Auschwitz: Making Meaning in a Meaning-Killing Place

[ This is the third of three parts of an excerpt from the work-in-progress The Skeptical Believer. See prior two posts. ]

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I have been arguing in the last two posts that human beings are inescapably meaning-makers, constantly engaged in trying to make sense of the world—and that pure reason is only one, often tangential, component in the process. It goes on in the darkest of places.

A quick story. Like many people, I have gone to Auschwitz. After the gas chambers no longer poisoned their thousands per day, of course. After the satanicly ironic words over the gate, “Arbeit Mach Frei,” were no longer a death sentence. Auschwitz is a black hole that obliterates (I first wrote “obliviates” and that works too) sense and sense making, and no one should pretend otherwise. Nevertheless, it is also a place where, for evil and for good, people continued to be human.

Within Auschwitz is a wall between two buildings where thousands were executed by firing squad. In one of those buildings prisoners were held for interrogation, torture, and eventual execution. In this building Father Maximillian Kolbe and others were starved to death. I have looked in the room they died in and I can say I was unable to take it in. I lacked, perhaps fortunately, the imagination.

But in a nearby room I saw something more tangible that speaks to what I am trying to say here. It is a rough etching in the wall of the head and torso of Christ. A figure, presumably the image’s creator, clings to Christ around the waist. It floats there, in the semi-darkness, a testament to one person’s final effort to make sense of it all. I do not focus on the fact that it is Christ—though that was essential for the person who etched it. It could have been, as it was elsewhere, a Star of David or a flower or that person’s own face.

I bring it up here because I see it as an emblem of that sense-making hunger in every human being. I know nothing of this person’s life or convictions. All I know is that at its likely end, in a place of evil and nullity, he continued trying to make sense. He found meaning—and hope–in the story of someone who had been humiliated and executed two thousand years before. By etching that image in the dark cell, he showed a commitment to a community of others who had also taken that story as their own. He did not, it seems, give himself to despair or bitterness. He persevered—to the end. And now his story, or at least this sliver of it, is part of my story. And now part of yours.

The influence on me of this visit to Auschwitz is not primarily rational or pragmatic. Scraping marks on the wall did not save him, nor will it me. But it helps us both make sense of things.