While attending World Vision meetings in Geneva, I took the opportunity to use my weekend off to visit Auschwitz.
On the plane to Geneva, I watched the film The Reader in which Kate Winslet plays an extraordinary role of a former Auschwitz guard whose history through a relationship with an underage man catches up with her. This underage man is studying law later in life when the Winslet character is tried with crimes against humanity.
The catch line (skip this bit if you intend to see it) is that she could have acquitted herself by admitting that she could not read or write, but she was too humiliated to make such an admission and was instead convicted as the leader of Auschwitz guards who committed atrocities.
What struck me was the extraordinary small-box mindset that said "I did what I did in locking prisoners into a burning barn knowing they would die, because if I unlocked it they would escape. My duty was to keep them from escaping. They would run away otherwise."
The film prompted me to take the weekend I had free between meetings to visit Auschwitz, just out of Krakow in Poland. The overwhelming atmosphere of evil, evil in a pedestrian orderly guise, perplexed and disturbed me. The reports of so many guards were like the Kate Winslet character in The Reader.
They were doing their duty and they would go home, after gassing children and women, to their own wives and children and not think twice about the murderous genocide that was their daily rhythm.
The paradox of humans who can be so creative, imaginative, courageous and loving and humans with those same instincts, who can be so murderous, evil and cruel, is one that I wrestled with at Auschwitz. It is the very paradox of our work at World Vision. I see stories of the most amazing courage that inspire hope in me for the future.
Equally I see stories of malice, cruelty and malevolence often within government structures in countries that are desperately poor and where abuse and greed dominates. Both are true of human nature. Both without reflection and insight can run freely.
The challenge for me was to take seriously self-examination and the insight, which as the apostle Paul would put it, human evil is radical and runs through every human heart, as does human good.
I left Auschwitz recognising that this was not the historical chapter that had been closed and could never be repeated, but has had it repeats in countries I have visited. Cambodia where I visited Tuol Sleng concentration camp where finally one of the guards is on trial so many years after the Kampuchea massacre. It is true in Rwanda where guns and using machetes - where genocide of 800,000 people happened in only eight weeks.
It is potentially true in Darfur which I visited and seen the impacts of cruelty, rape and pillage beyond belief. Auschwitz is not a closed chapter, it remains a recurrent theme. It raises questions about what it means to be human and what it means to resist evil.
