One of the most profound experiences in my life so far dealt with hate, it was the day that I visited a concentration camp.
It was the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. It was a Nazi concentration camp that held the opponents of the Nazis including Jews, Catholics, Poles, and it also served as a prisoner of war camp holding Soviet soldiers.
The moment that I walked through its gate, I felt the hate, the pain, the suffering. I had never experienced anything like it in my life and so far still haven’t. I knew what had happened there, but I did not expect that much hate in the air, it was palpable. The countless victims that died there that didn’t deserve what happened to them.
In the park there was a great obelisk on the steps of the obelisk was a rose that someone had laid there. It was a yellow rose that was all shriveled and dried. I just thought of how it was a symbol of the place, the rose for love for all that died, shriveld for all the pain and suffering and I am sure that many of those held here was the same shrivle likeness before they past away.
One of the prisoners that died there is one of the most famous of all the Jewish Holocaust victims. Take a guess?
If you said Anne Frank you are right. That’s right she was not at Auschwitz like many might think though that is where her father was sent. Anne and her older sister where at Bergen-Belsen till their death. There is a headstone for them though nowhere near where the bodies are. Who knows where they are.
I also went in to the museum at the park. While it didn’t have the same feeling as the rest of the camp, the pictures of what happened there was just horrific, I had already been to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. but till you see the pictures at the place where it happened and feel the hate and pain and suffering you don’t realize what it was really like.
This was such an amazing experience.
Till you have seen where something happened it is almost like a story just one that you can’t realize the trueness but once you feel all that happened, that is when you realize how it was.
In some ways, I think about how it’s like experiencing God in you. Once you truly feel him in all of you. You realize the truth of it and no one can take that from you, not even the devil himself, the epitome of hate.
The Yellow Rose.
