Service Times
Sunday School 9:00 am
Worship Service 10:00 am

Location
1624 Broadway Avenue
Sheboygan, WI 53083
920.451.0991

Directions

Search the Bible

The trip to Dachau

It would soon become clear, at 4.30 A.M on a cool May morning, in the Spring ’98, that the trip we were about to take was not merely a tourists’ day of vacation. Everything was prepared methodically as for any other trip…the hot espresso coffee to keep us awake so early in the morning; packed lunches, some local currency and some souvenir gifts, many music tapes to kill the time, and minds ‘prepared’ to absorb as much as we could in one entire day. I had just finished reading in Italian “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” by Goldhagen. This book refreshed in me memories of previous readings of Bonhoeffer, Moltmann and Primo Levi. As we jumped in the car, that morning, from Varese, we were all excited to spend a day traveling from Italy to Germany, passing through Switzerland, Austria and finally arriving in Dachau, Germany. We were anxiously anticipating the Helvetic fairy mountain peaks, covered with untouched snow; the cold icy water of little lakes spread throughout the valleys…sheer beauty surrounding and awaiting the sight of isolated immaculate villages on the slopes of the mountains. Nature was about to show us the goodness of God in creation, the master touch of an Artist who communicates his feelings with the brush on a canvas.

Overwhelmed by the Bavarian land, much loved by Adolph Hitler as a vacation resort, with its woods and evergreen pines, we finally arrived in the busy and windy Dachau. Many tourists’ buses were heading all in the same direction…so we followed and in a few minutes, we were in the parking lot of the in-famous Concentration Camp. It was fenced in by barbed wire as to remind the curious tourist that life had meant no-life for thousands, in that same modern and busy city many years ago. We decided to eat our lunch walking anxiously while visiting the Camp. The first gate that welcomed us – like many thousands of inmates during the second World War - was made of simple black cold bars of iron, with the famous writing on top: “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Labor will make you free). My thoughts went soon to the poet Dante Alighieri and his “The Divine Comedy”. In his famous book, all the miserable souls approaching the Inferno were to go through a door and were ‘welcomed’ with these words: “Lose all your hopes entering in this place!” That Camp of Dachau, like Dante’s Inferno, was to become hell on earth. The lashing of evil in its pure form, God turning his back on hopeless people and children, God unable to cope with unrestrained wickedness God taking revenge on the Jews, for having killed the Messiah. God was repaying the unending rebellion of his preferred people. These must have been the bitter thoughts in the minds of the inmates as they went through the gate. 

Very quickly, we all got quiet, walking aimlessly – not curious anymore - in that vast windy Camp. Among the trees we saw the barracks, the gas chambers, the ovens, the hooks, the spots where human ashes had saturated the soil, the prison, the Nazi Headquarters, the Museum of historical and photographs documents. We saw the depressing cold and contort iron structure design of emaciated inmates with an underneath inscription in many languages: “Never Again”! Never again, is the warning! Never again will this sort of evil be perpetrated against human beings.

We felt, as we were paralyzed and motionless, although walking on the pebbles with so many other tourists. We were unable to speak to each other or exchange impressions, but each one of us was in turmoil trying to find some explanation, a reason for so much suffering, endured fifty years ago in the same spot where we were walking that day. The question was undoubtedly puzzling our mind: Why did God allow, permit and even agree to – according to some - this evil to come over that part of the world? What good could come out of the ‘Final Solution’? If God is so good, then why is there such evil? As a Christian, I was not questioning in my mind the goodness (Ps. 107:1), the mercy of God. The Bible gives ample proof of any lack of evil in the plans and character of God. The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever (Ps. 118:1); the compassionate traits of the Father are there for the entire humanity (Jas. 5:11). The final proof of the love of God for humanity is in Jesus Christ. As a Christian, I did not doubt the control of God over the affairs of man, his sovereignty and his government. It is enough for me to read the Book of Daniel to be amazed at the concern of a Fatherly heart. The question that puzzled my heart was: “Why did God, in his mercy and goodness, being in total control, allow such a degree of evil to take place?”

As we were going around from one spot to the other, I remembered the beauty of the Alps, the Christians songs heard during the trip, the characteristic villages full of life, and the exciting trip to Dachau. Now in the windy Camp the mind was trying to make sense of it all. Nature, during our trip, had indeed declared the glory of God (Ps. 19), but here in the Camp, how could I even perceive a divine purpose out of the suffering of so many people? As a Christian, I supposed to have the answer to the relation of God to evil in this world, but I found it hard to come up with a satisfactorily answer. They told me that God has decreed that evil would be part of His plan, that God has determined that evil would be used to bring glory to Himself, that God permits evil in order to accomplish His purposes, even that God controls and directs evil, and so on. Now, facing all this destruction, I was walking on rivers of spilled blood, hearing in my mind countless hours of silent and suffocated cries. I could hear the whispering of hopeless prayers addressed to a seemingly disinterested God, while standing half-naked under the winter rain in the main courtyard at 4 o’ clock in the morning for a roll call.

I walked with my head down, ashamed to be part of that humanity that perpetrated the holocaust. Strangely, I found myself to be both the naked crying child, forcefully separated from his mother and the SS officer, ruthlessly screaming orders, while the melodious notes of the Tannhauser of Wagner ironically played all around. As I was standing there, I was both the sufferer and the evil agent. Once more, I realized that God had not taken part in the ‘Final Solution’. He had not caused it! The only possible ‘glory’ (Kabod = weight of truth) he could have gotten from it, was the bitter fact that man, apart from God, is only able to destroy himself. In the words of Moltmann, God was not silent in the concentration camp; He was there, suffering with the sufferers, mourning with the mourners, Christians and non-Christians.

Although born 16 years later after the war, I felt to belong to the thousand of inmates that died in the Camp’s Laboratories under medical experiments. I felt to scream to the heavens that I was there too with them! Our petty tourist visit was our duty, as human beings, to scream aloud to the world, that the evil of Dachau had affected ALL of us, with the coming generations. The evil of Dachau had affected God himself as He remained silently while that child stood half-naked and barefoot in the camp, soaked under the stormy rain. My petty tourist visit turned out to be the realization that I, as a human being, was not a simple spectator of a tragic event, getting all emotional involved over the suffering of fellow human beings, Christians and non-Christians. I belonged to the race that allowed and caused the Holocaust to take place. We as human beings were to be blamed for the sinful actions and the tragic results of it. I felt that my visit to the Camp was to become a homage I had to pay to the innocent dead and a divine appointment to ask a loving and a compassionate God, forgiveness for our evil ways. God was not motionless, he cried with them; God did not allow Nazism to take place, sinful man developed it; God was not taken back by the brutal force of the Holocaust, He indeed stopped it and made a World War cease (Ps. 46:9).

Dachau today stands as a testimony of what we are all capable of, apart from God and a ‘pointer’ for all generations, in need of a loving and compassionate God, who will save us from our evil actions-sins.