my visit to hell pdf

My Visit To Hell – A Novel

Hell is a subject that is not discussed much in our Churches today.  Many  have rejected it and try to persuade others that it doen’t exist.  Some say “God is too loving to send someone to hell!  I say…. God is too loving to force someone to endure Heaven who would hate it there.

I decided to write on this subject after reading a novel by Paul Thigpen called “My Visit To  Hell” (This is an updated version of his novel called: Gehenna.”).

I rarely read novels (maybe one per year), but I highly recommend this one.

The novel is sort of a modern version of Dantes Inferno.  In fact, Dante is referred to several times during the book.

Basic Synopsis:

I don’t want to give too much away about the book but here are some highlights:

The main character, Thomas, is a liberal seminary professor who professes to be an agnostic.  He does not believe in the Bible let alone in a literal Hell. After arriving in Hell, Tom is escorted through the various levels and rings of hell by “Miss C” (his nickname for her). During the time he spends traveling, dodging and hiding from Demons, he comes to a much greater understanding of Hell and its occupants. He both comes to understand God’s Justice and God’s Love.

While the book is a novel, it will really cause you to rethink your views on Hell and the eternal consequences of our actions here on earth. The time we live is short compared to the time many will spend following their choice: separation from God and His Love!

© 2021, Matt . All rights reserved.

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My Visit to Hell

By paul thigpen.

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My Visit To Hell: A Novel Kindle Edition

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Realms
• Publication date 20 April 2007
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About the author.

Paul Thigpen, Ph.D. is an award winning journalist and the best selling author of more than twenty-five books including a Dictionary of Quotes from the Saints (Servant, 2001), Blood of the Martyrs and Seed of the Church (Servant, 2001). He is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University also holds a doctorate in historical theology from Emory University.

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B001P05V58
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Realms (20 April 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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About the authors

Paul thigpen.

Paul Thigpen is a native of Savannah, Georgia, and grew up on one of the sea islands along the Georgia coast. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he received a B.A. in Religious Studies. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Historical Theology as a Woodruff Fellow at Emory University. He has served on the theology faculty of several colleges and universities and was appointed in 2008 by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to their National Advisory Council.

Paul is an award-winning journalist and the best-selling author of sixty books and more than five hundred journal and magazine articles in more than forty religious and secular periodicals. His works have been translated into sixteen languages and published around the world.

Paul loves to sing. He was a first-tenor soloist with the Yale Glee Club and the lead singer in a Christian rock band that pioneered contemporary Christian music throughout Europe in the early seventies. He also had a small speaking part in the 1979 CBS made-for-television movie ORPHAN TRAIN, in which he played a character named "Thigpen." Paul has even been known to do improv comedy with some of his college students in campus coffee houses.

Thomas Paul Thigpen

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Book review: my visit to hell – author paul thigpen.

Adrian Halen 12/28/2010 Book Reviews

I have long been a fan of “Dante’s Inferno” masterpiece. As confusing as it can get, the core story is an epic film in the making. I have to say I’ve just read another book which I feel the same way about. Although it is clearly derived from “Inferno” it is its own product as well. Being that this column of book reviews might seem an odd place for books on Christianity, there are some that perfectly fit like a glove. Paul Thigpen set out to write a “fiction” book on hell. No not another “I’ve been to hell” and can tell you what I’ve seen ” books but a fantasy epic full of horror, spirituality and purpose.

The name of the book “My Visit to Hell” is pretty clear. The story within is a new discovery. Not only did I find his writing clever but his imagination has created a rich novel full of fresh content and horrific visions. As it is told, Thomas is on his way home and narrowly escapes the urban thugs that populate his sector of the city. A chase ensures and Thomas finds himself in hell after falling down into an old building through a loose flight of stairs. We assume that he’s knocked unconscious and is dreaming the vivid visit, however as it progress it is clear that the visit is meant for so much more.

One of the things that’s stands out while reading is Thigpen’s knack for replacing common Inferno themes with a new brand of images. When Thomas falls into Hell, he is greeted by a guide by the name of Capopia. She leads Thomas through the common sights that Dante refers to. However visions of things like lost souls are replaced with Zombies who sit mindless in front of static tv sets, a Charon who takes on a urban punker persona and a story about how a crack in hell was originated. Clever is the word that came to mind as Thomas is explained that the great Harrower of hell was in fact Jesus who “descended into hell on the 3rd day” to rescue souls. The cleverness doesn’t stop there as Paul details every instance with a nice analogy and purpose to it.

