Last autumn I visited the notorious death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland where it is estimated some 1.25 million Jews from all over occupied Europe were exterminated, and, as our Polish guide reminded us, many non-Jewish Poles suffered and died. It was raining as we stood in the wooden stables where the male prisoners lived – the rings for tethering the horses were still on the walls! In winter the temperature could sink to -20 degrees. It was an image of absolute misery. The Nazis dominated virtually the whole of Europe and this was what was in store for any others they would conquer.
In the months that have followed my visit the dark of winter has set in and the ravages of the recession bite deeper. More people are out of work and levies and taxes burden us, cutbacks in health, education, welfare, and entitlements plague us, and I hear the cries protesting that they do not deserve this and will not take it lying down. Nobody deserves this kind of treatment, but then the prisoners in Auschwitz did not deserve it either. You look at small babies in prams and think they will spend all their working lives paying off the debts we have run up bailing out our financial institutions.
And where is God in all this? Does He not hear the cries of the poor? In these days after Christmas we need to go back to what we just celebrated: that Christ came to live in our world, share our privations and die in an unjust system. The stables in Auschwitz were no better than the stable in Bethlehem. Christ knows what it is to be cold, an outcast and naked. But what he always warned his disciples against was losing hope. He would talk of his coming death, but he always ended on the note that he would rise again. Maybe they did not then understand what he was talking about, but we do, and we too need to hear his message of hope and his enduring promise to be with us.
After my visit to Auschwitz I remembered again a speech I once came across. It was the speech King George VI gave at Christmas in 1939 when it did look all-too-possible that all Europe might indeed be occupied by the Nazis. The King was not a compelling speaker but the poem he quoted was inspiring: ‘I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied, ‘Go out in to the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be better than light, and safer than a known way.’