even though I walk through the valley of death and dying

I will try my best to explain today to you, but forgive me if I do not do it justice or if you are offended by it.

Today we visited Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz Berkenau.  I have been anticipating this day since I stepped off the plane in London.  My anticipation was to walk through horror and Hell, to sob, to feel anger, or to feel like I was going to throw up or pass-out at the atrocities of these places.  I have a tendency to be distant from this type of feeling, and I wanted to avoid that at all costs.  I wanted to learn whatever the Lord had for me to learn in this place.  Feel how he wanted me to feel.

(A distinction for those who do not know:  Auschwitz Berkenau is an extermination camp in which the Nazi’s murdered thousands of Jews and other types of peoples i.e. Russian POWs, gypsies, mentally disabled people, homosexuals, anti-socials, Poles, Czechs, and many others from German occupied areas.  Auschwitz 1 was a concentration camp that was built before Berkenau.  It conducted 5 months worth of extermination until Berkenau was built but was mostly a work camp and a prison.)

I will describe the second half of the day to you.  We visited and camp and memorial at Auschwitz 1 second in the day after Auschwitz Berkanua and lunch.  Because of what I had experienced at Berkenau, I did not know how I was going to feel.  To make it short, I could not feel much.  I saw the hair, I saw the shoes, I saw the mounds and mounds of glasses and dishes and suitcases and clothes.  The one thing I could not handle where the baby clothes and baby shoes.  The thought of the poor children..
As I walked through the barracks, I thought to myself “this is what Hell is like”.  I walked through horror and Hell.  But I felt that the Lord was protecting my heart, guiding my feelings.  I did not break down as I thought I would.  But I will not say that I was numb to what was around me.  I sang to myself…
“Even though I walk through the valley of death and dying, surely goodness will follow me, follow me.  In the house of God forever”



In the beginning of the day we had gone to Auschwitz Berkenau first.  For the first 45 minutes of the tour I was continually asking God how I should feel.  I was confused.  I kept looking at the trees.  I was affected at Sachsenhausen and have been deeply moved by many Holocaust documentaries and books.  The horror of that “event” is not lost on me.  As we made our way to the demolished gas chambers I looked up at the trees.  Today’s weather was incredible and they were so beautiful and silent.  But I pitied them.  I thought, “How does life grow here?  It shouldn’t grow here..  Should it grow here?”
Most people come to these places and feel extreme empathy, distress, trauma, and sadness.  But how does one house those emotions?  Where do we go from there?  How does life grow from the knowledge of such death?  I kept thinking about what I should do with the knowledge of that place.

Because of my education, I have heard a great deal about the Holocaust, the reasons behind it, the technology, the way the world made it possible.  And the evil made sense to me.  All of it’s awfulness, it made sense for a fallen world.

But I did not feel like the place was godless.  I am not saying that I have answers for why God allowed such evil to happen to his children.  I do not know why.  And I hate it.

But I felt the Lord’s presence so greatly in that place.  Not in a warm and happy way of course, not the way you feel after your favorite worship song or whatever.  It was more real than that.  I felt the presence of His power and wisdom.  It surrounded me from above and on all sides.  I knew that He saw our group in that place and He had seen everything that had happened there.
Nothing that happened has been lost on Him.

I did not know how I could feel this way.  And I knew that He felt anger, sadness, and pain at what happened.  I have felt that.  But I did not feel that today.

I could only swear that He loves his children.  And that he loved all that went there, Nazi and Jew, Pole and Czech, Hungarian and Gypsy.  And I CANNOT explain why it happened, but I know that He loves his children.  I was in that place and my trust in the Lord has never been stronger.  I felt like a tree whose roots were deep, deep, deep in trust in the Lord.  I could go nowhere out of His sight, out of His plan.

I felt His power.  His power is bigger than death, bigger than Auschwitz.  He defeated death.  As I thought of his power, wisdom, and love, I will say that I have never felt the presence of God more in my life than in Auschwitz Berkenau.  I have struggled for the past 2 years, more like the past 6, to know and feel the Lord’s love for me.  And as I thought of His love for the people sent to that place, I felt it and knew it a little more.  I do not think I would have asked to feel it there, but he loved his children, he loves me and guides me.

I walked back to the bus in the strangely warm autumn day, surrounded.