Further descentions result in all types of horrors. Confronting Minos the judge almost costs Thomas his life before Minos is confronted by his guide. Minos is this case is Frankenstein. As explained mankind has subconsciously taken iconic images from hell through dreams and nightmares and repackaged them into the media’s of today. Seeing Frankenstein was a surprise though the analogy is explained as to why.

Another interesting thing I enjoyed was that the demons were always at war for dominance and status. So a demon who might have been listed in “Dante’s Inferno” was most likely overthrown and replaced already by a more powerful competitor. Other instances has trapped souls lodged in unmoving telephone poles, sufferers sentenced to live in mountains of human excrement while being pelted by demons, souls whole must walk along cliffs while demons whip them with razor tipped devices and a whole lot more of hellish proportions.

Thigpen has really considered all angles of this journey into a cohesive re-telling that also at the same time re-invents the story with facts and information that really makes sense. Not “just” fiction, but fiction with purpose. The book “My visit to Hell” has a message embedded in all its darkness. The message though is presented forth in a way that any horror fan would enjoy reading. What I found most fulfilling is that while this is considered a Christian book, the horrors within were as worse as anything you could imagine. A punishment for every crime. A torture for every sin and level of hell for every sinner. In fact, as levels were described I couldn’t help saying to myself…oh it can’t be any worse than that!. Well surprise….. it gets worst with every level of descension that not only provides painful ways to suffer but crueler ways to suffer.

The world that is unveiled in Thigpen’s hell takes on alot of the original ideas by expanding on them. At times, even in Dante’s Inferno the explanations were simplified into sins-to-punishment relationships. In this case, we as readers get a tighter relationship to as what, why and how these punishments are inflicted. Even aborted children have there place and form of retribution to the damned.

Excuse the pun, but this was one hellavu book! Rich in descriptions and details that come to life around every corner. I’ve often thought about how one would go about turning Dante’s inferno into a film , and I must say that even though this isn’t a screenplay it could easily be “that” book which would make for a prime candidate for film reinterpretation. I was engaged from front to back and highly recommend this as a thrilling read that paints the images firmly in your mind as it goes along.

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ISBN: 1599790939

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My Visit to Hell

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My Visit to Hell By Paul Thigpen Nearly seven hundred years ago the Italian poet Dante wrote The Inferno , an epic tale of the fate awaiting doomed souls in the underworld. Now, the story continues...... This description may be from another edition of this product.

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Two minor mistakes but everyting else was gravy., call to change, entertaining and thought-provoking, take a guided tour of hell, theological thriller, popular categories.

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One Man's Visit to Hell

A ZENIT DAILY DISPATCH

One Man's Visit to Hell

Interview With Author Paul Thigpen

SAVANNAH, Georgia, 17 SEPT. 2007 (ZENIT)

Those who don't believe in hell are living with a very dangerous kind of wishful thinking, or a comfortable fantasy, says author Paul Thigpen.

In this interview with ZENIT, Thigpen discusses his new book "My Visit to Hell," published by Creation House.

Thigpen is editor of The Catholic Answer, director of the Stella Maris Center for Faith and Culture, and an award-winning journalist and best-selling author of 34 books.

Q: You have written a novel, "My Visit to Hell," about just that — a young man's visit to hell. What prompted this?

Thigpen: The Holy Father recently lamented the fact that so few people in our day ever talk about hell. Maybe this book can contribute in some small way to changing that situation.

Why should people talk more about hell? Many of our contemporaries, including some Catholics, refuse to believe that hell truly exists.

And several surveys show that even among those who believe in the existence of hell, the great majority think they have little or no chance of ending up there.

Nevertheless, in the Gospels Our Lord has warned us solemnly and repeatedly about the terrors of hell. So what we have here is a very dangerous kind of wishful thinking, a comfortable fantasy that needs to be challenged.

We should be thinking about hell, and heaven as well, because our destiny profoundly shapes our identity.

The more we know about our possible destinations, the more we'll know about who we are, why we're here, and which way we should be headed.

I certainly don't enjoy thinking and writing about sin and its tormenting consequences, but given the widespread denial of hell in our day, and the avoidance of any discussion about it, the time seems right for a book such as this.

Q: How has your book been received? Do you think it has appeal to those who do not claim to be Catholic?

