The Prisoners Who Hid from Freedom

On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers pushed through the gates of Auschwitz. They expected to find the dead. Instead, they found seven thousand survivors — skeletal, hollow-eyed, wrapped in thin blankets against the Polish winter. The soldiers called out that liberation had come. The war, for them, was over.

But many prisoners did not move. Some crouched behind bunks. Others pressed themselves against walls, trembling. A few wept without sound. They had lived so long inside death's machinery that freedom felt more terrifying than captivity. The open gate was incomprehensible. One survivor later recalled, "We had forgotten that the world could be any different. When they told us we were free, we did not know what the word meant anymore."

The news was too vast for the moment. Liberation did not arrive with celebration — it arrived with shock, silence, and a fear that bordered on holy dread.

Mark tells us that when the women found the tomb torn open and heard the staggering announcement — "He has risen; He is not here" — they fled in trembling and astonishment. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. This was not the fear of danger. This was the fear of a reality so enormous it could not yet be carried in human words. The Almighty had shattered the last wall, and like those prisoners blinking in the winter light, the women stood at the threshold of a freedom almost too great to enter.