My high-school English teacher taught us a module on the holocaust.  As part of the module we read ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel in addition to some other texts on the subject.  I remember quite vividly the stark transition of Elie Wiesel from an optimistic Torah student to a hardened realist by the end of the war.  At the beginning of the book he was discussing the notion that there were many pathways into the Garden of Eden (heaven).  By the end of the book you were left wondering which pathway coincided with the horrible events of the Holocaust.

I myself, like the young Wiesel, was an optimistic student of Torah.  I was convinced that everything would be alright and that the events Wiesel had endured would soon be redeemed by the imminent return of the Jewish Messiah.  Nothing would or could shake my faith or at least, so I though.

At the end of the module on the Holocaust, our teacher brought in a slide show.  He was a tour leader for ‘March of the Living’ which is a tour of high school students to the concentration camps of Europe followed by Israel.  I saw images of soap made from human bodies and fabric made of human hair.  These images attacked my shield of faith violently but the attack was repelled.

It was only when my teacher got to the image of the mausoleum shown above that I felt my shield give way a little and the sharp edges of that image met with flesh.  The damage was not done in a single instant.  The initial damage felt more like a pin prick, but like glass shards in carpet fibers, over time they wear into the pile until the underpad is exposed and bare.

My initial thoughts were defensive: “Perhaps there were the ashes from the wood included with the ashes of the bodies, accounting for the large volume?”  I had seen cremation urns however, and had previously remarked that the volume of ashes was remarkably small.   I had many other such attempted defenses but they all failed.

Again, the reaction to this image was anything but immediate.  It was a slow process which occurred over several years.  Whenever I hear God exalted and people sing the virtues of religion, this image was in the back of my mind.

This image just didn’t mesh with my view of the universe — a universe with a caring God that would soon make everything alright.  Some things once done, can’t be undone, no matter what the explanation.  When I decided that there would be no explanation that I would accept for the mausoleum at Majdanek, I was forced to conclude that there could be no active caring God.  That one image changed my entire world view.  I’ve never been the same since.