One Christmas in Poland

I’ve been saving this for Christmas Eve.

The story takes place in Auschwitz, 1941. On Christmas morning. It was cold in the concentration camp. Bitterly cold. Most of the prisoners inside were Polish, not Jewish. The Jews wouldn’t arrive until mid-1942.

The Polish prisoners were huddled together that morning, trying to keep from freezing. The temperature was low. There was frost on the ground.

The prisoners were ill equipped for the cold, clothed in striped pajamas made of thin cotton. Some prisoners used strips of torn fabric as makeshift mittens or boots.

Their hands and feet were cut and battered, from manual labor. Their clothes were soiled, from working in muddy trenches. Already, many of the Polish prisoners were suffering from frostbite. Some were dying of pneumonia. The lucky ones had already passed.

This morning, at sunup, their captors had given them a horrible Christmas present. In the roll-call square, the SS had erected a huge Christmas tree overnight. The tree was decorated with pretty electric lights. But beneath the boughs were the corpses of inmates who had either been worked to death, or had frozen to death.

The inmates saw the bodies of their loved ones, lying there, in contorted positions, with peaceful looks on their frozen faces.

Many prisoners rushed to their loved ones’ remains, but were kicked away. The others just looked on in vapid silence.

One Polish prisoner recalled that this Christmas tree was the Germans’ “present for the living.”

And the hits kept coming. The SS announced to the prisoners that anyone caught mentioning Christmas, even just a little bit, would be killed. They were also prohibited from singing Polish Christmas carols. Forbidden from exchanging trinkets as gifts.

That day, all prisoners were forced to march into the roll-call square, in the biting frost, to listen to a radio address of the Pope’s Christmas Eve proclamation. Forty-two prisoners froze to death, falling to their knees before the broadcast ended.

But I am not telling you this story to tell you about the horrors.

No. I’m telling you this story because that night, in Block no. 10a, while huddled together to keep from freezing, in the silence among inmates, tired from a full day of labor, dirty and underfed, without even the energy required to speak, something happened.

That’s when a lone tenor voice began to sing the Polish carol, “God is Born.”

Nobody remembers who started singing first. But the singing grew. One voice at a time. Children joined in. The rasped voices of old women sang along. The baritone voices of fathers and grandfathers chimed in too.

“Bóg się rodzi, moc truchleje,

Pan niebiosów, obnażony…” the song went.

The voices reverberated throughout the camp. Soon, all prisoners were singing the ancient hymn.

Here are the lyrics English:

“God is born and the powers of earth tremble,

“The Lord of Heaven lies naked,

“Fire is frozen, light is veiled…

“God is born. What do you have, earth?

“God gave up His happiness.

“He walked among His beloved people,

“Sharing in our hardships and toil.

“He suffered much, not little…”

After the final verse, prisoners rose and sang the Polish national anthem. Whereupon, everyone exchanged warm embraces and sobbed for a long time.

One prisoner recalls, “Such a [beautiful] moment never fades from my mind. That Christmas is fixed forever in my heart and memory.”

I pass this story on to you because I don’t want to forget what the inmates believed; that amidst the hell of life, amidst the pain of living, amidst the cruelty of earth, God is born.

And that’s Christmas.