Night

Auschwitz Camp I - Near Krakow, Poland

Auschwitz Camp II - Birkenau





The remainders of one of two of the gas chambers

Each chimney represents the remainder of a barricks that housed 200 - 300 prisoners



I just finished reading "Night" by Elie Wiesel. I'm a bottomless pit of nothingness. I don't even know what to feel or what to say. I'm numb.

I've read so many of these books and every one has the same effect on me. I know its an "old" story and I know that its one that tends to get passed around and mourned and revered a lot, but its still a stagnant story of the worst of humanity. Its literally a horrid stench in history along with so many other injustices that have been met out on various cultures and societies of the human race.

The thing that makes this story even more poignant for me now is that, I've been there. I've seen the buildings and the chimneys and the gates and the guard towers. I've seen the pictures of prisoners (before and after) and the film reels. I've read the stories. I have all the pieces put together in my mind and it still doesn't make any sense - but yet it does. The thing that keeps me coming back to this history is the recentness of it. I've been to these countries and have seen and felt, even years later, the blackness that such a recent history has left. I've talked to people who have stories and have seen this all take place. It keeps my interest in this history and the road that has been taken to arrive at this history.

The beginning of "Night" contains a forward written by Francois Mauriac, a French journalist. I'm not completely sure what Mauriac's views on Christ and eternity are, but I read and reread the last paragraph of his foreward. As Mauriac looked at Wiesel when he told him his story and then when Wiesel cried that he no longer knew what to think of God, Mauriac consoled and then contemplated to himself "What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a conerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost? And yet, Zion has risen up again out of the crematoria and the slaughterhouses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is they who have given it new life. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace, If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to Him. That is what I should have said to the Jewish child. But all I could do was embrace him and weep."