In the spring of 2007 I traveled to Central Europe the first time. There I met Miro—a bohemian
soul shaped by war in his youth. While I had grown up with khakis, youth group, and David
Letterman, Miro had survived air raids in Belgrade. He wore scarves and questions, while I
carried certainties.
We journeyed to a Christian retreat in the Carpathians, stopping first at Auschwitz—a literary
pilgrimage for me, but something deeper for him. We walked through corridors of death and
memory: Kolbe’s cell, Mengele’s surgical room, piles of shoes and hair and prostetics. I feared I
had brought Miro, an agnostic, to a godless place. But after hours of silence, he finally said,
“There must be a God for this kind of thing to be made right.”
His words were not argument but a cry of moral realism—a cry for God’s creative justice deeper
than revenge. It was a longing that echoed the ancient prophets and philosophers, pointing to a
God not absent from suffering but present in it. Miro didn’t find proof of God’s absence at
Auschwitz, but the necessity of God’s presence.
I remembered theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who found faith in a POW camp through Christ’s
cry from the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” It was the voice of a God who enters pain.
And if the gospel doesn’t speak hope even under Auschwitz’s gate, it’s no gospel at all.
Hell, perhaps, is not just beyond—it is among: in camps, in warzones, in the systems that crush
the weak. And Christ, crucified, descends into those hells still. He walks the ruins, weeps with
the broken, breathes among the bones.
He doesn’t conquer this world with force, but with His wounds. Not with vengeance, but with
love. He descends into our deepest places—and from there, He rises.
Maranatha,
Jordy
