A Visit to Auschwitz

Few places I have visited have disturbed me as much as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum located in Oświęcim, Poland.

On September 1, 2004, while I was lecturing at a Bible conference for Polish pastors, a friendly young man took me to see the horrific concentration camp that operated between 1940 and 1945. At the top of the main gate, one can still see the cruel German inscription, Arbeit macht frei —“Work sets you free.” During my visit, I was filled with deep sorrow at seeing the tangible evidence of how brutal human beings can be to one another under the influence of the devil. After arriving at Auschwitz, most prisoners were killed in the gas chambers, and their bodies were immediately incinerated.

Then their ashes were used as fertilizer in the nearby fields. Initially, those spared were photographed for the sake of identification.

But under a variety of ongoing tortures, including starvation and slave work, their appearances changed so much that they could no longer be recognized. So, the identification process had to be replaced with tattooing identification numbers on the prisoners. Some of the cruelest atrocities committed were the reproductive and genetic experiments on human beings.

One of the main goals was to sterilize Slavic women and learn how to make Aryan women give birth to twins. One wonders how such atrocities could be committed in the culturally developed Europe of the mid-twentieth century.

Nazism includes a tragic blend of the nihilist philosophy of a dead God (taught by Friedrich Nietzsche) and the evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest. Nazism is one example of the practical expression of Satan’s government, which he claimed was far better than God’s. Undeniably, human beings are sinners by nature, and apart from God, they tend to destroy themselves. Only God can bring true stability to our world, to our social circles, and to our individual lives. Please do not leave God out of your plans!