Remembrance

A few weeks ago the world watched as about three hundred elderly people visited the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous death camp of World War II. They were joined by several thousand others to commemorate the 70th anniversary of their liberation from this hellish place. 

We visited this place when we were in Europe. It is unforgettable. And it is difficult for me to find words to adequately describe what it represents in human history.

We spent two nights in Krakow, Poland, in the old section, and had planned to walk the city as has become our custom. It really is the best way to appreciate the old buildings and cobblestone streets, the parks and markets. So we set out from our hotel only to find that it is both Jewish Shabbot and All Saint's Day, a day of remembrance so significant here that all shops and tourist sites are closed. Last night the cemeteries shimmered with candles, a luminous sight. Today men in sober black suits and women in long black skirts with dark stockings carry flowers to place next to the candles on the graves.

The places we planned to walk to are closed, and the city is more spread out than we thought. So we hire a young woman, a tour guide with an electric car slightly larger than a golf cart, to show us the city. Her English is good, with a throaty, eastern European quality.

This city reeks of the Holocaust, even after seventy years. As we walk we find memorials - monuments and wall plaques and signs - everywhere. They mostly bear a date and a list of names, in memory of those who had been summarily executed on that spot simply for being Jews. Sidewalks and streets and walls feel like hallowed ground. When we speak, we do so quietly.

She takes us to the Jewish Quarter, Kazimierz, which had been the center of Jewish life for centuries until the second world war. 

"Some of these buildings are still vacant," she tells us as we crane our necks to look up from our seats in the tiny vehicle. "They have not yet found descendants of the owners so they cannot sell them." Not yet meaning since The War.

She calls our attention to a large group of people walking two-by-two on the sidewalk. 

"You notice the Jewish tour groups?" she asks. "They always stay together and they always bring their own guards."

We scrutinize the group. And yes, we see burley men in dark suits gazing up at the tall buildings surrounding the group, at cars going by...looking everywhere but at the site their tour guide is describing.

I lean forward towards the driver. "Do they have reason to be afraid?" I ask.

"No," she replies. I weigh her response against what I am seeing and I wonder...

She takes us past Schindler's Factory, which has become an historic icon and museum since Stephen Spielberg's movie was produced. We are sad that it, too, is closed today.

She turns down another street and we see a fragment of the wall that had surrounded the Jewish Ghetto. When Jewish residents of Krakow were forcibly removed from their homes, they came here, thousands and thousands crowded into the space of four long walls. The fortunate ones made it onto Schindler's 'list' as workers in his factory. From there they would be secreted out of the country to safer lands. He is credited with saving as many as 1200 people.

I look at the wall, with its unique rounded lines. 

"When the Germans built the ghetto, they made the wall in the shape of the tombstones used by Jews in their cemeteries. It was a message to them as they entered," she says, and I am silent. I can think of no words that would be adequate when faced with such blatant malevolence.

It had occurred at Auschwitz-Birkenau as well (the next stop for Jews who had been forced into the ghetto), this speechlessness in the face of sheer wickedness. We mostly walked around the death camp in silence, and when we did speak to one another it was never much more than a brief whisper. We joined a tour and walked under a lie forged in wrought iron: Arbeit Macht Frei. Work did not set anyone free in this accursed place.

I had read books and seen photos. My father had a book that he kept hidden from us kids. One day when an opportunity presented itself, I pulled it out from under a pile of linens and took a look.

I saw pictures of human skeletons - hundreds stacked open-eyed and naked in piles, others miraculously still alive, clothed in striped pajamas that hung from their bones. The captions were in Dutch and it would be years before I learned the meaning of these photos.

We took the tour and all I could think is how could this happen? Oskar Schindler knew what was going on. How could a whole city turn their back on such evil and still sleep at night? What did they think was happening in this camp with trainloads arriving full, day and night, and leaving empty every time? Didn't they smell the stench of burning flesh in the very air they breathed?

Our tour guide comments that her country, Poland, is surround by three bad countries: Germany, Ukraine, and Russia. She said Putin is crazy (to which I have to agree), and Ukraine needs to fight its own battles, like Poland did, to achieve its independence. She says we are lucky in America because we have no neighboring enemies and two oceans to surround us. Her words make me feel less secure somehow, and I look around at the empty streets and old, run-down buildings marked with graffiti. She has made me see her city through her eyes rather than the eyes of a tourist. I am glad to return to the hotel.

All day I think: what would I have done? And I wonder: how can something like this be forgiven?

Corrie Ten Boom, author of The Hiding Place, experienced - and survived - a camp such as Auschwitz. She lost both her father and sister during that dark era.  So when she talks about forgiveness, I listen.

"Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart," she wrote.

So I watched the recent news report, the video of the elderly remnant returning to the place of their worst nightmares. Most were but children during that experience and I wonder how the horrors of Auschwitz shaped their lives. I understand their desire that this period of dark evil not be forgotten, for surely we humans are doomed to repeat the things we refuse to remember and repent of.

But I look at these who survived and they give me courage somehow. I hope that they have found the ability to let go of bitterness and pain and anger and now sleep peacefully at night. And I ponder these words, also from Corrie Ten Boom, who had lived them:

You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have.