Thigpen: Catholic readers often comment that the book has sent them running to the sacrament of confession, and for that I'm grateful.

It's not intended to condemn people for their sins, but rather to encourage them to flee to God for forgiveness and healing.

As for non-Catholic Christians, I've had an enthusiastic response from readers representing a variety of religious backgrounds.

The main themes of the story — the horror of sin, the hope of grace, the dignity and danger of human freedom — lie at the heart of the Gospel that all Christians embrace.

As for atheists, agnostics, and other non-Christians, my hope is that they can identify to some degree with several characters in the book who share their situation.

The main character is in fact an agnostic who must reconsider his position in light of what he encounters on this terrifying journey.

Anecdotal evidence encourages me that the book is stirring readers to think seriously about the matters it touches upon.

One reviewer said he plans to make the book a part of his annual readings for Lent. Another reader composed a series of songs about the story.

Some book clubs are choosing it to read and discuss. It's required reading in at least one college course, and a new scholarly study of contemporary Christian fiction devotes a chapter to it.

Q: Why did you choose the novel as a format, over poetry or simply a theological discourse on the topic?

Thigpen: Dante's "Inferno," the 14th-century poem about an imaginary visit to hell from which my account draws heavily, convinced me that a narrative approach to this subject could be quite powerful in ways that a straight theological discourse could not.

This isn't to say, of course, that Dante's vision isn't theologically informed; his portrait of the infernal regions actually embodies the moral theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, as does mine.

Dante's book was only one in a series of what are known as "tours of hell" that go back to ancient times, all using narrative fiction to paint a chastening portrait of sin and its eternal consequences.

Even Our Lord himself spoke of hell using a parable whose stark imagery awakens in us a sense of dread: see Luke 16:19-31.

Few people today will read lengthy poems of the sort Dante wrote; they prefer novels.

So the contemporary genre of speculative fiction seemed especially appropriate for this subject matter. You might think of it as a book-length parable.

Q: In some ways your novel is like Dante meeting Walker Percy, put in a contemporary setting. Is this partially what you had in mind?

Thigpen: You're right — or even more precisely, Dante meets Flannery O'Connor, who is one of my literary heroes.

She and I are from the same hometown, Savannah, Georgia, and my mother went to college with her. So I've always felt a certain kinship with her and with her vision of the world.

O'Connor masterfully portrays sin in all its revolting ugliness. Yet always she reveals a "moment of grace," a divine light that shines all the more brightly because the surrounding darkness is so deep.

My intent was similar: to show that even though sin deforms us into something grotesque, God still labors to reconcile and heal us.

Q: In your depiction of hell, you describe layers of it rapidly filling up from sins more readily committed in our cultural climate, for example, abortion, destroying fetuses for scientific or medical research, assisted suicide, striving for bodily perfection. In what ways do you categorize and describe some of these?

Thigpen: What I call the "moral topography" of hell — its structure of descending circles, each one punishing a sin worse than the one above it — I borrowed from Dante, who based it on St. Thomas' moral teaching. Below "limbo" lie the circles of "upper hell," which punish sins of weakness.

Next is "middle hell," punishing sins of the intellect; and finally "lower hell," punishing sins of malice, both injury and fraud.

The lower you descend, the more serious the sin and the worse its punishment.

When I considered the sins you've noted, I realized that they are simply more contemporary versions of ancient sins already identified and positioned in Dante's hell.

Like abortion, destruction of embryos for research is murder of a particularly loathsome type — a betrayal of the tiny innocents that God has given us to protect.

So those who are guilty of this sin aren't punished with other murderers; they end up much farther down, in the lowest circle with some of the fiercest punishments, where traitors are tormented.

Or consider the idolatry of bodily perfection: It's actually a form of gluttony, a narcissistic addiction to the pleasure of looking physically attractive.

So those who are guilty of this sin are ironically punished alongside the gluttons, whom they detest as undisciplined slobs.

Of particular interest to many contemporary readers, I think, is the circle punishing sins of the intellect.

Those holding to the popular notion that sincerity of belief is all that counts will find plenty here to challenge their assumptions.

Q: You mention in the preface that you were reluctant to write this book given the gravity of the topic. Are there ways in which meditating about hell has changed your own life?

Thigpen: Spending several months thinking deeply about hell, and writing down the fruits of that reflection for others, cultivated in me a healthy fear of the Lord, and "the fear of the Lord is hatred of evil": Proverbs 8:13.

