This little book is not a history of the camp and not a tour. The first duty of a Christian who comes to this ground is to tell the truth about who was murdered here. About 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Around nine in every ten were Jews. Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners and others died here too. Pictures of a gate or a cell become false when they replace those numbers.
Catholics died here as well. Maximilian Kolbe, prisoner 16670, stepped forward at roll-call and took another man’s place in the basement of Block 11. Edith Stein, a daughter of Israel who had become a Carmelite, was killed at Birkenau with her sister after the Dutch bishops protested. Priests whispered Mass without a chalice. None of this makes the camp a shrine. It makes it a place where the Church also has dead to name, and where she must kneel without rearranging the graves.
John Paul II came in 1979, went down to the cell, stood at Birkenau, and said that other victories had been won here in other tongues. Later the Church learned, slowly, that a convent on this particular edge of the ground could wound the people whose dead lie here first.
Read it slowly. Hope, in these pages, is not a mood. It is the fact that a man can still give his life for a stranger, and that memory can still refuse to become a slogan.
A Silent Homilies booklet. Written to be read in one or two sittings.