Almost 50 years to the day in 1965, I, along the a group of young Polish Christians, walked into the worst death camp ever devised by modern man, thus opening my eyes forever to the reality and horror of evil, perpetrated by ostensibly civilized men and women who listened to Wagner, Bach and Beethoven at night with their families while exterminating millions of Jews, whom they regarded as sub-human, by day.

These men were not ignorant savages from the jungles of Borneo, nor rampaging Boko Haran from Northern Nigeria, or ISIL thugs. This was a systematic extermination of a people who were smarter, brighter, and better educated than they were, and for whom they harbored such deep resentment from a bankrupt ideology that they slaughtered millions without a second thought.

As I wandered through the death camp, it still had the smell of death about it 20 years after WWII had ended. There was a terrible deadness about the place. There was still no animal life to be seen or heard anywhere near the camp, especially bird life. Animals apparently smell death better than humans I am told and will stay away unless trained to do otherwise.

After about 15 minutes into viewing the "housing" of those about to die, I noticed that some of the young people with me had begun to cry and they asked to leave. I should have left with them, but I could not. I had grown up with a profound sense of man's sinfulness (and my own) and the reality of evil in the world, but I had never really experienced it first-hand. I could not leave. I was deeply fascinated, perhaps, macabrely so. I wanted to know and understand why it is Christians do believe that sin and the offer of salvation is so important in a world torn by sin and suffering.

I wandered through rooms filled with hair, glasses, and gold fillings on display behind thick glass with enormous pictures of dead bodies along with photos of those emaciated victims who were still alive. Those images will remain with me for the rest of my life. To this day, I cannot attend the Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington even though some of my family have visited it. I cannot fully explain why. It seems oddly second hand.

I walked over mounds of earth now under grass where thousands of men, women, and children lie buried. There is little or no record of who they were. Many were shot, but gas was quicker, faster and cheaper. Zyklon B was the "final solution" for the Nazis in their genocidal campaign of extermination.

As I left the camp, I had an opportunity to write something in a Book of Remembrance. I simply wrote, "Man's inhumanity to man. Only God can punish those who did these terrible deeds."

Auschwitz or Oswiecim could kill 4,000 every 24-hours, I subsequently learned. Numbers were unimportant to the Nazis. Hitler's extermination of all Jews in Europe and, possibly the world, was his goal. He cared little for numbers. It was all part of his grand design.

Today, Auschwitz has become a place of pilgrimage for the curious, but do they really understand what draws them? Some perhaps want to make atonement for the horror done there; others are just tourists in a country they may never visit again.

Years later, I would write my dissertation on The Idea of Man in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and recall the millions herded into the Soviet Gulags to die, among them a young Communist who would survive and later recant this ideology and become a Christian. Here is one famous line I never forgot; "Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts."

Of course, there have been other genocidal atrocities including the tens of millions who died in the 1950s in Mao's China, and millions in Cambodia in the 1970s. In 1994, 800,000 men, women, and children perished in the Rwandan genocide, perhaps as many as three quarters of the Tutsi population. At the same time, thousands of Hutu were murdered because they opposed the killing campaign and the forces directing it. One hundred thousand died in Bosnia with 2.2 million displaced. The insanity continues to this day in Nigeria (by the Boko Haran), in Iraq where Christians have been virtually wiped out, and in Syria, as well as the "Darfur Genocide" where over 480,000 people have been killed with over 2.8 million people displaced. The killings, which began in 2003 and continue still today, is the first genocide in the 21st century.

Back to "civilized" countries and we are see once again the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. In France Jews are again feeling threatened with thousands leaving Europe for Israel.

It is 70 years later and things have not changed. Liberal fantasies of utopia on earth still persist. Mankind still desperately wants to believe in the basic goodness of itself, but it is a myth. Malcolm Muggeridge called it "The Great Liberal Death Wish." People desperately want to believe that we can have peace on earth and goodwill towards men based on nothing but economic advancement and political goodwill. The Enlightenment that led us to believe that human reason and personal freedom would bring about a civilized world still remains a distant fantasy.

As Cook writes, "Divorced from God, human reason becomes just a tool for using the world. The limitations of the human condition can be transcended with efficient technology. Divorced from truth, freedom becomes the will to power."

We live in a time of technolatry -- the idolatry of technology as the French philosopher Jacques Ellul author of The Technological Society pointed out. We have not outgrown or educated our sinful natures into civilized beings. We need a Redeemer, not a liberal optimist.

As the American philosopher George Santayana observed, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And as Cook notes, "Those who cannot understand Auschwitz are condemned to rebuild it."

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