I came to a new understanding of how repugnant, how despicable, how corrosive sin truly is, with the result that I wanted all the more to avoid it and cling to God instead.

It also made me more deeply grateful for divine grace.

I deserve the everlasting misery of hell because of my sin, but God sent his son to make it possible for me to live with him forever instead in the joy of heaven.

I can never cease to marvel at such a gift!  

This article has been selected from the ZENIT Daily Dispatch © Innovative Media, Inc.

ZENIT International News Agency Via della Stazione di Ottavia, 95 00165 Rome, Italy www.zenit.org

To subscribe http://www.zenit.org/english/subscribe.html or email: [email protected] with SUBSCRIBE in the "subject" field

My Visit To Hell

In the wake of President Obama’s visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp today, The Daily Beast’s Christopher Buckley recalls his own horrific trip to Auschwitz with his father 10 years ago and his walk along the Wall of Death.

Christopher Buckley

Mandel Ngan, AFP / Getty Images

I went to Auschwitz, about ten years ago, with my late father. There is something about seeing Konzentrationlager Auschwitz that makes you want to give witness. I wrote a long description of the visit, which I’ve never published until now.

Note that the following contains disturbing descriptions.

February 19, 2001

You go through the visitors center and there it is. You’ve seen it in photographs a hundred times, the famous gate: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Work will set you free. The idea was to be reassuring, unlike the slogan Dante hung over the entrance to his hell, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Put in an honest day and everything will be all right. Counterproductive to panic the arrivals. Here, and up the road, in Birkenau, they thought through all the details, down to the numbered hooks in the dressing rooms outside the gas chambers. The SS jollied you along. Remember which hook you hang your clothes on so you’ll be able to get find them after the shower. And don’t forget to put your shoes underneath so you’ll be able to get them, too. You’re a shoemaker? Great, we need shoemakers. At Auschwitz, they even had a prisoner orchestra playing inside the gate. It helped keep order. Good for morale, too. How bad could it be, if they greeted you with music?

It’s February and gray. The poplar trees that line the avenues between the cellblocks are bare. The swimming pool—See? We even have a swimming pool!—that was to impress the Red Cross is covered with dirty ice. Crows, gallows. It’s hands-in-the-pockets cold, but would you want to see this in springtime, with blossoms and sweet earth smells?

Our guide is Jarek. Mid-forties, fluent English, dark mustache, knit cap. He grew up in Oswiecim. He speaks precisely, in a low, clear voice without emotion for nearly six hours, except for twice, once outside Block 10 and inside Block 11. We pass under Arbeit Macht Frei. He indicates a grassy strip. “Here is where they gave the welcome speech. They said, ‘You dirty Poles, this isn’t a sanitorium. There’s only one way out—through the chimney of crematorium. Jews, you have three weeks. Priests, one month. Three months for the rest of you.”

Sixty thousand, out of about 1.5 million, survived Auschwitz. If you made it through the first weeks, you stood a chance of making it. Some managed to survive five years, from 1940 to 1945. By contrast, out of 600,000 at Belzec, three people survived.

It feels colder inside the cell blocks, where the exhibits are. There is a blown-up photograph of Himmler viewing Auschwitz’s first inmates, Soviet POWs. Polish political prisoners, the intelligentsia, priests followed. Two years later, with the construction of the much larger Birkenau three kilometers away, the camp became ground zero for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

Between October 1941 and March 1942, some 10,000 Soviet prisoners died here. Jarek as well as the exhibits use the word “murder” instead of die, or kill, or exterminate. It takes some time before the ear gets used to it, modern speech being less direct.

“The method for murdering the Soviets was in many cases simple,” Jarek says. “Put them in a field, surround them with barbed wire and leave them.” Some became so resigned from hunger that they would climb themselves onto the wagons of corpses. There was cannibalism. In Thadeusz Borowski’s short story, “The Supper,” a group of Russians who have tried to escape are lined up, arms tied behind them with barbed wire, and shot point-blank through the back of the head in front of a crowd of starving prisoners. The prisoners clamor and rush forward and must be dispersed with clubs. “The following day … a Jew from Estonia who was helping me haul steel bars tried to convince me all day that human brains are, in fact, so tender you can eat them raw.” Borowski was at Auschwitz. He survived and later put his head in a gas stove at the age of 29.

