Love Conquers Hatred: A reflection on what I've learned

“Forgiveness demonstrates the presence in the world of the love 

which is more powerful than sin.” 

- Pope John Paul II

This is just one of the quotes I wrote down from the Pope John Paul II museum, but I think it’s so powerful. We’ve now been back for a little over a month, and with the stress of the end of the semester between finals and papers due, our trip to Oswiecim seems so far away. However, I still think about what we learned in that short time away. One of the main things I realized is that there were so many things surrounding WWII and the Shoah that I will never be able to understand, and I definitely struggled with that realization for a while, even for a good few weeks after we were back. However, what we’ve learned and continue to learn has shown me that love and forgiveness overpowers the hatred that continues to exist in our world.

Fr. Manfred, one of the lecturers we were lucky enough to have at the Center for Dialogue and Prayer, spoke to us about love and about how God is manifested through love. He told us that it was through love that God was present during the Shoah – that it was through love that God was present in the camps. He made it easier for me to understand that though love isn’t always clear and isn’t present in every story from that dark time, some stories allow us to see it in action and in this way, to see how God was present during the Shoah.

He shared a few stories of his encounters with survivors who had different perspectives on this idea of love and of God’s presence. One survivor that he knew had survived Auschwitz II-Birkenau, but his job was to throw corpses into the burning fields every day. Because of this, he never felt God’s presence; he didn’t understand why they had to die, or why he had to burn them, and he would hope that people would come to help their situation. He would wonder where God was and continue to ask why; he couldn’t see God through the destruction or in the people that surrounded him. I found the next perspective interesting as well because of what Fr. Manfred had to say about it. This woman worked in the women’s camp in Birkenau and saw people go to the gas chambers; she asked Fr. Manfred what he meant by God, and she told him that because of what she saw there, she is unable to believe in God. She did say, though, that she believes in love. Fr. Manfred said to us something like, “who am I?” to tell her that it’s the same thing – that when you believe in love, “that is what I am talking about when I speak of God.” I found this powerful, as it is in alignment with the teaching of respect for all beliefs.

The next story is yet a different outlook: this man was also a survivor of Auschwitz-II Birkenau, and he was not religious when he was there. However, he said that his experience during the Shoah made him realize that it means something to be Jewish. He began to study and learn and found that whenever people helped one another, when they were good to one another, when they did something for another that costed more than it helped them, that that was God in action. When you do something out of love that costs more than you gain, this is God — and it just amazes me that he took this understanding away from his own experience at Birkenau.

I’ve decided that while it is true that I will most likely never understand many of aspects of the Shoah, I know now that understanding everything is not the point. The point is standing witness to the tragedies of the past as well as to the progress we’ve made as a human race. The point is the greater understanding of love and respect for one another as humans that has come out of this experience for me and for our class, and hopefully, for the world as a whole. I’ve realized that in my memories of our time in Auschwitz, I’m starting to see the love more than the hate. Of course it’s easier to see the love when you aren’t standing in the middle of where it all happened, where the hate allowed for the worst crimes against humanity to be committed, but the understanding of how far we’ve come along with the realization of how much further we need to go is something I’m lucky to have acquired from this once in a lifetime experience.

The Prayer of St. Francis, displayed in the Center for Dialogue and Prayer

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Hope in the Horror

Auschwitz II-Birkenau was enormous. Looking out from the guard’s watch tower at the main entrance, before even entering the camp, was an incredible experience. Just seeing the size of the camp was overwhelming. I was unable to stop myself from trying to imagine what it was like not even a century ago, when there were still all of the barracks and still people everywhere and still trains running through the middle of the grounds, delivering more innocent people to their deaths. We walked through one of the eight original barracks, we saw the makeshift beds that four or more prisoners would sleep on for so little time each night, and we walked along the tracks of the train that used to unload more and more people who would soon be sent to the gas chambers. We walked to the ruins of the gas chambers – the two huge gas chambers that SS guards blew up in an attempt to destroy the evidence of the crimes they were committing, because they knew that they were committing crimes – and we saw the two smaller gas chambers, one of which stood in front of fields where bodies were thrown into and burned. We witnessed the remains of the horrors of Auschwitz-II Birkenau. 

Items found during renovations of the barracks in 1960.

We also went back to Auschwitz I and had the opportunity to walk around freely without a tour guide. I liked it because we were allowed to wander in silence and take our time viewing the exhibits we wanted to spend extra time in. One amazing thing that I saw was this exhibit of items found in the barracks when they were being renovated. The caption explained: “They must have been hidden by a prisoner who was planning an escape.” Among the items were three pairs of shoes – men’s, women’s, and a very small pair for a child. I think this is kind of a symbol of hope – a sign that some prisoners still had hope. A family was trying so hard to stay together – their will to survive wasn’t defeated.

