You don’t “visit” Auschwitz. You don’t willingly enter the site of greatest evil and suffering the planet has held. The darkness is too great.
The only way to make this journey is to discover that goodness is always stronger than evil, and that it takes only one act of goodness to break the death-grip of hell.
At the end of last year my husband and I were invited to join a delegation to visit Auschwitz for the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. Our group was lead by Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of the Mengele Twins group in Auschwitz. The subjects of heinous medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’, Eva and her sister Miriam survived until the liberation in January 1945, and began the long odyssey of the rest of their lives.
But our delegation would be very different from other groups there for the official ceremonies. The slogan “never forgive, never forget” has been used in events remembering the holocaust. Our delegation will never forget, but we did learn about forgiveness. Eva has freed herself from victimization by declaring that she has forgiven Josef Mengele and all other Nazi officials who inflicted suffering on her. She has discovered, and promotes, the rebirth from victim to healer that happens when we can forgive deep hurts. Outrage is usually the response of other survivors when they hear Eva’s story, and it’s understandable. I cannot explain how Eva forgives. But I have taken it deeply into my heart, and thought about it.
I am the daughter of another woman who forgave the Nazis. My mother was a small girl when everything and everyone she knew and loved was stripped from her by the Nazi regime. She escaped with her life, but when the war was over and she discovered that her grandparents and her entire circle of friends and acquaintances had perished, she started to consider herself a survivor.
For many people, the passage of time softens heartache; for my mother, the opposite occurred. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, her hurt turned into bitterness, and her pain into anger. She did not want to be bitter; in fact, she struggled constantly to keep from hardening her heart. But she could not forgive. Then one day it dawned on her: she would never be able to forgive her family’s executioners until she was able to see that despite their guilt, they were still fellow human beings. She wrote, “Trembling, I realised that if I looked into my own heart I could find seeds of hatred there, too. Arrogant thoughts, feelings of irritation toward others, coldness, anger, envy, and indifference – these are the roots of what happened in Nazi Germany. And they are there in every human being. As I recognized – more clearly than ever before – that I myself stood in desperate need of forgiveness, I was able to forgive, and finally I felt completely free .”
Eva returns to Auschwitz every few years to teach and to remember. On 25 January 2010, our delegation of American visitors walked through the Gate of Death onto the infamous Selection Platform of Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, where Eva was torn from her mother’s arms minutes after unloading from the cattle cars, never to see her again. Eva and Miriam were sent ‘left’ to the barracks, while their parents and older sisters were sent ‘right’ to the crematorium.

The sheer vastness of Birkenau is numbing: a wasteland of broken down barracks, punctuated by the brick chimneys of their small fireplaces. Four hundred and sixty-eight acres, it was not big enough to accomplish what the Nazis wanted to achieve; new sections were under construction even as the distant thunder of liberation was heard in the winter of 1944–1945. At the end of a kilometre of triple train tracks are the ruins of the four large crematoria, which were blown up by the Nazis as they fled westward, away from the Russians. The camp perimeter is still marked by the curved concrete posts, barbed wire intact, the lamps now empty.
We spent four days trying to comprehend what happened here. Auschwitz I now houses the museum and multiple exhibits that ensure that the Holocaust will never be forgotten. Provocative displays of human hair, shoes, eye glasses, and named suitcases fill one of the barracks. The first underground crematorium built at the camp still exists, and on the iron trolleys that loaded corpses into the ovens, we lit Jahrzeit candles and recited Kaddish. It is cold there, a cold that only comes from hell. The brave flames pierced the gloom, and Kaddish remembered the dead and asked that our faith in God not waiver.
In the decades since the holocaust, people have asked, Where was God? I found God in Auschwitz, through Prisoner number 432. Marian Kolodziej was a young Polish Catholic who resisted the German occupation of Poland in 1939. Arrested and sent to Auschwitz, he arrived on the first transport and was tattooed with one of the earliest numbers. Surviving not only Auschwitz, but also Gross Rosen and Buchenwald, he was liberated in May 1945. Kolodziej died last year, but his more than 200 drawings are exhibited in a gallery near Auschwitz. Apocalyptic and tormented, and fraught with death, his pen and pencil pictures are overwhelming, almost oppressive; some are mural-sized.
However, if you look closely, Christ is there. Borrowing an image from Christian iconography, Kolodziej has drawn a figure representing Christ, carrying his cross to Golgotha. One of the heavy, curved concrete posts surrounding Auschwitz is the cross, and the Christ bears a tattoo. This image brought stinging tears to my eyes: He was there, in Auschwitz. Christ, who made the ultimate sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sin, and who taught us to forgive, did not leave his people. Unseen, he carried the concrete cross. Unseen, he hung from the flogging post, his head crowned with barbed wire, as envisioned by Kolodziej in another image.
Also present in many of Kolodziej’s drawings is Fr. Maximillian Kolbe. Kolodziej was in the same block as Kolbe, who died on the floor of cell 18, in the ‘death barracks.’ A Polish national and a priest, Kolbe offered his life in the place of another inmate who was randomly selected for execution as punishment for a block mate who did not appear at roll call. The man he saved lived to see liberation. What are Jesus’ words? Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. The power of evil and death in Auschwitz was penetrated and broken by this and other uncounted acts of selflessness and sacrifice for others.
On the 27th of January, the day of the official commemoration, we stood at the end of the tracks and heard speeches by the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, and several survivors. We watched Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walk past the Birkenau monument, and we heard his words. All the speeches contained eloquent calls to remembrance, pleading that the Holocaust never be repeated. But we did not hear words pointing to an alternative, a fool-proof way to make sure it would never happen again: Forgiveness.
In Poland, all students are required to visit one of the concentration camps within its borders. Most Israeli students come here too, to “never forget”. And so the camp was filled with tour groups, their cameras and tour-earphones, hearing their guides in their own language. But we had something that may be unique among the millions of yearly visitors to the museum, and which cuts across nationalities and cultures. We had a witness to the power of forgiveness, everywhere we went, and this key unlocked the door to something we never expected to find in Auschwitz. Hope.