Six million. The estimated number of Jews brutally and senselessly murdered during the events of the Holocaust. Six million. A number unbelievably large, impossible to wrap the mind around, and still only an estimate, as the exact number will never be known.
Even roughly 5 weeks after visiting the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, I’m still trying to process all I saw there. Having studied World War II in High School, I had thought I knew what I was getting into; but I was wholly unprepared for the way being in a place of such great suffering would trouble me. The sheer magnitude of the evil that occurred not only there, but in so many other similar camps is simply staggering.
Through a headset in Tower E came the story of a local pastor some time after Sachsenhausen had opened. His church had been fervently praying for the prisoners in Sachsenhausen, and after begging for months this pastor was finally actually permitted to enter the concentration camp and share communion with an imprisoned Rabbi. He read the Rabbi Psalm 69, which speaks of violence as well as justice, in order to show that the people were behind him and praying for him. This, however, was taken to be a provocation, and the pastor narrowly avoided arrest. Not the most dramatic story, by any stretch of the imagination, yet it was the one that impacted me most greatly. Naively, I had never even thought about the role of the church during the Holocaust. While at first the majority of the world was unaware of what was happening, information eventually got out and churches worldwide presumably began to pray fervantly, begging God for mercy. But there was none. For six million Jews, there was no mercy.
This haunts me. I realize our God is not a circumstantial God and that He remains true and constant through all time. And evil is clearly a result of human free will, rather than any fault of God’s. But did He not care about what was going on? Where was He? He is all-powerful. He could’ve stopped this. Why didn’t He? A quote I saw later in a Holocaust museum we visited that was found in a letter from a mother to her daughter, both being taken to concentration camps, said, ‘Maybe God will pity you’. But He did not; both mother and daughter were killed in the camps.
Never before have I seriously asked these sorts of questions because never before have I been faced so directly with the truth. I am unable to turn away from these events and horrors, yet I am shaken to my core. I did not expect this trip to Germany to impact my faith much at all. Once again, I was so naive. Somebody once told me that ‘questions are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep you alive and moving’. Well, these questions have certainly led me closer to God in these past weeks as I search for answers from Him.
There are no easy answers. In fact, there may not be any answers at all in this world. I only know that God is good, even when our limited human minds cannot comprehend how He is working.