Welcome to the Bloodlands

I used to think history mostly lived between the pages of my books—dates and battles, heroes and villains. Then, on my way to Ukraine, I passed through Poland, standing briefly on the grounds of Auschwitz. The same soil that once witnessed the Holocaust now bears silent testament to an evil so profound, mere words fail to capture it. Chiseled into one of the walls, I saw a line that made my blood run cold:

“If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness.”

The next day, I was standing in the midst of Ukraine’s war-torn landscape; those words followed me like a ghost. When mortars whistle overhead, I catch myself thinking of the horrors that once reigned in those camps. The land here is saturated with blood—no longer just from an era we promised we’d never repeat, but from today’s newly displaced, newly terrorized. And I recall a line from Elie Wiesel’s Night, echoing the numbness of witnessing indescribable cruelty:

“Never shall I forget that night … which has turned my life into one long night.”

I came to Ukraine armed with little more than my faith in human resilience. My dusty history degree taught me about nationalism—that seductive, fiery ideology that can unify a people while demonizing others into faceless enemies. Abraham Kuyper’s ethics once reassured me that every inch of creation, every human soul, belonged to God. Yet here, as in Auschwitz, it seems humankind brazenly stakes its own wicked claims, defying any notion of divine sovereignty with bullets and bombs.

I see pictures of broken families huddled in basements at Holostomel, the stench of antiseptic and fear filling their lungs. A mother cradles her child, eyes hollow from endless nights spent dodging shrapnel. A lawyer shows me a photograph of his destroyed home. You can almost feel the tears carving silent trails down his face—except they’re not there. Everyone I meet is strong and unrelenting. War and destruction have become the new normal, and they live in the face of it with a spirit so indomitable it could shame the strongest storm into silence. 

Yet these are the same images I once saw in black-and-white documentaries about the Holocaust—except now they’re in color, heartbreakingly real, and happening before my eyes.

My medical compassion pales in the face of such anguish, just as my historical knowledge pales in the face of this living, bleeding truth: nationalism can choke our capacity for empathy, turning ordinary neighbors into mortal foes. And so I stand, torn between the shock of seeing history repeat itself and the heartbreak of realizing we never quite buried the old hatreds.

Even when I close my eyes at night now, I can almost sense the heaviness of Auschwitz’s past blending with the present chaos in Ukraine. How many times can one patch of earth be soaked with innocent blood before we learn? How many times must we scrawl in the margins of history, “Never again,” only to watch as it happens again—and again?

Kuyper would urge me to cling to hope, to remember that no human sphere can claim the whole of existence. But in moments like these, the simplest question—“Where is God?”—threatens to break me. You read the words on that wall in Auschwitz: “If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness,” and you understand the depth of betrayal survivors felt. Now, as I tend to shattered bodies in Ukraine, it’s hard not to feel a similar cosmic abandonment.

Yet, I still hold onto slivers of faith. I see it in Anna—the Ukrainian refugee who goes to work every day to teach, even as her home is ransacked and burned. I hear it in the lectures of Karill—a teacher who proclaims truth louder than the air raid sirens. Maybe those flickers of compassion stand in defiance of every monstrous deed scarring this region—past and present.

I’m haunted by the knowledge that history never stays locked in textbooks. Auschwitz taught us what happens when we let hatred run rampant. Ukraine reminds us that the capacity for cruelty slumbers beneath every national banner. I can’t stop the war, just as I couldn’t undo the nightmares of the Holocaust. But I can still take a picture, write, and listen to grief-stricken voices. It’s a meager offering, yes—but perhaps, in the long arc of history, these small acts of mercy are the brightest lamps we can light against the onslaught of darkness.