I glanced at my calendar recently and learned that April 18 (this Sunday) is Holocaust Remembrance Day. I asked myself, how could I, a Gentile believer in Christ, honor a nation that has seen the most astounding miracles and horrendous tragedies within the history of mankind? I can offer this, a memory.
I visited Auschwitz the summer of 1994 with two friends, to see with my own eyes the horrors inflicted upon the Jews during a time of insanity. I saw firsthand the evidence: suitcases, eyeglasses, artificial limbs, hair clippings, all stuffed into enormous piles behind glass windows. My stomach twisted. I’d seen enough.
We were told, however, that this Auschwitz was the “tourist” version. “You want the real Auschwitz, you get a cab to AuschwitzII-Birkenau.” I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, but I wanted to somehow wrap my brain around the gravity of Holocaust. There was nothing to fall back on in Birkenau, just the raw silence of the cardboard-thin bunkers, the SS towers, the wire fences, the dead horizon, the angry skies. The earth still moans with the weight of those atrocities.
The worst spot was the crematoriums. I thought they’d be intact, but Hitler panicked towards the end of the war and ordered all evidence be destroyed, albeit hastily. I sat on all the concrete rubble that once was the belly of the beast, and I understood beyond mere textbooks that the Jewish people died gruesome, heart wrenching death at the hands of men who’d lost their own souls.
But there was also this. The Jews were the ones with a clean conscience, and so freedom was in their hears to the very end. The Nazi guards who abused and murdered were the real prisoners of Holocaust, prisoners of their own hatred. I believe, despite what was done to them, the Jews had their freedom. And they had each other. And I traveled all that way to Auschwitz because I think I knew deep inside that the real, unsung heroes of World War II spilled blood on that land.
Timberly Ferguson