oswiecim/auschwitz

I read a short dialogue that puts into words what ran through my mind as I stepped over the ground that so many people are buried under.

The burning question: "In Auschwitz, where was God?".
The resonant response: "Where was man?"

Contrary to the image I held in my mind, Auschwitz wasn't covered in snow the day I went with five of my friends. I was glad of their company as we disembarked from the bus and entered the huge hall containing the ticket office. We were standing in a crowd of people, being assigned little stickers with the date scribbled on them, feeling strangely nervous at the disorganised chaos and drawing comparisons between our stickers and the tattoos of the original victims. The air shudders with nerves and the mind conjures stupid comparisons. When we watched the introductory documentary we became even more frazzled as we could all swear that we smelt gas!

The entrance to the Auschwitz camp still bears the iron letters "arbeit macht frei" ‑ work brings freedom. If death is considered freedom then this seems true enough. The many Poles, Romanians, Gypsies, Jews and others who were brought to this place were worked through Summer's fire and Winter's freeze, up to 18 hours a day, until they died of exhaustion, starvation, cold or disease. The 'lucky' ones were assigned jobs such as cleaning the toilet blocks or stripping the dead, gassed bodies of people for their gold teeth, hair, anything found on their body that could be used. These people lived a little longer, sometimes even six months.

As you begin your tour the facts assault your consciousness, but you won't remember any of them. The numbers are too huge and the atrocities too unimaginable for now, but soon you will see for yourself the horrors of this place that linger in your mind long after you leave. Everybody knows about the gas chambers, but to stand in the place where people were forced to strip naked before being herded into them brings new light to what happened here. In other parts of the museum/camp you see piles upon piles of glasses, women's make up products, children's toys, shoes and clothes that were taken from the people who came here. Huge hessian sacks containing human hair were discovered by the camp's liberators; the Nazis in their retreat hadn't had time to remove all the evidence. Walking along a huge corridor you start to feel sick as plaits, ponytails, masses and masses of hair rests disheveled on the other side of the glass. At the end of the corridor is a piece of cloth woven from this hair and your breath deserts you as you wonder: who weaved this cloth? Who wore it?

The next room holds a mountain of shoes. Then prosthetic limbs, so many of them that your mind boggles ‑ in my life I've met three people who had a prosthetic leg; here there is a room full of these plastic and metal limbs ‑ how many people died here! Then it's the dolls, little toys that were taken from children who would die and given to other children who would live.

The museum continues to the grey/black execution wall in a courtyard surrounded by basement windows. The windows look into the torture rooms, the starvation room, the dark room, the standing room, the suffocation room into which enough people were forced that they would slowly suffocate to death. The entrance to these basement rooms is through another long corridor lined with the mug shot style photographs of victims that were taken in the early days of the camp. Most people look vacant and shocked. Some look confused, others defiant, a few have a wry, sardonic smile on their face that seems to say "do your worst, my body is not my soul". Flowers adorn some of the photos and bring the faces to life; these were real people!

After hours of this your mind starts to shut down and you simply absorb the truth without question; perhaps this is how people performed these atrocities, their minds switching off at the extent of the horror.

In the early days, those arriving on the cattle trains thought that they were being taken to a new camp, like the ghettos they had left but in the open air and away from other people, where they could continue to live out their lives and have their freedom. On arrival, they were told that this is not a sanitarium but a concentration camp, that Jews were to die immediately and others would not live beyond three months. They were divided into groups of healthy and unhealthy; the healthy ones were sent to work as slaves while the unhealthy ones went straight to the gas.

It's certainly true that greater atrocities have occurred in this world. Genocide is not new to human history. Rwanda's 1994 genocide saw the deaths of 1 million Tutsis in only 100 days - one sixth of the number of Jews killed in the entire war. What makes Auschwitz and similar camps so much more horrifying is the methodical, relentlessly cold blooded nature of the 'final solution' that was put into action here.

At the end of the tour, after seeing evidence of unimaginable evil, I reflected on the question of where was God and where was man. I stood gazing at the barbed wire etched against the sky, surrounding the lurking gas chambers of Birkenau, and beyond it I watched the sunset colour the clouds in bright shades of orange and pink. I took it as a metaphor, found the answer to the question.

It might sound abhorrent, but to do evil is easy. To herd weak, scared, travel weary, confused people into gas chambers and flick a switch is simply a matter of being weak yourself. But to risk your life and your family to save these people takes great strength and boundless courage. The glow of the sunset is reflected in the entrance hall of Auschwitz, which is lined with the stories and photographs of ordinary people who found the strength to risk everything they loved for the sake of a stranger.

These people represent the best and brightest that humans are capable of, and their deeds came at such great cost that their worth is so much more than any act of cruelty.

Staring at these people's faces you realise why you can still appreciate the beauty of a sunset over such cursed ground. You realise that humankind goes to greater lengths to fight evil than to create it, and therein lies our salvation, therin lies God, therein lies man.