More exhibits. The Nazis kept such meticulous records, which in the end only meant that there was a vast amount to destroy as the Red Army approached in January 1945. Every death—murder—was written down. Jarek points to a photocopy of a ledger that survived. “The reason given was never ‘bullet’ or ‘gas,’ but instead ‘heart attack’ or ‘kidney function’.” Deaths are listed in intervals of minutes.

In the next case are photocopies of transit passes for the trucks that brought the cannisters of Zyklon B pellets. The contents are listed as “material for the displacement of Jews.” Here are the minutes from the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin on January 20, 1942, the meeting of the board of directors of the corporation in charge of the Final Solution. These are free of euphemism. One page shows the goal: a column of numbers, country-by-country tallies, with a bottom line of 11 million.

Up a flight of stairs, around a corner. No more paperwork. Now it gets personal: two tons of human hair behind glass. Mounds on mounds, amorphous and hard to take in at first, until you focus and see the pigtails and braids. Jarek remarks that they were going to send some of this to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but in the end it was declined as “too much.” The hair was shorn after the gassings, then efficiently dried in the crematoria so it could be industrially spun into carpeting.

Here is a large pile of spectacles, a spidery mass of rusted wire-frames and dusty lenses. These were left with the clothing in the dressing rooms, so the last things seen through these glasses would have been nervous kapos and Death’s-Head guards.

Behind another wall of glass is a jumble of rusted artificial limbs, canes, crutches, braces. Like the hair, it blurs into abstraction until the eye settles on a child’s fake leg. Now it’s into another room and the suitcases, piles and piles of shriveled leather suitcases. They wrote their names on them in large white letters. Jarek points out the word “orphan” in Dutch. Hundreds of names. I write down one: PETR EISLER 1942 KIND. The year of his birth and his child— kinder —status. In the next room comes the display of children’s clothing, pacifiers, rattles, hairbrushes. Then the shoes, a mountain. Finally the empty canisters of Zyklon B, perhaps a hundred or more, in a pile. By to the calculations of Rudolph Hoss, Auschwitz’s first commandant, it required seven kilos of Zyklon to murder—not the word he used—1,500 people, so this pile here might have sufficed for perhaps 75,000 or 100,000 human beings. It appears from the tops that they refined the process of opening the cans. Some are jagged, others have been smoothly cut, as if in one motion by a machine. Across from this display is a clay diorama of a gas chamber in action. Once everyone was inside, between 700 and 1,500, depending on which of the five gas chambers it was, the doors and windows were sealed tight. The bluish pellets of diatomite soaked in hydrocyanic acid were poured through chutes. Exposed to oxygen, the pellets gave off prussic acid, blocking the exchange of oxygen in the blood. Those close to the chutes died instantly, the ones farther away took longer. Hoss watched one gassing through a peephole. In his Reminiscences before he was hanged in 1947, he describes clinically that it took two or more minutes before the screams turned to moans. Still they didn’t open the doors for half an hour, just in case. After that it was safe for the Sonderkommando , the prisoner work crews, to wade into the tangle of bodies, vomit, and excrement to get the hair and the gold teeth and drag the bodies next door to the crematorium. The work paid well and was competed for: one-fifth liter of vodka, five cigarettes, 100 grams of sausage for each job.

It’s gotten colder outside. We’re approaching Block 10 now, where Professor Doctor Carl Clauberg, a university professor of gynecology described by Borowitz as “a man in a green hunting outfit and a gay little Tyrolian hat decorated with many brightly shining sports emblems, a man with the face of a kindly satyr,” sterilized women and men with chemicals and roentgens and infected children with disease, for science. He was released from prison by the Soviets in 1956. Jarek says, “He went back to Germany and took out an advertisement in the newspaper saying, ‘Dr. Clauberg is seeking an assistant.’ He did not even change his name.” A trace of a smile. “He was arrested and died the same year, of poor health.” Elsewhere at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dr. Josef Mengele performed his experiments on twins and dwarves.

In the courtyard between Block 10 and Block 11 is the Wall of Death. There is a sign urging quiet, so you approach slowly and reverently, as you might an important tomb. Visitors have placed six bouquets of flowers at its base. A woman is crouching, trying to get a red votive candle lit. People have left pebbles in every inch of the creases in the wall, in the Jewish manner of mourning. Jarek tells what happened here. Prisoners who had been tried by the SS, for trying to escape, taking food, for whatever reason, were taken out into the courtyard naked, in twos. A strong kapo who, before he came here, had worked in the circus, held them face to the wall. An SS man shot them at the base of the skull, with a short air pistol if there were a lot of executions to be done, so that the camp would not ring with incessant gunshots.

