Whilst in Poland, Debra and I felt duty bound to bear witness to the suffering of the victims of Auschwitz/Birkenau. These are a few of the photos I took.
These were not “just” death and slave labor camps: They were designed for the systemic torture of helpless people. Utter insanity.
I won’t even attempt to describe the experience of seeing the bales human hair sheered from hundreds of thousands of murdered women before they were cremated, of the tens of thousands of shoes and toiletry items stolen from victims during the “sorting” process, or the horror of the starvation cells, the standing cells, the gibbets, the shooting wall, or of standing in a gas chamber where thousands of people perished, or the shock upon catching the first glimpse of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate at Auschwitz or that awful red brick building that stands astride the train tracks at Birkenau built to allow genocide bureaucrats to observe the sorting of human cargo.
Evil is real. Auschwitz proves it. And yet...even amidst the worst of which human beings are capable, even there, one still can find flickering evidence of true goodness. Suddenly, unexpectedly, there was the starvation cell in which Fr. Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to die in place of a man with a family, who we were told, survived the Holocaust as a result of Kolbe’s sacrifice.
Seeing Auschwitz/Birkenau was one of the most harrowing and anguishing experiences of my life. It is inexpressibly painful, but if you are ever near Krakow, please go. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to them. Never again!
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