One year ago I stood staring up at the ominous black letters looming over me, spelling words that countless people had passed under into their death. Ironic.
Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Will Set You Free
Auschwitz-Birkenau. The largest concentration camp complex utilized during the Holocaust. I stood in a gas chamber. I saw piles and piles of hair cut from over one million victims murdered there. I heard stories of dehuminization and death. These are not things your mind can really comprehend.
A part of my brain will forever be haunted by that day. The images ingraned in my mind are far more vivid than the images held by my camera.
And the stories.
Prisoners stuffed into boxcars for days without food or water. Separation from family, stripped of every earthly possesion.Treated worse than cattle headed for slaughter.
Those not killed immediately faced the desctruction of their humanity. Starved. Abused. Dehumanized. To be a rat in Birkenau was to be better off than a human.
All photos taken from here. Although I have seen everything in these photos, my pictures were not very good.
A year later I again stood gazing upward, this time at a monument in Cambodia made of over 5,000 human skulls and bones. I touched a tree against which babies were smashed and killed. While birds sang and workers chopped down coconuts, I stood on ground where 17,000 people were killed in under 5 years during the Khmer Rouge.
Choenug Ek. The most famous of 20,000 mass grave sites throughout Cambodia, holding the remains of one fourth of the population of the country at the time of their death.
Later I wandered through abandoned rooms, furnished only with rusted metal bed frames and blurry black and white photographs of the victims that once occupied them. I faltered over torture devices, barely able to reach out and brush them with my fingers. I stared into the eyes of men, women and children who must have known that they were to die shortly after they were photographed. "I'm so sorry you had to die", I whispered to one.
Tuol Sleng (S-21). Prisoners in S-21, a school turned extermination center, were brutally tortured and forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. As many as 30,000 were held at Tuol Sleng. There were 7 survivors.
"To destroy you is no loss; to preserve you is no gain."
And now there is one thing that sticks in my mind above all the rest.
It's not hatred of Hitler or Pol Pot, the leaders of the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge. It's not horror at all of the death. It's this: human depravity and God's grace.
Maybe you would never lead a country into the destruction of it's people. But if your family depended on you for survival, would you join the side in control, the one with all the food and some small promises of protection? Or would you choose torture and death? Would you choose to kill or be killed?
What if you or I were born in a different time, a different place, with different influences; what if we were taught different ideologies than the ones we were, with minds that work differently than ours, with different life experiences. With different combinations of all of these things that make us unique individuals, we would be just as capable of commiting unspeakable attrocities. Even today, if your life was different, you might be a man buying a prostitute in Thailand, a murderous street kid in Honduras, or a radical rebel leader with an army of children in Uganda. Maybe there are truly good people out there, the kind that couldn't hurt a fly. But only because God made them that way.
Do you know why you are who you are?
God's grace.