A former prisoner, a Dr. Boleslaw Zbozien, described what he witnessed here one day:

“Sometime, I cannot remember the exact date, we encountered [SS sergeant-major Gerhard] Palitzsch on the streets of the camp at Auschwitz. Before him, he was driving a man and a woman. The woman was carrying a small child in her arms, and two larger children, around four and seven years old, walked next to her. The entire group was walking in the direction of Block 11. I made it with some colleagues to Block 21 in time. From a window in a room on the ground floor, we gazed out at the courtyard to Block 11, standing on a table in the room. As long as I live, the scene that played out before my eyes will be engraved in my memory. The man and woman did not resist when Palitzch stood them before the Wall of Death. It all took place in the greatest calm. The man held the hand of the child who stood on his left side. The second child stood between them; they both held his hand. The mother clasped the youngest to her breast. Palitzsch first shot the baby through the head. The shot to the back of the head exploded its skull … and induced massive bleeding. The baby struggled like a fish, but the mother only held him more firmly to herself. Palitzsch next shot the child standing in the middle. The man and woman … continued to stand without moving, like statues. Later, Palitzch struggled with the oldest child, who would not allow himself to be shot. He threw him to the ground and shot him at the base of the head while standing on his shoulders. He then shot the woman, and at the very last, the man. This was the greatest monstrosity… After that, although many executions were carried out, I did not watch them.”

We place our pebbles. Jarek says, “Between 5,000 and 20,000 people were shot here.”

We go into Block 11. The faded sign above the door reads,

BLOK SMIERCI

Block of Death. Just inside the door on the left is the room where they held the proceedings. Jarek remarks that the SS officer who sentenced 5,000 Poles here to die was still alive last year, living in Germany, age 92. We ask why. He shrugs. At the far end on the corridor, on the left, looking out into the courtyard, is the room where the condemned where stripped and held. An illustration depicts a naked girl holding onto her mother’s legs as the SS guard comes for them. High on the wall, a prisoner scratched graffiti, a name and the date and the words, “Sentenced to die.” Beneath that is the date of the next day and the words, “I’m still here.”

In the basement of Block 11, the first gassing with Zyklon B took place. Six hundred Soviet POWs and 250 Poles were locked in. They poured in the pellets. It took 20 hours to kill—murder—them all. This is how they learned the correct dosage.

Cell 18 was the “Starvation Cell.” If a prisoner escaped, the Lagerfuhrer , or commandant, would select ten prisoners from the escapee’s block. They would be shut in this cell without food or water and left to die. Generally this took a week.

In August of 1941 there was an escape. One of the prisoners, Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan missionary, asked the commandant to let him take the place of one of the ten men selected to starve. Father Kolbe was still alive in the cell two weeks later, after the others had all died. They finished him off with an injection of carbolic acid. He was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint by Pope John Paul II in 1981. Candles burn in the cell to him and the others who were murdered here.

In another room in the basement of Block 11 are the four “Standing Cells.” Each measures about a yard square, with a small hole for ventilation. Four prisoners were crammed in at a time and left all night, sent out to work in the morning and returned here at night. This punishment might last three days, or two weeks. The sign says that it produced “extreme emaciation and a slow, agonising death.”

In the hall as we leave the basement I ask what the pipes are. Jarek explains that it’s the only cell block in Auschwitz with central heating. “Because it was officially a Gestapo prison, it had to be heated.” The second and last smile of the day. “Rules.”

We walk past Cell Block 21, where the Doctor Zbozien witnessed the murder of the Polish family, past a memorial stone left by Israeli President Chaim Herzog with a quote from Psalms 38:18, “My sorrow is continually before me.” We walk past the gallows where they hanged prisoners 12 at a time, past the cell block where the whorehouse was on the second floor. “It was Himmler’s idea, to give incentive to the non-Jewish prisoners.” Borowitz wrote about this in one of his stories. The prisoners’ name for it was “Puff.”

Outside the barbed wire you come to Gas Chamber and Crematorium Number I, Auschwitz’s first functional one after the initial experiment in the basement of Block 11. Seventy thousand were murdered here. It’s the only intact crematorium out of five at Auschwitz. The SS dynamited the other four at Birkenau as the Red Army was closing in.

