The trip to Oswiecim is deceptively beautiful. The bus bumps across gently rolling Polish countryside, through forests, and within sight of farmers working their early summer fields. This past Friday, it was a particularly pleasant day for the journey.

That beauty seems perverse when one remembers how Hitler's armies translated the name of that town into German: Auschwitz. That one word may do more than any other to capture the inhuman darkness into which modern humanity can sink.

Auschwitz remains a place of profound darkness. Even on a beautiful June afternoon, the scent of evil lingers in cellblocks, barbed wire, and crematoria. It is an overwhelming experience to walk the fields in which a million and a half innocents lost their lives. You can't help but think for a moment that it would be better to wipe the place from the earth, allow nature to overgrow the ruins, and perhaps one day restore purity to what remains a foul place.

So why preserve, why remember, why take a day out of a perfectly enjoyable holiday to put oneself in a distinctly sombre mood? While everyone who walks through the crematoria of Auschwitz almost certainly has personal answers to these questions, two struck me in the midst of the pain of my visit.

First, it is a physical place of solemn memorial and powerful pilgrimage. We Christians are well familiar with memorial and pilgrimage, not as intellectual exercises, but as gritty tangible events. There is a rough and challenging physicality to journeying to Auschwitz, touching the cold stone of the gas chambers, walking the lonely steps that would have been the last for so many, and smelling what I can only describe as the sour odour of evil in the air. These sensory experiences bring home with chilling effect the reality of human suffering and remind Christians of the suffering of the cross in which we are all called to participate.

Second, through stories of courage in the face of death and compassion amidst so much evil, Auschwitz gives incredibly powerful testimony to our Christian belief that the light of Christ will never be overcome by the darkness of this world. Sixty years later the darkness of Auschwitz lingers, yet the stories of sacrifice and endurance by countless condemned men and women testify to the strength of God's light in this world. The overwhelming military force and dark ideology of the Third Reich could not overcome the power of the Light of the world.

So if you ever find yourself in southern Poland, make the pilgrimage to Auschwitz. Remember the million and a half innocents who met their deaths within its electrified barbed wire walls. Feel your knees go numb as you walk along the last steps of so many. Weep. And remember not only the darkness of that place, and so many others of our world, but the inextinguishable Light that burns through it all, and calls us to take up his work.

David Buckley

The Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland has published and continues to produce work on the issue of forgiveness and Dealing with the Past. For a list of resources and our recent contribution to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee consultation: "Reconciliation: Way of Dealing with Northern Ireland's Past" click here. If you wish to take this subject further please contact us.

Watch http://www.contemporarychristianity.org/ in the coming weeks for our new resource on the book of Esther: Power & Providence.