It is the hottest season of the year and most of us decide to take a short break to return later to the hustle and bustle of daily life. Wouldn’t it be nice if the hustle and bustle would only be during the week’s holiday and normal life would be tranquil and relaxed? This often shows the anxious levels to which we have built up our daily life scenarios and should lead us to pull the plug on trying to do much more than is adequate to live, leaving little time for self and family.

My wife and I finally managed to escape on a short holiday to Krakow, Poland, as one of the local low cost airlines offered a direct flight there. The people are polite, the weather, city, culture and countryside are very nice indeed and life not so expensive. We also enjoyed driving to the surrounding small villages and foothills of the High Tatra Mountains and I was particularly impressed by a retreat zone called Kalwaria, which was founded by a governor of Kraków on 1 December in 1602. We even managed to walk all the way up a high mountain meadow to see the beautiful sights. The highlight of the visit however was a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, just a stone’s throw from Wadowice where Karol Wojtyla was born.

I had visited Dachau in Munich several times, but nothing compares to the vast scale of the extermination I witnessed in this place and it will be forever impressed on my memory. It actually was a series of 40 camps of which I think Birkenau was the largest. It takes 25 minutes of fast walking to walk from one end of this camp to the other, passing by rows and rows of bunkers. What is more depressing is the extent of suffering, despair and death inflicted on millions of people (mostly Jews, but even intellectuals, Catholics, political activists and other undesirables, as well as including ethnic cleansing) exterminated here by using Cyclon-B pellets in the gas chambers, a shot to the nape of the neck, starvation or simply injecting phenol into the heart.

You can still see the squalid quarters and the punishment cells, the gas chambers and the ovens! The smell of death still lingers everywhere, but to me the most repulsive was a visit to the camp hospital where all sorts of scientific experiments were carried out on inmates. Research/operations without anaesthesia, injecting inmates with chemicals (phenol, petroleum) and bacteria (typhus, tuberculosis), open surgical experiments on children and others too horrible to mention, at the end of which all who partook in these, including the hospital staff themselves, often forcibly drawn from among the prisoners including eminent physicians, nurses and pharmacists, were simply exterminated at the signal of an SS hand. Doctors’ names such as Carl Clauberg, Horst Schumann, Josef Mengele, Emil Kaschub, Eduard Wirths, Bruno Weber, Helmut Wetter, August Hirt and many others, surprise one because so many eminent and learned people could contribute so sadistically to what went on there to such an extent. Many of them did not just have doctorates in medicine but also PhDs in the sciences, humanities and philosophy. It was not just doctors either. Lawyers, architects, dentists, notaries and many other learned people participated in this affront to human dignity. It seems that education alone is not enough to protect human dignity and save humanity from itself. Something more is needed. Something that pays respect to the real requirements of human dignity, and there in the darkness of all this macabre drama lies a cell lit by a candle, cell number 18, where a human being offered himself in sacrifice for another, where love was able to shine out and vanquish the darkness of this earthly hell. Maximillian Kolbe suffered starvation in this cell, but his guards just got fed up waiting for him to die and a physician injected phenol into his heart to finish the job quickly.

I write this after reading through the framework Bill on IVF that the government has just published. IVF in Malta has been carried out for 20 years and nobody knows what is happening exactly. Those who argue that self-regulation is enough to control IVF should of course reconsider after reading the first part of this article. The State has made a declaration that not only defines the homo sapiens human embryo legally, but has also sought to protect human life at its most vulnerable stage, when developing in a dish outside the womb. Human selection and eugenesis is disallowed in the Bill, as are all types of experimentation and destruction of human embryos. IVF has to be carried out on a male and female in a stable relationship and donations by third parties are not allowed. These aspects all respect the requisites of natural law, the refutation of which in exchange for some perceived neo-civil rights, would lead society to redefine parenthood in a totally new and retrograde manner, paving the way for the dissolution of society as we know it and resulting in ultimate chaos and disorder. Freezing of embryos with their implicit destruction (35 per cent), desertion by parents and experimental loss of human life is also to be illegal. Instead, newer forms of egg freezing with equal results will be applicable.

It is also opportune that the State has allowed feedback on the Bill till 14 September, as there are some small issues that need tweaking. All in all however, it is a very positive Bill and should be met with universal approval except of course for those whose concept of human rights and dignity are based not on natural law and objective ethics but on some other aspect of relativist utilitarian or post utilitarian philosophy and ethics. To these I advise a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.