I have very little to say about my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I took only the one photo, at the entrance to Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
What kind of monsters can perpetrate crimes of such enormity, of such depravity?
There’s an excellent article in Wikipedia. You can also visit the website of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. And if you perform an online search for “holocaust,” you can learn much more. But you will never understand, as I will never understand, how such a thing can have happened.
This was a difficult day. But it’s a journey everyone should take. There were a lot of young people touring the camps. A lot of people period. We can maybe hope that those who see this come away with a recognition that human beings committed these atrocities and human beings were also their victims. How different are we? How far removed are these events from our current experience?
We should know that these kinds of horrors didn’t end when World War II ended. It happened in Bosnia. And it is happening today in Myanmar. In Sudan and South Sudan. In Syria.
I’ll keep hoping that we learn to love one another.
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