Auschwitz: Upon Further Reflection

After some time to reflect more on the Auschwitz experience and also time to talk to the others on the trip, I keep coming back to two different quotes. The first is by Edmund Burke and is one of my favorite all time quotes: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." The second is a quote that is engraved right next to the exit of the Holocaust museum in Washington DC, it is attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoller and goes like this: "They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up." These two quotes just fit the emotions of today perfectly. We have always had good men throughout history, and we have also always had evil men. The question is which is going to triumph in our time? If you are a Christian you know that in the end the Lord wins and ultimately will defeat evil but that does not mean that evil will not have victories along the way. The facts of history show us many times and places where the forces of evil have triumphed over the forces of good. The mass extermination of the Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, and others by Nazi Germany is definitely a time where for a while the forces of evil triumphed.
The two camps at Auschwitz that we visited are a gripping reminder of the fact that there are times when evil triumphs for a period. The first camp at Auschwitz has the sign above the gate that was a cruel joke by the Germans that said basically that "Work brings your Freedom." There were many people who upon arriving at the camp truly did believe that upon entering the camp and working for a while they would receive their freedom. I really wonder how many hours or minutes it took for them to come to the realization that they were not going to become free at this camp. Surrounding the camp was two barbed wire fences separated by a small road. Each of these fences were severely electrified and many folks chose to fling themselves into the fence and be electrocuted rather than face the horrors of the camps on a daily basis.
The deep hatred that was displayed by the Germans towards the Jews and others is overwhelming visible when you visit these two camps. They were both designed for one thing and one thing only, the extermination of human life. The camp at Birkenau is a huge facility and every square inch of that camp was designed to degrade the human life to the point where it was acceptable for those guards to kill the residents of the camp. When you stand in the barracks and you see where these human beings were given 5 seconds at two separate times during the day to do their bodily function, it will blow your mind the inhumane condition that this must have been. When you see these things it makes you wonder why more people were not standing up for these people at the time. I understand that if people had stood up to the Nazi regime they too would find themselves in these camps, but look at the work of folks such as Schindler and his work in the city of Krakow to keep Jews from going to the death camps and you wonder why there weren't more that did the same thing. Dietrich Bonhoeffer sums up silence in the face of evil very succinctly: "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."
I had a huge internal struggle while walking around the two camps with one part saying we need to tear this place down because of what it stood for but then there was another part of me that said we need to keep this place as a reminder of the atrocities that occurred. We must keep these places because if we demolish them they can so easily be written out of our history books within a generation. Then today I see a story in the news that there are some schools in the UK that are dropping the teaching of the Holocaust in their history because it might offend Muslims (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-445979/Teachers-drop-Holocaust-avoid-offending-Muslims.html). This makes my heart hurt because it means it is already starting to happen. How can we as humans sit back and allow this to be taken out of history because it might offend someone. Yeah it isnt exactly the brightest time period in the history of the world but if we do not learn from our history then we are doomed to repeat it. We have seen time and time again that when we do not learn from our mistakes in the past that we will make those mistakes again, there are many many examples of this throughout history. Please stand guard so that we NEVER forget the atrocities of the past whether that be the Holocaust, 9/11, the killing fields of Cambodia, or those committed by dictators such as Pol Pot and General Mao. It is our duty to remember and pass on to the next generation so that our children do not repeat our mistakes.