“You entered here by the big gate. You will leave through the chimney.” —Nazi SS guard
When you walk further past the barracks of Auschwitz, past the palpable fury, and past the railroad tracks that split Birkenau in two, a deeper, darker question rises: Where was God?
I’m not trying to work through an abstract theological exercise, because it’s a question I felt in my chest when I looked down at the stretch of rail tracks where families were unloaded from cattle cars. I hear it while looking at the piles of children's shoes in a glass case, in the scorched remains of crematoria that burned 24/7.
If my God is all-powerful and all-loving, then where was He when smoke rose from the chimneys?
I know this question has been asked by people much, much smarter and wiser than I am, and for that, I hope for your forgiveness in this simple column.
This question was something survivors wrestled with long before we ever did. Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he entered Auschwitz; he later wrote that he saw God hanging from the gallows. Other people said they lost their faith the moment the smell of burning flesh reached them.
Who can blame them when the silence of Heaven in such an evil place felt deafening?
There are no easy answers; some Christians tried explaining it as our gift of free will gone wild; some Jews saw it as punishment or exile, while others declared that if God was indeed there, He was powerless, and if He was all-powerful, then He was absent.
The camp grew into a kind of spiritual no man’s land where every explanation feels thin, and every answer unsatisfying.
Despite everything against them, there were those who clung to their faith despite the darkness. They prayed in whispers, reciting the Psalms under their breath, choosing to die with prayers on their lips rather than surrender their hope. Some believed that God wasn’t absent, but was there, suffering alongside them inside the gas chambers, in starvation, and on the gallows: A God sharing their pain rather than sparing them from it.
It’s a mystery that doesn’t resolve my anger, but it complicates it, saying the silence might not have been from abandonment, but from an act of endurance.
But often the question of God overshadows the question of man. Maybe the real scandal isn’t divine silence, but human obedience: God didn’t shovel children into ovens, He didn’t draft the train schedules, or ordered silence from the people surrounding the camps.
It was men, exercising their free will by stripping civilization of conscience.
The barracks have accused mankind long before accusing God, and there’s the clear indictment that when man decides to play God, something far worse than the beast is created.
The barracks accuse mankind before they accuse God. And the indictment is clear: when man decides to play God, he becomes something far worse than the beast.
Auschwitz shattered the faith of some people forever. And for others, it provided a reason to hold on to their faith even tighter than before, because it provides the only explanation for why good and evil exist and matter.
For me, when I stood there, the question swelling inside me didn’t find resolution. Instead, it deepened, reminding me that faith isn’t clean and definitely isn’t simple; it’s something that's wrestled in the dirt where the smoke rises, leaving prayers unanswered.
Maybe the point lies in that conflict rolling in the dirt: that the barracks are there as a means to keep us asking, because maybe the greater danger is forgetting the question.
Despite everything I’ve written, I have to ask again, why did my God seemingly abandon so many in such great need?
I don’t claim to know, and I would be arrogant to think I would have the answer when so many have struggled with that question. But what I do know is that asking is necessary for my faith, because the alternative: shrugging, forgetting, excusing, hands silence the victory.
And the barracks demand more of us than that.
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