How do we speak of the unspeakable? How do we name the horrors of the Holocaust without breaking under the weight of those words? Six million lives reduced to ash, humanity itself gutted and burned. The camps, the chimneys, the cries—echoes that will never fade, shadows that stretch across generations. We look to heaven and ask, Where was God?
They tell us it was free will, that God would not strip humanity of its power to choose, even when those choices led to unspeakable violence. They say He was there, in the courage of the few who hid their neighbors, in the trembling hands passing crusts of bread through barbed wire, in the tear-streaked prayers whispered into the dark. But is that enough? Can that answer hold under the weight of a child ripped from her mother’s arms, under the smoke of lives extinguished in chambers of cruelty?
Where was He when the trains rattled across Europe, packed with the condemned? Where was He when the fires burned, not to warm, but to destroy? Where was He when hatred marched in uniform and silence stood by, complicit? We ask, again and again, because we cannot bear the silence of the heavens when the earth is screaming.
What do we tell our children when they ask why? When they stare at black-and-white photographs of skeletal faces, eyes wide with suffering too great for words? Do we tell them the world looked away? Do we tell them that evil does not always wear horns—that it can sit at a desk, shuffle papers, and call itself efficient? Do we tell them about fear, about indifference, about how quickly humanity forgets?
We tell them the truth, because to lie is to betray the dead. We tell them that this happened, that people allowed it to happen, and that it must never happen again. We tell them to see the world clearly, to refuse the easy comforts of ignorance. We tell them to speak, to act, to stand against hatred wherever it appears—because hatred never walks alone.
God did not stop Auschwitz, but maybe He wept. Maybe He turned His face away, unable to bear the agony. Or maybe He stood there, silent in the flames, taking on the suffering alongside those who perished. We do not know. We cannot know. And yet, we are left with the ashes, with the question of what we will do with them.
To prevent another Auschwitz, we must refuse to forget. We must name the evil, not just in history, but in our own hearts. We must teach our children that humanity is capable of both horror and greatness, that they must choose to be the latter. We must keep the stories alive, even when they hurt, even when they break us, because memory is a fragile shield, but it is the only one we have.
Where was God? Perhaps in the same place He is now—in the fragile hands of those who dare to hope, in the voices that cry out for justice, in the hearts that refuse to let darkness have the final word. Perhaps God is not the answer but the question: What will you do?
© R Gordon Zyne