'Do you know why Poland is called Po-lan-ya?, asked an Auschwitz survivor who accompanied Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last week to the death camps.

"Tell me," I replied.

"Because it stands for 'here' (po) 'slept' (lan) 'God' (Ya)." Indeed, the question of where God was while His children were being tortured, humiliated, murdered and incinerated throughout Europe has bothered - and continues to bother - theologians and ordinary people, religious and not, for the last 60 years.

Some talk about hester panim, that God hid His face. Others link the Holocaust to the establishment of Israel, saying that it was some kind of wake-up call for Jews to return to Zion. Others view it as a punishment for sins, while still others argue that it is all part of the mysterious ways of the divine that the human mind simply cannot fathom.

And, finally, there are those who say Auschwitz proves there is no God, because a merciful God would not have allowed Auschwitz to happen.

One of the most poignant moments at the closing ceremony of the March of the Living last Thursday in Birkenau, which Sharon attended, was when Tel Aviv Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, a Buchenwald survivor, said that while a child during the Holocaust he was always dogged by one simple question: "Why?"

"I remember thinking almost all the time about one word," Lau said. "The question was why. Why? What was my crime, why do I suffer, why am I freezing, why am I starving, why am I so frightened all the time?"

Why, asked Lau, was his father beaten with a rubber hose a meter long? Lau said that for "this word, with the question mark, I never found an answer."

And that is precisely what made his words so poignant. Here was a former chief rabbi of Israel, an articulate speaker, a Torah scholar, not taking the expected path and proffering an easy answer. He simply let the question hang there - as it must.

Once Auschwitz demanded attention, noise, action - by the world, by the Allies - but it was not forthcoming. As Sharon pointedly said in his speech, "Remember the silence of the world."

Now, however, Auschwitz calls out for silence, but too many people are talking - about the meaning of Auschwitz, presuming to be able to explain it, to know what its lessons are. Lau, by not answering his own "why" question, showed the proper respect for the silence that the place deserves.

Auschwitz needs silence now, but doesn't find it.

THERE WAS something powerful about the spectacle of 21,000 people - many carrying Israeli flags - walking through this miserable place, singing Am Yisrael hai ("The Jewish people lives"), precisely at the place where Hitler tried to end Jewish history.

But with 21,000 people, with all the power that image conveys, come cellphones, arguments about who sits where, idle chatter, laughter, gossip and cursing. This is all the by-product of so many people in one place, and is as inevitable as the cacophony of light-hearted conversation in a house of mourning. It feels terribly awkward and out of place at the location where 1.1 million Jews, and another 400,000 non-Jews, were slaughtered.

The place demands silence.

"Lift our eyes and look at the sky," Buchenwald survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel told the gathering in that somber, sad voice of his.

"It is a cemetery, an invisible cemetery - the largest in history. For the first time in Jewish history, the victims were not brought to a Jewish burial," he said.

"Look around you and you wonder how entire communities, multitudes of human beings, all descendents of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were brought here in atrocious conditions to suffer and vanish in such a small geographical
place.

"How could 10,000 to 12,000 human beings be eliminated in one day and one night? Try to close your eyes and try to listen, somehow, to the prayers of the old and the laments of the young as they were walking to their deaths. Try to imagine as they still hover in the air waiting to be received by the celestial tribunal."

Indeed, the small size of the place was striking. One could imagine that a place of such boundless evil would extend forever. But it doesn't, it is finite, fenced in by the infamous, foreboding barbed wire. Auschwitz seemed peculiarly small. Birkenau appeared much larger, but still not as vast as would seem necessary to carry out such crimes.

While the marchers from around the world converged on Birkenau from Auschwitz, a powerful public address system played the tape of a voice reading name after name after name after name of Jews killed there.

The deep voice plodded on without mercy: "Diamit, Yata, Latvia; Ritman, Yehudit, Latvia; Cohen, Wolf, Latvia; Kravitz, Ya'acov, Latvia."

It was an endless recitation of names that entered the ears and penetrated the mind and unnerved you until you wanted to shout, "Enough, stop already."

As the names were read, pictures of the horrors committed at this place flashed on large video screens. You saw a picture of smoke billowing from large chimneys and saw some trees in the background, and then looked around and identified the line of trees that appeared in the picture. You saw pictures of humiliated women forced to stand naked before their tormentors, and looked to your right, where it took place. You saw pictures of emaciated people in wooden barracks, and then lifted your head and saw where they slept, stacked liked animals.

Pictures of the Holocaust have, for me, always had an otherworldly quality - not of this place, not of this time. But seeing them while standing at "ground zero" removed that element. The Holocaust didn't happen on another planet, as author and Holocaust survivor Yehiel Dinur (Katzetnik) once wrote. It happened precisely here, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a real place, with identifiable marks, and trees and flowers and mud and birds chirping.