We stand inside and look up through the opening where SS men in gas masks poured the pellets. Through the door at the end are the ovens. These could incinerate 340 bodies a day. Jarek shows how the slide worked. It still does. A bouquet of roses has been left on one. The German company that made these, he says, finally went bankrupt in the 1960s.

A short lunch in the cafeteria, borscht and croquettes and nonalcoholic beer, since they don’t serve alcohol at Auschwitz, no matter that you could use a drink. Soup for the prisoners consisted of nettles and water. Morning tea was brewed from oak leaves. For dinner, wormy bread, perhaps with a smear of lard. Some of the survivors weighed 60 pounds.

Birkenau is a five-minute car ride. This is Konzentrationlager Auschwitz II, Auschwitz concentration camp number two, built in 1942 in pursuance of the Wannsee Conference goals. “Compared to Birkenau,” Jarek remarks, “Auschwitz was a Hilton.” Birkenau is how the Germans said Brezinzka, which means Birch Wood, the name of the Polish village that was here. Auschwitz was how they said Oswiecim. Oz-vee-chim. The town once had a sizeable Jewish population of its own.

The rail line that approaches Birkenau runs through a red brick guard tower and this too is familiar from photographs and documentaries. The prisoners called it The Gate of Death. From May to October 1944, 600,000 Hungarian Jews—a line of numbers in the Wannsee document—came through here. In the spring of 1944, at the height of Auschwitz’s efficiency, 10,000 arrived here each day.

We go up into the tower. Jarek opens a window and stands back and says quietly, “Birkenau.” It’s here, rather than at the Wall of Death or Cell Block 11, that many visitors break down and weep. Perhaps it’s because of vastness that confronts them. You’re looking out on an area 3,000 feet wide by 2,100 feet deep: 174 barracks, four crematoria, surrounded by double fences of barbed wire and guard towers. The crematoria could only handle about 5,000 bodies a day, so at times to keep up they had to burn bodies in the fields by the woods in the distance. The stench from that, and from the early mass graves of Soviet POWs, is described in the literature.

Jarek gets a key to the gate and we drive to the rail platform where the arrivals got off Eichmann’s transports after journeys of sometimes three or more days, no food or water, packed in so tightly that in summers water from the humidity ran off the ceilings. About 80 percent of the arrivals, those unfit for work, the older men and women, women with babies, children under 14 were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. Borowski’s book of stories is titled, This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen .

We stand where the families were separated. Jarek points. We look and see a dozen deer on the other side of the barbed wire, running down an alley between barracks, white tails going up and down in the ruins as they leap.

On one side of the rail platform was the women’s camp. “When the trains came,” Jarek says, “women would shout to the women arriving, ‘Give the baby to the granny.’ That way you might not be selected for the gas chamber. This was the choice.”

We drive past a small pond of foamy water where they dumped the ashes, to Gas Chamber and Crematorium II. On the maps, these are designated KI, KII, KIII and so on. KII is larger that the one at Auschwitz. Jarek’s uncle lived six kilometers away and told him about the smell. We stand on the ruins of KII, which is more or less as it was after the dynamiting, collapsed onto itself, but the foundations still clear. Jarek points, “Mengele’s laboratory.”

Between KII and KIII is the memorial, a raised terrace of moss-lined granite bricks, a low stone sculpture and nineteen plaques, one for each language of the people murdered here, French, Greek, Norwegian, Italian and all the rest. The one in English says,

FOR EVER LET THIS PLACE BE A CRY OF DESPAIR AND A WARNING TO HUMANITY, WHERE THE NAZIS MURDERED ABOUT ONE AND A HALF MILLION MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN, MAINLY JEWS FROM VARIOUS COUNTRIES OF EUROPE. AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU 1940-1945

Jarek explains that they changed the wording after communist rule ended in Poland. Originally, the plaques made no specific mention of Jews. “In Poland then, the idea was officially that you didn’t point out one group above the other.” After communism, it was no longer politically incorrect. Ninety percent of Auschwitz’s victims were Jews. Next came Poles, 70,000, then Gypsies, 23,000.

On the drive back to Cracow we don’t say much, my father and I. It leaves you quiet, Auschwitz, even as it impels you not to be quiet about it, to tell what you saw, no matter that it is all by now so well-known and documented and familiar. At the airport in Zurich, the local Sunday paper shows a photo from a recent rally in Switzerland, hundreds of shaved-head neo-Nazis giving the salute.

