July 22 used to be a state holiday in Communist Poland marking the day that the traitors imported by the Soviet Army installed themselves in Lublin in 1944 as the “Provisional Government of National Unity” and would proceed, for the next 45 years, to torture Poland with their pretensions to legitimacy. Today, July 22 is no longer even remembered. The national holidays are November 11 (the recovery of independence in 1918, which the Communists had made illegal to observe) and May 3 (Mary, Queen of Poland and Polish Constitution Day, obviously another reason why Communists would be allergic to it).

I remember July 22 because I started visiting Poland in the 1980s, as communism was entering its final years. Like death before the Last Day, however, it still had some sting. I would attend the Summer School of Polish Language and Culture (still in existence) at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL). KUL was the first university to reopen in Poland after World War II and the only free and Catholic university behind the whole Iron Curtain — from Berlin to Vladivostok — from 1944 until 1989. I remember July 22 because, obviously, it was a big day for the Reds in Lublin, which was why the patriots of KUL always made sure we were outside of Lublin on that day.

KUL would take us to Kazimierz Dolny. Kazimierz is a scenic Renaissance town about 45 miles west of Lublin, on the Vistula (Wisła) River. Today, tourists go there to marvel at its historic center, built in Kazimierz’s days of prosperity. From 1500-1650, Kazimierz grew wealthy from the grain trade along the river. It is one of the best examples (along with nearby Zamość) of Renaissance style in Poland. The city hosted a large Jewish community. Visitors go to the parish church, the remains of Kazimierz castle, and the neighboring streets to see those historic traces. As a summer language and culture program, KUL wanted to show us Poland’s millennial Christian culture, especially so we didn’t have to see what the Communists called “culture” in Lublin. I first went to Kazimierz 37 years ago, in 1987.

What impressed me the most and has remained with me was a visit to the nearby Franciscan Church. It, too, is a beautiful church, dating from 1591, situated atop a hill. Known as the “Polish Nazareth,” the Franciscans assumed care of the church in the early 1600s. It is designated a sanctuary because of its painting of Our Lady of the Annunciation, to which many miracles have been attributed over the centuries.

But what struck me was also another side of the church’s history. During World War II, the Germans took over the Franciscan church. The Gestapo turned the cloister into a regional prison, torturing and killing people there. Because the way to the church was up a hill and the Nazis did not want to get their nice boots dirty, they pilfered the headstones from the local Jewish cemetery to “pave” the path.

Of course, I knew about the Holocaust. I also knew that Polish Catholics suffered under the Nazis: 3,000,000 Polish Catholics, 3,000,000 Polish Jews died at German hands. But July 22, 1987, made that experience tangible. It would be made even more real when we later visited the German concentration camp in Lublin — Majdanek — to stare into a dome that contained the ashes of thousands of human beings. To walk through barracks that — unlike how the Germans arranged Dachau — were not overly  sanitized. To see rooms full of people’s suitcases. Or a stack of dentures.

As a prolife Catholic, those events made clear to me what the culture of death meant. And, contrary to some of the mainstream media, it was also clear to me that the Holocaust — the murder of Jews — and the killing of Christians by the Nazis were not works of a baptized Austrian housepainter but of practical atheists, pagans worshiping a fake “Christianity” overlaid with Nordic paganism but basically Nietzschean will-to-power.

To see a little country church, a 400-year old shrine tended by Franciscans — an order clearly dedicated to peace — turned into a factory of death, where people wailed and died, was heart-moving. On that hill the hatred of human beings was so great that their tombstones were pilfered to humiliate even the dead and efface their memory. What struck me then, and remains with me, is the awareness that, on that little hill in what was then a largely forgotten town behind the Iron Curtain, two great faiths — Judaism and Christianity — met in interreligious encounter.

Interreligious encounter in suffering is a lesson that should teach all faithful Jews and Christians to return to Him who is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Return to Him who breathed life into man, making him “a living being” (Gen 2:7), a living being who, fully alive, proclaims the glory of God.