"This was not a different planet, this was the same planet," Lau said. "It's too easy to solve the problem by saying it was a different planet. Didn't they [the Nazis] hear the same music, read the same books, smell the same flowers, raise their own babies - and throw ours to the flames?"

At Auschwitz you see those flowers, and realize the planet where this all took place is very much our own. The place looks very much of this earth - indeed, too much of this earth.

IN THE springtime, the 45-minute bus ride from the airport in Katowice to Auschwitz is stunning in its beauty: lush green fields; dense forests populated by thin, white-barked, birch trees; little pristine-looking villages; cemeteries with large crosses and garlands of flowers upon the graves; patches of yellow wild flowers.

If you can stop yourself from imagining petrified Jews hiding in these same forests, or Nazis tracking them down with long-toothed Dobermans and then hanging their human prey from the same trees, then this countryside looks inspiring - God's handiwork in nature.

Mockingly, it is amid this beauty that Auschwitz-Birkenau is set - the epitome of everything ugly that the human race is capable of - man's handiwork on earth.

One of the survivors who traveled with Sharon was Ze'ev Factor, who was transported from his hometown of Lodz, along with his mother and younger sister, in 1944. He was almost 18.

The first Nazi order when they arrived at the camp, Factor remembered, standing within eye-shot of where they stood upon arrival 61 years ago, was that the women were commanded to go to one side, the men to the other.

"My younger sister, she was 11, broke out in bitter weeping. I told her not to cry, that it wouldn't help," Factor said. "She said that she was not afraid, and that she would be together with our mother. 'But you are alone,' she said. 'How will you manage?'

"Today, 60 years later, I stand here. They were killed an hour after they arrived, sent to the gas chambers, their bodies burned on the same day."

This was Factor's fifth time back to the site of his personal anguish. The first time was in 1988.

"I wanted to be at the place where I last saw my mother and sister. To stand there, to commune with their memories," he said.

To commune with memories sounds like a spiritual impulse. Oddly, this site, where such evil was perpetrated, now seemed to take on an almost spiritual
quality.

Auschwitz is a site where kaddish - a religious prayer - is said with added fervor, even by the non-religious. It is a place where the afternoon prayer, minha, is recited with additional intent, and where non-religious journalists, who would be highly reticent to do so in any other setting anywhere else in the world, take part in a minyan.

What is it about the site - a site where some argue religion died, where God slept - that brings out these impulses? Perhaps it is because it is a graveyard, and graveyards are deemed consecrated, hallowed ground.

Perhaps it is because listening to the El Maleh Rahamim ("God full of mercy") prayer for the dead at this site seems like the only appropriate response; all other words, emotions or feelings are bound to fall short.

The religious impulse has many faces.

There can be a sublime feeling of spirituality after the birth of a child, or after surviving an illness, or upon seeing the wonders of the world.

The spiritual impulse sparked at Auschwitz, however, is neither lofty nor sublime nor one of thanksgiving - it is one of anger and defiance. Answering a fervent amen to kaddish at Auschwitz is shouting to the Nazis that they did not win, and shouting to God that faith remains despite the horrors.

WHEN THE cantor at last week's ceremony chanted El Maleh Rahamim, it was less a chant than a yell. His roar ricocheted off the barracks and ascended on high. It was an angry prayer, recited from an angry place.

But anger - if left unbridled - can be destructive. Even at a place like this, it must be channeled.

"The truth is that in this place, we have all the reason in the world to give up on humanity, but we will not give up on humanity," Wiesel said. "We have all the reason in the world to choose anger, and we shall not yield to anger. Hope is all we have, and hope is all we can give to one another."

That's one approach. Lau had another.

Recalling the first trip he took to Buchenwald in 1991, he said that he went into a room once used as a torture chamber and found etched into the wall five Hebrew letters spelling the Yiddish word for revenge, "nekuma."

"What is that nekuma," Lau asked. "Is nekuma to throw a rock? I can't; is it to shoot at a living person? I can't. But he wrote 'nekuma,' and he wrote what many people - millions - thought.

"The nekuma is that we are here," Lau bellowed. "The nekuma is that we are home; the nekuma is that we have a homeland; the nekuma is that we have a Guardian of Israel; the nekuma is that we are a living people; the nekuma is that we came here with a blue and white flag with a Magen David to say that in every generation there rise up those who seek our destruction, but the Holy One Blessed be He saves us from their hands, and that our faith will
not flicker out, and that our light will not be extinguished."

The crowd, listening in rapt attention, clapped. A strange reaction, but earnestly heartfelt and oddly appropriate, even at Auschwitz, even at a place that now screams out for silence.