Under the Broken Sky

The train tracks that led into Auschwitz end in a gatehouse, that, despite the millions killed in and around it, is surprisingly small and not nearly as threatening-looking as one might think. That's how people who have been there describe it and how it looked in the NYT today.

All my life, I have been fascinated by places where huge numbers of people breathed their last. I looked once at the rolling farmland and woods of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, and couldn't help thinking that for thousands, this was their last landscape of the planet Earth.

Earlier I had seen the shrapnel-filled fields of Verdun, where a million soldiers died in World War I. The day was misty, the earth winter-barren, and the thousands of crosses of the dead climbed the hills into the far distance. With the pill-boxes still there, and the outlines of the trenches never to be overgrown, it looked for all the world like "All Quiet on the Western Front."

But most places of mass death are not like that. The fields of Manassas, as a matter of fact, are beautiful and have had to be protected from the rampant development of Northern Virginia.

I went there and laid on the ground, the blood long since absorbed by the rich soil. I looked at the sky, the same sky so many looked up at before death. It hasn't changed, just as the sky at Auschwitz is not forever stained Crimson. God isn't evil, only indifferent.