Auschwitz-Birkenau

Drive for about sixty kilometers east and a little north from the center of Krakow and you'll come upon an area with some light industry and prominent railroad tracks. A little further on you'll see a 1960s-type hotel of the ultra-modern Soviet model called Hotel Globe, which acts as gatekeeper to the innocuous town of Oswiecim (German pronunciation: Auschwitz). What you see from the road looks like a quiet if drab city of relatively new construction that is notable primarily for being significantly uglier than the surrounding countryside, which is extremely beautiful. Small black signs, however, begin to catch the eye, reading nothing but "Museum - Auschwitz" with an arrow pointing in the appropriate direction. Pulling into the camp is something of a surprise, as you see none of the spare wooden barracks that one usually associates with concentration/extermination camps; rather, there is a dazzling array of simply but elegantly constructed brick buildings that look precisely like the Polish military base they once formed.
The camp is almost perfectly preserved, though most of the buildings have been reworked on the interior for the commemorative purposes of the museum. The space is surprisingly small, taking only about five minutes to walk across, but it is densely packed with rows of neatly spaced buildings that bear no exterior signs of the purposes to which they were once put; it is not the buildings, but rather the motto "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" on the wrought-iron entrance gate and the impossibly elaborate fence-and-watchtower system that prevent the distracted mind from forgetting what the name Auschwitz means.
I will not say there are no words to describe the things that the buildings contain, but I will say that I have not the words for them. In one building, you stand in a room that is perhaps fifty feet long and thirty wide that is partitioned into two glassed-off displays by a walkway of some five feet's width. For the length of the room on either side of the walkway, shoes have been piled to a height of about six feet. How is one to describe the sensation of being surrounded by the objects of the dead? And how is it possible to explain the impossible realization that the endless ranks of shoes are in fact no more than the barest fraction of the actual number of shoes discovered? The mind simply will not take it in. The gas chamber, the crematory ovens, these things you can actually touch - they are no more than cyphers, realities too brazen to divest their secrets.
The only moment in the camp when you feel at all human is the cell of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Fransiscan who volunteered to die in the place of another man who was the father of a large family, to which he was eventually able to return after the liberation of Auschwitz. Kolbe spent two weeks in the cell without food or water, but was eventually martyred when his impatient captors decided just to shoot him.
Auschwitz is a delicately constructed piece of cruelty, but for all that it has a limit and an end; the bricks themselves act as a breakwater past which the waves of inhumanity cannot pass. Birkenau knows no such limitations. A ten-minute drive from the entrance of Auschwitz puts you in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by gorgeous rolling fields of grain and verdant forests. Out of this nowhere there appears an enormous brick gate structure surmounting a double pair of railroad tracks from which the distinctive barbed-wire fencing extends to the right and the left. I know rationally that Birkenau is no more than two square kilometers in area, but nonetheless I cannot supress the certainty that it is infinitely wide and deep; the ramshackle wood-slatted buildings extend in monstrous rows until they are devoured by sheer distance and dwindle into specks toward the horizon. Birkenau has none of the ordered closeness of Auschwitz - it is an endless and open field of green verdure and wooden horror that traps the mind in an irresolvable conflict between beauty and revulsion.
Most of the Jews killed in camps were killed on these grounds; at least 1.1 million have been confirmed, and various contemporaneous reports seem to indicate that the actual number is likely somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million. Evil and the blood of innocents are the constitutive agents of the entire site. Yet somehow the simple goodness of Creation will not let evil hold sway over even this, its high altar. The place is defined by a beautiful stillness that contrasts with the ugly fullness of Auschwitz. Even as I write this the repulsiveness of the camp is almost palpable, but I cannot and will not let go of the beauty that is there; perhaps Nature is trying in her own way to tell the story of the unsung martyrs of the slaughtered masses. Driving away, you see trees and bushes whose long arms hang wearily away from Birkenau, as if they had once turned away in horror and been unable to return.
Nearby in the old town of Oswiecim there is a church built by Dominicans in the fourteenth century where St. Hyacinth used to preach. The Salesians have had it since the end of the nineteenth century and a dedicated group of priests and nuns has been praying there and educating the youth in the attached school ever since. During the long darkness of 1940-1945, they ensured that the two small red lights on either side of the tabernacle were never extinguished. The Lord hears the cry of the poor; Christ has never left Auschwitz.