Christopher Buckley’s books include Supreme Courtship , The White House Mess , Thank You for Smoking , Little Green Men , and Florence of Arabia . His journalism, satire, and criticism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Esquire. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Forbes FYI.

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My Visit To Hell

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My Visit To Hell written by Paul Thigpen and has been published by Realms this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007 with Fiction categories.

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A Short Stay In Hell

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A damned man struggles to find meaning in a library, the dimensions of which are measured in light years.

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In the middle of the journey of our life Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood but then he founds a whole lot of literary movements and arguably modernity itself with his Divine Comedy that, nonetheless, inexplicably, didn't make God laugh. This serious absence caused God's non-divine counterparts, humans, to wonder: "Why are we in hell?" "Why is it so funny?" "And why can't I laugh?"

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Close your eyes and picture -- just for a moment -- hell. Fire? Demons? Eternal torment? Well, yes -- that's the place, in one very hot nutshell. But that's not all there is to the forbidding world beneath us. For a few millennia now, we mortals have imagined and reimagined hell in countless ways: as a realm of damnation, as an inspiration for highest art, as a setting for the lowest of lowbrow comedy. One might conclude that for all our good intentions to enter para- dise, we can't seem to get enough vivid details of its counterpart, hell. Provocative, colorful, and damned entertaining, Go to Hell takes readers on a tour of the underworld that is both darkly comical and seriously informative. From the frozen hell of the Vikings to the sun-drenched Cayman Islands' town of Hell (where tourists line up to have their postcards aptly postmarked), from Dante's circles of hell to Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Hellmouth, Go to Hell embraces our evolving relationship with the sinner's final destination, revealing how we truly think of ourselves in this world. What's down below? Meet HEL, the hideous, half-rotting goddess of the Viking underworld. Beware the Egyptians' AM-MUT, an unsightly mix of lion, crocodile, and hippo parts, and insatiably hungry for wicked souls. Visit JIGOKU, a Buddhist realm of eight fiery hells and eight icy hells: an all-you-can-suffer hot-and-cold buffet. Step into the INFERNO for a tour of Dante's nine circles of the damned...

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My Visit To Hell: A Novel Paperback – April 20, 2007

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• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Realms
• Publication date April 20, 2007
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1599790939
• ISBN-13 978-1599790930
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About the author.

Paul Thigpen, Ph.D. is an award winning journalist and the best selling author of more than twenty-five books including a Dictionary of Quotes from the Saints (Servant, 2001), Blood of the Martyrs and Seed of the Church (Servant, 2001). He is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University also holds a doctorate in historical theology from Emory University.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Realms (April 20, 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1599790939
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1599790930
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
• #1,172 in Religious Mysteries (Books)
• #34,821 in Christian Literature & Fiction
• #105,550 in Mysteries (Books)

About the authors

Paul thigpen.

Paul Thigpen is a native of Savannah, Georgia, and grew up on one of the sea islands along the Georgia coast. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he received a B.A. in Religious Studies. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Historical Theology as a Woodruff Fellow at Emory University. He has served on the theology faculty of several colleges and universities and was appointed in 2008 by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to their National Advisory Council.

Paul is an award-winning journalist and the best-selling author of sixty books and more than five hundred journal and magazine articles in more than forty religious and secular periodicals. His works have been translated into sixteen languages and published around the world.

Paul loves to sing. He was a first-tenor soloist with the Yale Glee Club and the lead singer in a Christian rock band that pioneered contemporary Christian music throughout Europe in the early seventies. He also had a small speaking part in the 1979 CBS made-for-television movie ORPHAN TRAIN, in which he played a character named "Thigpen." Paul has even been known to do improv comedy with some of his college students in campus coffee houses.

Thomas Paul Thigpen

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Select Settings   at the top of the page.

Select Mail >  Compose and reply .

Under Email signature , type your signature and use the available formatting options to change its appearance.

Select the default signature for new messages and replies.

Manually add your signature to a new message

If you've created a signature but didn't choose to automatically add it to all outgoing messages, you can add it later when you write an email message.

In a new message or reply, type your message.

If you created multiple signatures, choose the signature you want to use for your new message or reply.

When your email message is ready, choose Send .

Note:  Outlook.com is the web version of Outlook for users signing in with a personal Microsoft account such as an Outlook.com or Hotmail.com account.

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Create and add an email signature in Outlook for Mac

Create an email signature from a template

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