RUTHFULLY YOURS

The sun set slowly, shining its last light against the barbed-wire fences of Auschwitz, and casting a shadow on the ground where unspeakable atrocities were committed, three-quarters of a century ago. Ron Susser and his 16-year-old daughter Zoe set foot onto the former concentration camp, crossing beneath a gate that bore the infamous inscription: arbeit macht frei, or “Work sets you free.”

After traveling all day, a group of 220 people from the Arlington diocese in Virginia had arrived at the camp as part of their World Youth Day pilgrimage to Krakow, Poland. The trip to Auschwitz was an emotional one for much of the group. But it held particular significance for Ron and Zoe.

During the Nazi regime, now-notable figures such as Anne Frank and her father, Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi, Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, and Elie Wiesel were imprisoned in Auschwitz. The concentration camp also detained many of Ron’s ancestors, only three of whom survived: his great aunt and his parents.

“My parents were liberated on May 1, 1945,” Susser said. “My father referred to that day as his second birthday.”

Auschwitz operated for less than five years, and yet the number of people murdered at the camp is estimated to be somewhere around 1.1 million. Only about 200,000 people who passed through the Auschwitz camps survived.

The group from the Arlington diocese arranged to visit Auschwitz on the first day of their trip to Poland for World Youth Day, a global encounter that took place all of last week and gathered 3 million Catholics in Krakow to see Pope Francis.

Neither Ron nor his daughter had ever visited Auschwitz before, though Ron had taken a trip to Poland with his mother and brother at the age of five.

“For me, it was very emotional and dramatic,” Ron said, “because we were able to see the sights we had always heard about. The camp is very well preserved, so you can get a good feeling for the buildings. There were signs identifying where various atrocities had happened. For instance, you could see the wall of death where so many people were shot.”

Zoe said the entire visit to Auschwitz was surreal. “Driving up, you see the barbed wire and it looks like a movie scene,” she said. “It was breathtaking, not just for us, but everyone walking around was so quiet. Everybody was very reverent. Just the way it looked made it a very emotional experience.”

Ron also noted that visiting the camp at dusk changed the entire feeling of the tour. “There was an interesting effect from the sun setting while we were there. . . . It was very different than if we had been there in the bright sunlight,” he said.

Ron said that once he had reached a certain age, his father began to tell him stories about the time he had spent at Auschwitz. “It’s beyond belief that people could do these things to other people,” Ron said.

Zoe also recalled her grandfather frequently talking about the concentration camp. “He always said he’d speak to anyone who would listen. He’d go to middle schools, high schools, synagogues and talk about his experience. My grandmother doesn’t talk about it at all, she’s totally the opposite.”

Ron’s father died two years ago, but his mother is still living at the age of 93.

“One of the reasons my parents survived was because they were young, and it was recognized that they could work,” Ron said. “If you were too old or too young or you had a child, [the Nazis] would immediately put you off to the side and shoot you.”

Zoe said she also enjoyed the events she and her father participated in as part of World Youth Day, particularly a small audience with the pope. “There were only about 5,000 people there, and the audience wasn’t advertised, which was really cool and made it really intimate,” she said.

On the last night of the week-long gathering, all 3 million people in attendance slept outside on the ground and woke up on Sunday morning to celebrate mass with Pope Francis.

“Everywhere you looked there were arms and legs, and we were just completely surrounded by people in sleeping bags,” Zoe said.

Holding this year’s World Youth Day in Krakow also bears significance, because Pope John Paul II was born in Poland and lived in Krakow for almost his entire adult life prior to becoming pope. He visited Poland a total of eight times during his papacy; the first of these visits took place in May 1979.

The entire world witnessed that trip, particularly due to the Soviet Union’s control over John Paul’s home country. His influential visit is commonly considered to have begun the peaceful demise of Communist rule in Poland.

As author George Weigel noted in Witness to Hope, the authoritative biography of John Paul II, the pope made a pilgrimage to Auschwitz during his papal visit, calling the camp the “Golgotha of the modern world” and a place “built for the negation of faith — faith in God and faith in man.”

Weigel went on:

An altar platform had been set up over the tracks on which the victims had arrived by train, some to be dispatched immediately to the gas chambers and crematoria, others to rude wooden huts to await execution. The cross on the platform was “crowned” with barbed wire, and from one of its arms hung the striped material used in making prisoner uniforms at the Auschwitz concentration camp. John Paul II walked through that place of incredible horror slowly, his head bowed, stopping at the monument with commemorative tablets memorializing the Nazis’ victims in their twenty languages.

Last Friday, Pope Francis made a visit to Auschwitz as well, where he met with a small group of Auschwitz survivors. He wanted his visit to be a silent pilgrimage; his only public words were those he wrote in the guest book — “Lord, have pity on your people. Lord, forgive so much cruelty.”

Roman Kent, a Polish Jew and survivor of Auschwitz who visited the camp at the same time as the pope, told NBC News: “We came to Auschwitz not knowing each other and 90 percent of us left Auschwitz in the form of white and blue smoke emanating from the chimneys.”

Ron and Zoe said their visit to Auschwitz had a unique effect on them due to their family’s history.

“Among our group of 220 people from the Arlington diocese, we figured we were probably the only people who had this type of experience at Auschwitz, perhaps even among the 3 million people from around the world who were there for World Youth Day,” Ron said. “It was a very unique opportunity to go and combine the experience of seeing the pope with my family’s experience.”

Last year, Weigel wrote a First Things article emphasizing John Paul II’s refusal to believe that some problems in the world cannot be fixed:

Those frightened by the seeming power of the wicked in the world today can take heart from what John Paul II said to young people in Cracow in June 1979: “Be afraid only of thoughtlessness and pusillanimity.” Be not afraid: his signature phrase, lived to the end, made him John Paul the Great.

As over 3 million young Catholics gathered in Krakow during a time of escalating violence across the world — and as the Sussers reflected on the horrific violence that affected their family decades ago — the words of the first and only Polish pope remained as timeless and important as ever.

— Alexandra DeSanctis is a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at National Review.