suffering
Krakow’s ancient center was beautiful in the morning light. The streets were clean and pristine even after the crowds of the evening before. Although I was there for a graduate course at Penn, there was ample time scheduled for visiting noted sites of interest. The twelfth century cathedral was modestly preserved and the home parish of Pope John Paul II, was one among those several places checked off the visiting list. That morning, we boarded the bus for the twenty minute ride to Auschwitz, the famed Nazi Concentration camp on the outskirts of town. As we entered the walled brick edifice I felt strangely uneasy. To be in a place where such evil to one’s own had taken place was incomprehensibly sad. The tour started in one of the several brick buildings still standing. As we moved to another building the symbols worn by the captives in the camp were hanging on the wall just inside the door. As I turned to the right I saw the piles of human hair, remnants of people past whose lives had been taken without regard for the soul who lived therein. I was overtaken with grief as I excused myself and left the room to exit and sit in the open air on the steps outside the building. I lowered my head in prayer as I pleaded for God to help me understand how such atrocities could have happened. The capacity of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man was exacerbated as the group assembled again outside the cellar that was once a gas chamber and adjacent ovens to incinerate human remains. The next stop was the fields of Birkenau, now barren after once having been covered with wooden barracks in which thousands of Jews, homosexuals, and others deemed undesirable and expendable by the Nazi regime were dubiously housed like livestock. That day I was only a vicarious witness to a site where unspeakable pain and suffering was endured for the sake of ideology the empowered self imposed upon those they judged inferior. The pain and agony suffered there by the innocent can only be imagined today. We now live in a different era, but we must never forget that it is the same world of human demagogues that have within their unrestrained quest for power the capacity for massive human destruction. Each day presents us with choices that either enhance or diminish the human experience. May you and I embrace and learn life enhancing actions as we live each day with a thankful heart for those enhancing opportunities.