Krakow, Poland

Laura had a fall break from school so we hopped on a night train after my saturday game and woke up the next morning in Krakow, Poland. The old town center in the picture above is very beautiful. At the train station we immediately signed up for a trip that day to the famous Wieliczka salt mine and also a tour of nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.



The salt mines were huge and desended to the depths of 135 meters. There were many statues carved into the rock salt and large chapel in the middle with carvings of different scenes of Jesus' ministry.



The above picture was the only picture we took together. It was at the wierdest restaurant i've ever been to. The outside caught our attention with a huge picture of a meat platter (ok, maybe more my attention than laura's). We walked in and a guy in a tux escorted us down the stairs. There was another guy playing the paino and there were beautiful antique decorations. You would think fine dining right? No, you had to go up to the bar yourself to order your food and pay for it. We were very confused.

Auschwitz


This the entrance to Auschwitz concentration camp that everyone had to enter and exit through. The German phrase on the gate "Arbeit Macht Frei" means "work brings freedom" or "work makes you free". A cruel joke.



Laura is standing in the middle of the camp on the right and left are the barracks, which look on the outside like they did during the Holocaust, but all but one have been turned into museums.





This particular barrack had a room behind glass that contained 2 tons of human hair! I found it ironic that they had to have the title “material proofs”, but the Nazis destroyed as much evidence as they could. I became interested and researched a little on people who deny the holocaust. There is real group of scholars who say it never happened. Amazing huh? This is despite, as researchers Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman wrote, an overwhelming amount of evidence including:
Written documents—hundreds of thousands of letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches, articles, memoirs, and confessions.
Eyewitness testimony—accounts from survivors, Jewish Sonderkommandos (who were forced to help load bodies from the gas chambers into the crematoria in exchange for the promise of survival), SS guards, commandants, local townspeople, and even high-ranking Nazis who spoke openly about the mass murder of the Jews
Photographs—including official military and press photographs, civilian photographs, secret photographs taken by survivors, aerial photographs, German and Allied film footage, unofficial photographs taken by the German military.
The camps themselves—concentration camps, work camps, and extermination camps that still exist in varying degrees of originality and reconstruction
Inferential evidence—population demographics, reconstructed from the pre-World War II era; if six million Jews were not killed, what happened to them all?
(source Wikipedia)
But it’s clear that most of the deniers are anti-Semitic and have other vested interest for denying. i.e. Iranian President

For me, this struck me is a reminder about people’s rejections of the evidences of Christianity. As in Luke 16:31, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' No matter how much evidence is given, some people they will still deny the Jesus as Lord. Unlike the holocaust, which happened just over 60 years ago, Jesus lived close to 2000 years ago. But there is still written documents (Bible, historian Josephus, etc.), eyewitness testimony (I Cor 15:6, “After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.”), and loads of inferential evidence (too much to name here, but I’ll do one. The early church had to fight against Gnostics and false teachers and the writers of the gospels wouldn’t have made the early church leaders, Peter for example, look like so foolish unless it actually went down that way). Ok, one more, Jesus’ resurrection, like the holocaust, has never been recanted by any the eye witnesses even though many of the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection had to die horrible deaths which was based around their testimony that Jesus rose from the dead and they had seen it. Many people die for what they believe to be the truth, but how many people die terrible deaths for something they know to be lie?