It is said that the ancient Greeks valued a farm implement more than a slave, it was much easier and cheaper to replace the slave. The Romans devised horrific means of disposing of dissidents. For Christians, Good Friday is the most poignant reminder of their methods of execution.
In the twentieth century, when it ought to be argued that civilisation has come of age, the Nazi SS demonstrated one more time for history that humanity is for ever only a short step away from the obscenity of devaluing the potential of human life.
With a clear blue sky, a soft breeze blowing and coaches full of tourists, the Auschwitz of today is a world apart from the dehumanising horror of what took place over sixty years ago. The scale of the engineering project to devise and construct a death factory of this magnitude is mind boggling. The number of human souls who suffered here is incomprehensible. It is in the small detail that emotional responses are evoked.
Behind a glass screen is a mountain of shoes of all shapes and sizes. The eye falls onto one shoe, small and probably belonging to a young person. The worn down heel tells its own story of a life once lived and is now ashes spread somewhere on this vast killing field.
It is so easy to become sanitised to the sheer scale of the suffering endured, especially for those who were not immediately selected for the gas chamber. For the smallest deviation from the demands of a life sapping regime punishment was severe. Imagine, for example, a small cell in the cellar of the punishment block, a little over two feet square. Its entrance is no more than three feet high. In this dark and airless space inmates would be made to stand, sometimes four to a cell, for hour upon hour. Immediate execution was a less painful release from this living hell.
This is a place that must inspire every visitor to make our world free from the prejudices of misplaced ideologies that make one individual of more value than another. For the Christian, it is a pertinent reminder that our sojourn in this world is not for comfort and gain but for the acceptance and obedience of the teaching of the Jew whom we follow.
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“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose ones attitude in any given circumstance.” Viktor Frankl – prisoner of conscience of the Third Reich.
