A visit to hell

I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of spending eternity in hell away from God, away from love, kindness, grace and all else that’s good, away from meaningful human contact, and I’m so delighted that I’m not going there because I know Christ and have my life, my salvation and my identity in him!

Comparing anything to the horrors of hell may seem futile, but what else can you do when you’re faced with the horrors of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp called Auschwitz-Birkenau an hour’s drive away from the beautiful Polish city, Cracow. This camp, by far the largest camp during World War II, saw more than one million people dying there under horrifying conditions.

The vast majority of the people who were murdered were Jews from Hungary, Poland, Greece, Norway, Germany, Holland, etc. But there were also many Polish intellectuals, Gypsies from all over Europe, and Soviet prisoners of war who were all gassed, shot, starved to death or worked until they died which normally took less than three months.



We got to see gas chambers, cells where prisoners were starved to death, a train station platform where a Nazi doctor with a hand motion decided whether the people coming out of the train were ready to work or were sent directly to the gas chambers to die immediately. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp tells more about the horrors that happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau.






WHY FORGIVE?

So many impressions, so much horror, so much pain and tears and blood being spilled for no other reason than hatred and dehumanization. And sadly we as the human race haven’t learned a whole lot from the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Civil wars in Africa, ex-Yugoslavia, horrible wars in Asia and South America all speak about what happens when we dehumanize each other. It’s a lot easier to torture and kill somebody who is not a human to you than somebody who is just like you.

I was doing a little research on some of the famous people who either survived or died in Auschwitz. People like the Dutch diary-girl Anne Frank (who was there for a month before later dying in Bergen-Belsen in Germany), the Italian author Primo Levi, the Romanian-born American novelist Elie Wiesel and the French politician Simone Veil. All had a sad thing in common. Not only did the Nazis manage to steal their lives while they were in the camps, but they also stole their lives afterwards. Anne Frank’s dad, Otto Frank, spent the rest of his life trying to prove to people that her daughter’s diary was original. So in turn he spent the rest of his life thinking about the Nazis, thinking about the people who killed his family, thinking about people who believed Nazi-lies. I doubt that Otto Frank died a free man.

Levi, Wiesel, Veil also fought the fight against Holocaust deniers and were because of that tied to those people the rest of their lives. That’s the universal law of forgiveness we see here. If you are able to forgive the people who have done evil towards you, you set yourself free and you leave punishment to God. If you don’t forgive, you’re tied to the person who did the evil deed towards you, however horrible it may seem.

From a 2007 postmodern perspective, or from a 1945-perspective for that matter, it’s certainly not reasonable to ask people who survived the Nazi concentration camps to forgive the people who killed their entire family and tortured them.

It’s not reasonable either to ask a young woman who was molested as a child to forgive her dad. It doesn’t make sense to ask a father to forgive the murderer of his wife and three children. But only forgiveness will lead to freedom.

If you don’t forgive you can’t experience freedom.

Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, lived with his wife and five children right outside the extermination camp. He tortured, and murdered thousands of people and was responsible for hundreds of thousands of people dying. Höss was sentenced and hanged in a special made gallow right outside the first gas chamber in Auschwitz on April 16, 1947.

Many people witnessed the hanging of Höss. Some were survivors of the camp. Many probably cheered, rejoiced, sighed with relief and thought “now he got something of what he deserves”, but did Höss’ death mean freedom to the left behind family members of the people he murdered? No. Does any other death sentence mean freedom to the left behind family members? No. Does hating your molester give you freedom? No.

There is only (!!) the road of forgiveness. There is no other way. How ever difficult and unfair it seems and feels. We forgive, because he forgave first!

God bless!

Torben