A Round the World Adventure

I have been brought to tears many times while reading books about the Holocaust, but I have never wept the way I did after visiting an actual concentration camp today. 

We took a bus about an hour outside of Prague to visit Terezin, one of the main concentration camps for Eastern Europe. Almost 40,000 Jews were killed here during the Holocaust, and tens of thousands more were “processed” through the camp on their way to Auschwitz or death marches through Europe.

To read a book is one thing, but to walk through the chambers - to see a room, not much larger than my bedroom at home, where 66 prisoners were crammed for weeks at a time, with no shower and little food - to walk into the barbed wire gates knowing that I am free and they were not - to see the photos of skeletal survivors and small children who died at the hands of the Nazis - overwhelmed me with emotions.

And I wept. When you visit a place like this, you can’t help but wonder - for those years, where was God? How did He show Himself faithful on behalf of the 40,000 who died there? When they prayed, did the skies seem empty? And what allows a people, a country, a world, to turn a blind eye to this kind of suffering?

I know the theological answers, the political answers, and even the historical answers in my mind. But there are times of pain where our hearts cannot understand these answers.

I know these things:

The Holocaust was perhaps the deepest expression of the depravity of man - the end result of what happens when God is abandoned and we follow our own wills fully.

I believe in a God who restores - who allows - and who redeems everything. I don’t know how, or understand the suffering that happened here, but I trust that I have a God who is greater than my understanding.

“Some knowledge is too heavy…you cannot bear it…your Father will carry it until you are able.” 
— Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place)

-From Sarah