Tuesday, 14 August 2012

Seventy kilometers west of Kraków lies a most confronting, disturbing and heartbreaking place. While before the war and now it was and is known as Oświęcim, the place is best known by the name the Germans gave it - Auschwitz.

I do not plan to write much about our visit, especially since the horrors that were perpetrated there are largely beyond words, but I will write a little.

Like many of those we saw as we visited Auschwitz and Birkenau, we spent much of our visit, and many a time in the days following, shaking our heads with a sense of disbelief. Like we saw and experienced on our visit to Dachau, you enter and leave the same person yet are somehow changed. The people who walk out, although visually indistinct from those heading in, are somehow different. They are in the most part quieter, walking slower and sporting expressions ranging from disbelief, to distress, to anger and in some cases, a mix of the lot. 

I hope that in each of those who visit a seed is a sown, a seed borne of the knowledge of the injustice that occurred, a seed that might grow into resolve to speak up when confronted by injustice in their own life, a seed that might grow to help stop such horrors from continuing to occur.

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