A blog post by Emily Rolla, Spring 2011
Walking up to the gate bearing the infamous phrase, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” I heard a small child wailing. Spooked, I turned around and saw a women walking past with a small child. It was a coincidence, but it certainly set the tone for my experience with Auschwitz. As soon as you stepped onto the grounds, you felt the death looming over the area.
Now, let me just start by saying I’ve always been a bit of a crybaby. I cry at the end of Disney movies. Visiting this place where so many were stripped of their human dignity made it difficult for me to cry. It was so incomprehensibly evil. I couldn’t cry for a large portion of the camp, because I couldn’t process how anyone could be so inhumane to our brothers and sisters.
“Here is where they preformed experiments on women and learned how to sterilize them… Here are cells that had no ventilation and the prisoners slowly suffocated… here are all of the toys of the children that died here…here is the hair of the prisoners they would ship to factories to make rugs for the Germans…” –It was far too much.
I spent the day fasting in preparation of Auschwitz. I complain about being hungry about every two hours, and now I know that I have no right to. There are so many freedoms we take for granted- going to the bathroom whenever we want, for example. It sounds silly or trifling, but you got shot if you tried to use the latrines more than twice a day. In fact, the best job in the camp was cleaning the latrines because they had access to their use. It’s amazing. We have the gift of life- with TVs and computers and fast food and convenience. They had no sense of what “convenience” was because they didn’t care about their own appetites so much as just surviving.
I have been to the Holocaust Museum in D.C., but that cannot prepare you for what you see here. You are not just looking at artifacts, removed from the conditions of others- you are staring people in the face. You can see them form lines, you can hear them scream, you can feel them clawing for air in the gas chambers. You see the black smoke. You are staring evil in the face, and it’s too much to handle. As it was said in the movie we watched on the way to Poland, “When evil is only imagined, you can live with it. But when it is manifest, before your eyes, there is no way out.”
How many evils are we living with? Abortion is still legal in our country. Human trafficking continues. Poverty eats away at the dignity of our fellow human brothers and sisters. Why do we feel so uncomfortable when we see someone begging for food? As Christians, we know we are obliged to help them, and we are denying our conscience when we don’t. We know that person deserves to be treated with respect and dignity, but we walk on the other side of the road and pretend they don’t exist. It is those who remain passive and silent who perpetuate indignities.
“When it is manifest, there is no way out.” Imagine that you witnessed an abortion. Imagine that you were the one who was homeless and starving. Imagine that you were forced to sell yourself, just to survive. Would you fight, or do nothing? How much despair would you feel when no one came to help you? How much doubt in God would you have, when someone created in His likeness is the reason you are suffering and those claiming to love Him do nothing?
We tend to put a wall up when we hear about atrocities, saying, “Oh, that’s so sad,” and then return to our daily activities and maybe say a prayer and forget about it later on.
The silence here- the silence was deafening. It wasn’t the silence of the prisoners, though. The indignity shown throughout the history of mankind was crying out- and it was I who remained silent. My own silence was the loudest I had ever faced- silence for the sake of convenience, something these victims had no concept of. It wasn’t convenient to go pray outside the clinic in the cold. It wasn’t convenient to drive down to the soup kitchen. It wasn’t convenient to love. It wasn’t convenient to act or speak up.
I hope I will always carry this experience with me, that I may never remain deaf and silent in the midst of the cries of others ever again.
No comments:
Post a Comment