Today marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Located in Nazi-occupied Poland—Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, a small town 25 miles west of Kraków—the deathcamp didn’t crawl, fully firmed, into the world. It grew—metastasized really—over a period of years, emerging in embryonic form from the Hitlerian racist and nationalist ambition in April 1940, it expanded like a fetid yeast until it made manifest every horror of the Nazi blood and soil fever dream before, finally, eight decades ago today, the Soviet army entered Auschwitz and the nightmare was over.
The largest concentration camp in the German lager system, Auschwitz was really a constellation of camps: Auschwitz I, the main camp, with the cynical Arbeit Macht Frei gate; Auschwitz II—Birkenau—the vast estate marked by the hated, brickwork rail entrance, and Auschwitz III, a web of some 40 sub-camps. Its size signaled its ambitions. A combination work and annihilation center, Auschwitz was simultaneously a prison camp for real and perceived enemies of the Nazi regime and the German occupation authorities in Poland, a supply center for forced laborers for exploitation in Nazi-owned enterprises, and an extermination site for large-scale, mechanized slaughter. More than 1.3 million souls would enter Auschwitz. Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2 million of them would die. The dead included more than 70,000 Polish political prisoners, followed by nearly 21,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and 12,000 prisoners of other ethnic groups, religious minorities, and homosexuals. But, above all, always, was the Jews. Nearly 1,000,000 of them would be murdered at Auschwitz.
Such numbers, of course, often obfuscate as much as clarify the dimensions of the horror. They are large to the point of being incomprehensible. Many readers will be familiar with my habit of noting that at the end of the ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz the names of all the nearly 1.2 million victims were recited over loudspeaker. Because we don’t actually have the names of all the lost, the litany would have been incomplete. But imagining that we do have a complete list can be useful in trying to grasp precisely what 1.2 million really means. To read a list of 1.2 million names at the easy pace of one name per second would take nearly 13.8 days. Nearly two weeks of an unbroken recitation of name, after name, after name, after name.
This thought experiment can be extended in other ways. Just focusing on the Jewish victims, for instance, it would take 17.3 days to read the names of all the estimated 1.5 million Jewish children killed throughout the Holocaust. Just the kids. To read the names of all 6 million Jewish victims would take 69.4 days. More than two months of an endless procession of names, each one marking the theft of a human being made in the divine image.
In my long, albeit amateur, study of the Holocaust, one of the more poignant insights was offered by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He spoke of the first occasion when he toured Auschwitz. He had stood on the tracks at Birkenau, he had stood above the remains of the gas chambers and crematoria, stood in the reconstructed chamber at the main camp, had seen the pilfered supplies of suitcases, glasses, shoes, and hair. And finally, overwhelmed, this great Rabbi found himself asking the same question asked by so many others: “Where was God?” And this is what Rabbi Sacks said:
And words came into my mind. I’m not claiming they were any kind of revelation, but this is what they said: “I was in the words, ‘You shall not murder.’ I was in the words, ‘You shall not oppress a stranger’. I was in the words that were said to Cain when he killed Abel, (the first murder in the Bible). ‘Your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground.’”
And this insight led to a profound recognition: “Suddenly I knew that when God speaks and human beings refuse to listen, even God is helpless in that situation.” In the beginning, God made man—in order that He could love man, and that man could have the extraordinarily good gift of loving Him back. But love, of course, must be free or it is not love—for it cannot be compelled. Freedom, of course, has risks. The risk is rebellion. Auschwitz is nothing if it is not an apex example of the abuse of human freedom in rebellion against God’s invitation to love Him—and, by extension, His creation. But all that had to happen for Auschwitz to never have happened is for human beings to obey the sixth commandment—or, really, most if not any of the others for, ultimately, the only way to keep one is to keep each.
The entirety of Rabbi Sack’s reflection is well worth reading today. But I want to suggest one additional way—among the many other—of answering, in part, the question of where God was during the Holocaust. It’s not precisely true, as the Rabbi certainly knows, that God is helpless in the face of human rebellion. Rabbi Sacks is describing God’s unwillingness, in most cases, to overrule human freedom. He allows us to rebel. This means, also, that He is unwilling, in most cases, to overrule the consequences of human freedom. Hence Auschwitz. To be sure, the biblical record is full of stories of God doing precisely this—of intervening both against and in favor of human freedom, and of deterring or compelling or coaxing human beings to make or not make certain choices. One of his mechanisms is to recruit the freedom of other human beings. Hence Oskar Schindler, Maximillian Kolbe, and the Allied cause against the Nazis.
Tracking this vein of thought, I’ve often recalled the late Jean Bethke Elshtain’s comment to a friend as they watched the twin towers fall on that fateful September morning. Jean turned to her colleague and said, “Now we remember what governments are for.” Auschwitz, too, reminds us what governments are for. Paul’s letter to the Romans makes clear that governments are supposed to be God’s agents in the world—His viceroys. Governments are to use the power of government, including the justly-wielded sword, to protect the innocent, to take back things of sufficient worth that have been wrongly taken, and to punish grave evil. As the Nazis—and their Axis partners more broadly—proved, even human government—like human individuals—is free to obey or to rebel against God. As the Allies proved, some governments can rightly use their freedom against those who do not. Auschwitz reminds us why we want good men with guns in the world.
Today we celebrate the end of Auschwitz. We mourn the lost. We recall with gratitude those who survived. We give praise to those who rescued or attempted rescue. We give praise to the multitude of ways that so many victims found to resist Nazism and to love God and neighbor even in the lager. But we should remember, too, that those who survived would not have survived had good people—imperfect, broken, tarnished, ruined as they were—not acted in singularly courageous and faithful ways, individually, in concert with other individuals, or collectively as small militias or as governments to say “No” to the Nazi vision and to couple this refusal with the force to back it up. The Nazis would not have stood down on their own. They needed to be knocked down. And—albeit later than it should have—America gathered to itself the strength and the will to knock them down. Would that we would never tarry in the face of such malevolence again.
That this is true helps prove why is has never really been the case that the Chrisitan pacifist is the one who chooses non-violence and the Christian realist—or just warrior—chooses violence. If the decision were simply that, the Christian realist would choose non-violence every time—remember, if everyone in the world were either a pacifist or a just warrior, the result would be the same. There would be no war. But it is the just warrior and not the pacifist who has an answer to the fact that not everyone in the world is. There are times when violence is already in play and no amount of prayer, sweet language, or wishful thinking will stop it.
Or, perhaps better said, the answer to prayer sometimes comes in the shape of, say, the 82nd Airborne. Or, if more imperfectly, Soviet troops outside the hated gates.