#402 3 Reflections after Visiting Auschwitz

I spent several days last week touring Holocaust sites in Poland with a group from Christians United for Israel. Especially since Oct. 7th and the concerning rise of antisemitism in the US, Holocaust sites such as Auschwitz are a somber and moving reminder of hatred and murder on an industrialized scale and the remarkable resilience of the Jewish people. Many are familiar with the scale of the Holocaust, and it is difficult to grasp the murder of 6 million human beings. A few specific stories helped highlight the deep evil and horror of what happened, including:

• -the graves of appr. 800 children in the Buczyna forest, dropped from truck beds (while alive) into a mass grave and killed with grenades and machine guns. This was in keeping with Hitler’s command to “take care of the children” first, and approximately 1.5 million of the victims of the Holocaust were children.
• a bathtub in a private bath built by a Nazi officer in the crematorium at the Majdanek death camp, meaning he heated his water with the flames fueled by the bodies of victims.
• allied troops finding 2 tons of human hair cut from victims for use in German industry, meaning the hair of at least 40,000 women. Some was still in braids in the display at Auschwitz.
• picture taken by the Germans at Birkenau to prove the efficiency of the “final solution”–showing confused children and concerned mothers with just minutes to live as they are unknowingly sent to the gas chambers.

In the midst of this soul-wrenching evil, there were stories of incredible resilience:

• sewer drains in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw used to smuggle food into and escape from the Warsaw Ghetto.
• Halina Barinbaum, a 13-year old girl firsr sent to Majdanek and then Auschwitz. Her mother, father, and brothers were all killed; but she survived, moved to Israel, married, and eventually returned to Majdanek to tell her story and find closure.
• a copy of the moonscape drawing of Peter Gentz, a 14-year old Holocaust victim, has now been carried twice into space.
• our guide was a relative of a Holocaust survivor, and he routinely guides Israeli army units in tours in Poland. The nation of Israel exists despite Hitler’s efforts.

As Justice Jackson said so well in his opening statement at the Nuremberg trials, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”