Overwhelming. Awful. Incomprehensible. What people are capable of! What sophisticated machinery. Efficient, chilly, cold and effective. 1500 people were murdered every day in the well-oiled machine that was Auschwitz during the Second World War. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Polish, German and others who did not fit the ideology of the Third Reich.
At the end of January we traveled to this 'Golgotha ​​of this time.'

It was the third time it had been organized: a trip to Auschwitz on Memorial Day week. A group of more than 20 students took part. Half are international students from Delft, Leiden and The Hague, the other half Dutch students.

This year marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp. As a result, this horrific terror of the near history received more media attention than in previous years. But actually it deserves this stage every year, to touch us, lest we forget and ... work to prevent the repetition of such a superhuman drama.

Getting hit doesn't mean we have the certainty to turn it around. Perhaps 'Auschwitz' is too big a wound to be healed. But we should not look away from this wound, and the wounds that were or are still being beaten in line with Nazism.

Indifference is totally 'out of the question' in this regard. Evil should never have the last word. The good must be lived, even if it seems to be losing. People must resist, rebel, find wisdom and strength against the folly of the devastating exclusion, categorization and dehumanization of (other) people ...

We were warned that it could happen again today. The international company (including students from Africa and South America) gave inside information about the conditions in their country, which testified to dictatorships still deeply wounding, but also that people still (despite social media and so-called free press) hide behind that they don't know ... So it happens again, and again ...

One of the participants therefore called the trip a 'life-changing event'. She wants to work for justice in her home country, but she also knows that she must do it carefully. The security service is lurking. But 'this never again' felt like an appeal to continue her life differently from the emerging realization that life, a human life, is not a right, but a privilege.
A lesson to live by.

Walther