While being held at Auschwitz-Birkenau during WWII, seven prisoners were forced to reinforce walls in a school building near the camp, that the Nazis used for storage. On September 7, 1944, they wrote their names, ages, prisoner numbers, and hometowns on a scrap of paper, put it in a small bottle, and buried it in the concrete walls. Two of the men survived the war, but the fates of the other five are unknown. Considering the reputation of Auschwitz, it's most probable that they died there.
Why did these men hide that message? What were they facing that they felt the need to leave some evidence of their existence - and to what end? It wasn't like they were trying to communicate with someone. I'm sure they knew that it could be decades before that message might be found, if it ever could be. Maybe it wasn't even really meant to be found.
Five months after the message was hidden, the Nazis began destroying the gas chambers and other evidence of crimes because the Russian army was quickly approaching. Prisoners healthy enough to walk were forced on a death march towards Germany. On January 20, an order was issued to murder all remaining prisoners. But because of the chaos of the Nazi retreat, the order was never carried out. The death camp was liberated by the Russian army on January 27, 1945.
We have been told since childhood that "be sure your sins will find you out." It was madness for the Nazis to try to hide evidence of 1.1 million murders, but they certainly tried to. Maybe these seven men decided - just in case - to leave a message for God and whoever else would find it to stand as evidence against the horror they lived at Auschwitz.
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