the earlier days of the camp, identification photos were taken, but later the Nazis switched to tattooing prisoners on the arm)
- The prototype gas chamber and crematorium in the older part of the camp
- The display case full of discarded prosthetics, crutches, braces, and other support devices that had belonged to the disabled people brought to the camp (disabled prisoners were automatic candidates for extermination)
- The gigantic display case, probably 3 yards deep and 20 yards long, piled full of hair cut from female prisoners upon their arrival. The Nazis sold the hair to textile companies who used it to make nets, felt, and stockings.
The hair thing was especially crazy. I just stood there fiddling with the end of my braid and thinking of how all this hair had once been beautiful braids on thousands of women, and all of it had been chopped off. Marni was so impacted by it that later today, when we got back to Kraków, she found a salon (she'd been wanting a haircut for the last week or so) and got her already short hair done in a buzz cut.
All this awfulness, but like I had expected, I was numb. I couldn't shed a tear, or even feel really horrified. It was all just like a weight--the weight of knowing that such terrible things had happened.
As we walked back to the bus, I thought again about what I had prayed last night. How would God have me view all this? And what would He have me do, now that I had seen firsthand evidence of such notorious human cruelty?
Oddly enough, the people I really kept thinking about were the Germans. Maybe it was because I've been living in Germany, falling in love with its cities, getting to know its people. Maybe it was because of Corrie ten Boom's story about how the Nazis had been taught to hate to the point that they could commit such acts of cruelty towards other people. Or maybe it was both. But I just kept thinking: I am living in Germany right now. I know German people--regular civilians who are definitely not Nazis, but who are still lost because they don't know God. So what can I do?
And I realized: Love is the answer.
Yes, it was horrible what happened to the people in the camps, and I think it's really important for us to honor their memory. But all the sorrow in the world can't change what happened then. All we can do is look to the future and decide what we will do with it.
And now is the part where I'm going to get a little crazy on you, but I need to say it.
I'm not saying that I am good at loving other people like I should. I'm not saying I think I can change the whole world by loving others, because I can't. And I'm not saying that "love" in the hippie sense (or in the romantic sense, for that matter) will change the world, because it won't. The ONLY love that will change the world is God's love.
See, God is the only one who knows how to love perfectly. All humanity knows how to do is mess love up, because it's in our nature to mess up. When we are left to our own devices, all kinds of chaos happens--arguments, war, hatred, and even genocide--because we are too messed up to love properly. The Holocaust was just one of a million examples of how bad human nature can get when left to itself.
But God knew humanity couldn't love properly, and so He came up with a "Final Solution" of His own--a solution that was so wonderfully and radically different from the one the Nazis came up with. This was a plan to save mankind from destroying itself entirely.
God sent His Son, Jesus, to earth as a human being to teach mankind how to love. He didn't send Jesus to point a finger and say to the world, "You're so messed up!" No, Jesus came to be an example of how to truly love others. But humanity didn't get it. We got angry with Jesus and put Him on a cross to die a criminal's death, not realizing that we were the ones who deserved the criminal's death for all the times we wronged other people. He could have fought back. He could have avoided death if He had wanted to. But He chose to die--to take our punishment--and sacrificed Himself so mankind would have a chance to escape the punishment we deserved.. That is what God's love looks like: a love that sacrifices itself for others. And it is the only love that will change the messed-up tendencies of the human heart.
Why am I saying all this? Because I believe that one day very soon, there is going to be another world war, and this one will be a lot worse than the last. People talk about keeping another Holocaust from happening, but they don't realize that the Bible talks about a coming war in which the entire world will be involved and in which many more people will die than any war before it. The Bible says also that anyone who hasn't had their hearts changed by Jesus' love will have to face this war and the horrors of it. My heart has been changed by the love of Jesus, but I'm ashamed to say I'm not always totally up front with people about it. So if you've never heard me say it to you in person before, I'm saying it now: I believe that what the Bible says about this coming war, and I believe that Jesus is the only one who can rescue us from it. I'm not saying you have to believe me . . . look at Matthew 24 and 25 and also the book of Revelation if you want to know about this future war. And if you don't believe all this stuff about Jesus' love, read the book of John and just at least see what it has to say. Just check it out and decide for yourself what you think.
I realize that maybe I just freaked some people out or maybe even made them really angry. And if I made you mad with this post and you never want to read my blog again, you don't have to. But after going to Auschwitz today, I was reminded of how fragile life really is and how blinded by lies we all can become. So I feel compelled to say something about God's love, because I thought as I looked back at the gates and barracks of Birkenau and thought, Only His love can save us from that.
And that was when my emotional moment came. I almost got run into by a car in the parking lot because I was trying to not cry in front of everybody.
So what I took away from Auschwitz is: Share God's love with the people in your life, and if you don't know that love, ask God to show it to you and to prove to you that it exists. And don't take anyone or anything around you for granted, because freedom is a privilege!
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