The Village ILWIDIot

Walt Wiltschek

“When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” —Psalm 11:3, NIV

My vacation travels earlier this month took me to Eastern Europe, exploring some bits of family heritage as well as some places that had long been on my list to see.

One stop that covered both those aims was a difficult one: The Auschwitz memorial sites, in the Polish town of Oświęcim. I approached it with both anticipation and dread, wanting to learn but also wary of the emotional load such a visit would carry. More than a million people died at the Auschwitz camps during World War II, most of them Jews. The site also had a profound impact on the surrounding town and villages, with thousands of homes destroyed and many people displaced.

Seeing the railroad cars still on the tracks that led to extermination, the remains of gas chambers, and still-standing wooden barracks looking forlorn and almost haunted in open fields was a potent experience. While I think most of my own ancestors died in other camps, the echoes of what they and so many others must have experienced rang loudly.

Since returning, someone asked me what it was like, and I couldn’t really describe it adequately. I still haven’t found the right words for what I felt. But one that kept recurring while I was there was likely a common one: “How?” How could the world have let this happen? How would it have felt for those in the midst of it all? How did people hold on to any hope?

I also visited Oskar Schindler’s factory site in Kraków, another place surrounded by stories of death, but one with an undercurrent of life. Schindler’s efforts, as famously portrayed in the Steven Spielberg film, saved the lives of 1,200 Jewish people he was able to keep employed in his factories. While Schindler was far from a perfect individual, his tomb in Jerusalem bears the inscription “Righteous among the nations” because of his ultimate actions.

Perhaps that is one answer, or part of an answer, to “How?” In the face of evil, we do what we can. In the face of injustice, we find ways to change the rules of the game. We might not always be able to prevent terrible things from happening, but we don’t turn away, and we don’t let the terrible-ness consume us.

I wonder, decades from now, how people will look back on the events of our own time. As Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel wrote, “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.” What does “righteousness” look like today?