This blog is a little hard to write, but I think it is worth writing and sharing. There also won’t be any pictures.
On a cloudy and somewhat drizzly Sunday morning, six squadmates and I loaded up in a car and took the 2-hour drive from Krakow, Poland to the place that has shaped much of Europe, the culture, and, honestly, the world. It’s something my grandparents had memories of and shaped how all future generations grew up. That morning we went to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
When we arrived on our weekend trip to Krakow, a few of my teammates said that they wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I was not so sure. I didn’t know if I could emotionally deal with the things I would see in Auschwitz. We had been to the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and I had to step out because I simply couldn’t take it. I literally felt sick and thought Auschwitz would be just the same.
I mulled it over for the weekend and asked my parents and my brother, Eric, if they would go and why. With a sense of peace after a good amount of prayer, I decided to go. So, on that appropriately drizzly and cold Sunday morning, we drove up to Auschwitz, bought tickets for the English-speaking tour, and got breakfast while we waited the few hours until the tour.
Something I’ve noticed over the years about my walk with God and why I was apprehensive to go to Auschwitz was that the closer I am walking with Him, the higher my empathy level goes. I start to love and hate what He does and start to feel the sorrow and compassion He does for those people. I begin to truly love people and have God’s heart for them. It is an excellent indicator of how closely I am walking with Him.
These past months on the Race have marked some of the closest months I have had with God in my life so I had a good suspicion that I would be an emotional wreck in Auschwitz. I was not wrong.
We put on our headsets and then walked into the first concentration camp. The first thing that struck me was how different it was from the Killing Fields. The Killing Fields was a hodgepodge of places where rough buildings had once stood in a field. Auschwitz, though, was well preserved, clean, and orderly. It seemed a lot more dignified (if you can use a word like that for something as atrocious as this) than the Killing Fields. Neatly laid out buildings. Wide walkways. Evenly spaced lamp posts and trees. All of these things magnified and emphasized how systematic, heartless, and impersonal the Nazi’s selective eradication was.
Because of the order, it didn’t hit me until we got to a certain portion of our tour: the children portion. God has called me into Youth Ministry, and I even have a degree in Youth Ministry. I have a heart for children so coming to the part when they explained what had happened to pregnant women and children in general at the camp broke my heart. I saw the faces in pictures, and the silent tears began to fall.
They got worse as I walked. The orderliness bore into me harder and harder as a looked at how systematic it all was. Heartbeat after heartbeat, tear after tear, it got stronger. I took out my ear buds so I couldn’t hear it anymore because I couldn’t handle it. As we got towards the back of this building, we came to a room where they had things they had collected from people as they were processed into the camp and stripped away their identity. I knew it was coming so when the rest of my group walked in, I slipped out the door and sat on the steps of another building, simply letting the tears fall. As I sat there, my group came out and went into the next building, but still, I sat there weeping for these people. They had come here under the pretense that they were going to have a better life there with good jobs and money. I imagined all the emotions that they would have gone through as the grasp of what was happening took hold of them as belongings and families were taken apart never to see each other again. So much hope turned to so many gut-wrenching, horrific emotions.
As I sat there, some people looked at me but not many because we all knew how heavy it is. One woman slipped out of the same building and silently wiped her tears as I did. We shared a quick acknowledging glance and continued in our own thoughts.
As I sat there, I saw the bravest people that I encountered while I was there. Hasidic Jews with their large hats, curled hair, and long beards. I sat there for a long time watching them. There was an older couple with them who surely was old enough to remember the things that happened here. They wept and prayed quietly. I broke inside realizing that they must have known, or known of, people who had died here. So much hurt as I took the time to even think about walking in their shoes. Not only the hurts of the Jews but also well over 730,000 people who did not fit the Aryan-race ideal set out by the Nazis. So many shoes from so many backgrounds.
The tour continued, and I slipped in and out of the talks as I could handle it. As the tour came to a close at the main extermination camp, the tour guide thanked us for taking the time to come and take in what had happened. She said that she showed it to people so that the world may never forget what happened but also so that my generation would have a glimpse of what shaped their culture and the world.
I don’t have a nice way to wrap this up because there isn’t a way to wrap Auschwitz up nicely. That day I started to understand this culture. I started to feel for those people and the older people that we had been ministering to that month. I began to grasp a tiny part of who they were. It gave me more respect and love for them than I once had. As hard as it was, God used it to show me how His heart broke for these people and the things done. It broke my heart, but I know that He used it to give me a passion for these people that I would not have had. I feel like we can never truly minister to anyone until we understand where they’ve been. I also think that is why God loves us like no one else because He not only intimately knows the details of our past but also our future.