I think I expected this visit to the camp to be a little easier since we had already been there, but visiting Maximilian Kolbe’s cell for the second time was not easier. That one small space seemed to somehow embody all of the horrors of the camp and the atrocities that it stands to remind us of. Maximilian Kolbe is recognized as a Catholic saint and a martyr because when ten prisoners from his barrack were selected to die as a result of an escape made by another prisoner in their unit, one of the men cried, “My wife! My children!” This man was Franciszek Gajoqniczek, and he was saved by Maximilian Kolbe, who volunteered to die in his place. Along with the other nine selected prisoners, he was starved in cell 18, the starvation cell, though he didn’t ultimately die of starvation. He was prisoner 16670, but he was known as so much more than that number. He was known and continues to be known for this greatest act of love: the Gospel of John expresses that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another, and that is what Maximilian Kolbe did. For me, this is the greatest example of love in the camps. His action itself was amazing, but one thing about it that was specifically brought to my attention was the immediacy with which he volunteered his life. He stepped forward right away – there was no time to think. He didn’t have to think twice about what he was doing to know it was the right thing to do. I find it a miracle that we are lucky enough to have an example of a fellow human that possessed that type of love for humanity.

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The Power of Relationships

By our second night in Poland, I felt like in the short time we had been there, we had already learned so much.

Though we were warned we would be jumping right into everything, I didn’t know what to expect. However, I can say that it definitely wasn’t the desecrated Jewish cemetery that we started our Oswiecim tour at shortly after our arrival at the Center for Dialogue and Prayer. Before we entered the cemetery, a naive thought crossed my mind – something like, “Wow, it’s amazing that this is still here,” thinking it was going to be a somewhat normal cemetery. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that this was not the case. Walking through it, past the chalk-numbered tombstones, crooked and close together, no longer marking where their corresponding bodies are actually buried, I was shocked, though with everything we’ve learned I probably shouldn’t have been. The Nazis had not only tried to break the spirit of the living Jews – exterminating them wasn’t enough; they also tried to destroy their memory. I think just seeing the destruction, seeing the pieces of broken-up stones that once commemorated the lives of human beings, seeing that in person, was just kind of insane. However, they didn’t succeed in this goal. The white-chalk numbers were written by those who volunteered to work towards restoration of the site to mark and count the stones. They didn’t succeed in destroying their memory. I thought that the Polish custom of leaving little lamps on the gravestones was beautiful, and especially considering how there is no longer a Jewish population here in Oswiecim, I thought it was amazing that there was a good number of these lamps around the cemetery. To me, this represents the progress that’s been made since the Shoah. Seeing how non-Jewish Poles still visit this cemetery, a site they could become desensitized to and forget about as it is in their neighborhood, and witnessing how they leave the lamps at these tombstones, still honoring their memory today, provided a little bit of light in the darkness of the still-present destruction.

            Someone who played a big role in this visible progress was Saint Pope John Paul II. I was so excited to go to Wadowice and see the town he grew up in and to visit his home and the parish he was raised in, the place where his faith was fostered. Arriving in Wadowice and going to see his high school was a very cool experience, but visiting the Old Synagogue and hearing the story of Lolek and Jurek was incredible. I thought it was a fascinating story – one full of friendship and hope – and it definitely shows the power that strong relationships create. They were childhood friends, Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II (Lolek) and Jerzy Kluger (Jurek), and one particular story told of how when Jurek got his acceptance letter, the two were so happy they would be attending high school together. They understood from a young age that they were equals, and their religious difference didn’t stop their great friendship or the good relations between their families. However, after they graduated from high school, the war caused them to lose touch, as Jurek had to leave Wadowice with his father to escape capture and a terrible fate. He joined the Polish army heading towards Russia and survived the war. In 1951, he ended up in Rome with his wife, and when John Paul II went to Rome in the 1960s for the Second Vatican Council and was made a Cardinal, the two reconnected. Amazingly, their bond was so strong that it was as if time had never passed, and after all that had happened and all they had gone through separately, they came together in mutual love, understanding, and respect and worked towards mending Jewish-Christian relations.

Klugar contributed a lot to the impact that John Paul II was able to make during the Second Vatican Council, which can be seen in the Nostra Aetate that Pope Paul VI published in 1965. It is a “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions.” This document specifically highlights that Jews are not to blame for Jesus’ death, and it points out similarities as well as promotes respect between different religions. This story of friendship is so powerful – the two men went from being childhood friends to being an unbeatable team that worked towards unity after a long war that encouraged disunity. I wish it was a more well-known story because I feel like it has the power to open a lot of minds to the idea of how powerful human relationships can be and are. This depiction of the power relations can hold only reinforces why the reparation of Jewish-Christian relations is so important. Restoring the relationship between Jews and Christians and mending it into one that embodies understanding just as Lolek’s and Jurek’s did can help to create a more respectful and peaceful environment and promote mutually beneficial conversations.

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