I was born in Poland ten years after the war. Brought up on documentaries and films about wartime atrocities, concentration camps and the holocaust. They fed my childhood nightmares.

Two years ago I and my partner Michael, who is an Australian of Jewish origin, decided to go on a pilgrimage to Europe. As a part of it we planned to go to O¶wiêcim, better known to the world as Auschwitz. In the past I never would have thought I would want to go there. And yet we went.

On the way back we found ourselves in the local bus going to Kraków. The driver was busy chatting up a young woman sitting on the seat behind him.

Above his head a sign - O¶wiêcim. Black letters, white background. Stark contrast. The bus had just left O¶wiêcim where Michael and I spent a long day mostly in silence. And now this word staring at me. Black and white like heaven and hell. O¶wiêcim. The word came alive as if I was seeing it for the first time .

Maybe it is because I have spoken English for the last 20 years, that I was able to see my own language in a new light. Instead of seeing the sign as the name of the place where the horror of Auschwitz concentration camp took place, I saw its literal meaning. Po¶wiêciæ means to sanctify. To sanctify is to restore to wholeness, to make holy, to heal in the deepest sense.

Po¶wiêcimy, po¶wiêcim or o¶wiêcim as some folks in the country would still say, implies future tense and we as the subject. O¶wiêcim - we will sanctify.

The jarring discord between the literal meaning of the word and what it has come to represent hit me. Such a contrast with the beauty and peace of Chartres that we had left a week ago and yet I felt silence and stillness in both.

O¶wiêcim is now a place of pilgrimage for many. The place that is a symbol of the worst that humanity is capable of. A place that represents what seems impossible to forgive and heal. And yet within its very name there is a promise that we will.

Maryla Rose

Sydney 27th Jan 2005