…there is no word enough
to hold history in our mouths and swallow….
No word enough to contain
The “oh” of Shoah.

Nicholas Samaras

 

Eighty years ago, the Soviet Army liberated the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone, author of Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma, gave a talk in Berlin to commemorate the day: January 27,1945 and said she went to Germany “to face the past and… the beast that lives within us all.”

On my own pilgrimage to Auschwitz almost fifty years ago, I faced the same savage beast, but I also faced the contemplative that lives within us all – or doesn’t. I went to Auschwitz on a family trip to Poland in September of 1978, eleven years after I joined the Spiritual Life Institute.

On the day we visited the camp, black birds circled the air above us. There were no flowers growing and no green grass, only torture chambers, story after story of horror, and miles and miles of bricks, laid out as far as the eye can see, a brick for every one of the four million who were killed here. “Look at them and remember,” says the sign.

I found it hard to breathe, and I often felt faint, swallowing the lump in my throat and fighting to hold back tears, waiting until I got home to let them flow. I feel light-headed now as I write this. It’s rough stuff, so take care of yourself as you read on. And please do read on. We owe it to the dead – and to those living today in similar danger.

Gas Chambers and Bouquets

I almost didn’t go to Auschwitz because I was afraid it would be too painful. But I felt a sense of obligation, a need to help make reparation. I knew about it, the largest and most notorious of all the Nazi extermination camps from World War II. But I underestimated the emotional impact of being on site and confronting so many big and little details. The ugly barbed wire and the railroad tracks, iconic symbol of the one-way trip. The squalid living conditions with all those crowded bunk beds. The horrible lie above the gate at the entrance: “Work will make you free” – when the only way out was through the chimneys of the crematoria.

All the display cases full of tender, touching, human belongings stolen from those who died there: mounds of suitcases with names on them, piles of shoes, eyeglasses, and hairbrushes. An entire case was filled with Jewish prayer shawls, beautiful blue and white fringed shawls, worn for sacred times of ritual and prayer.

My sister Connie and I brought three bouquets with us as our own prayer offerings. We left the first one in front of the prayer shawls. We left the second one inside an oven where 12,000 bodies were incinerated each day. We left the third in the “cell,” the hole where Maximilian Kolbe died, the Franciscan priest who volunteered to take the place of a much younger man with children who had been arbitrarily selected for starvation in a bunker. We should have brought another bouquet for the gas chambers, barely disguised as showers. I feel faint even as I remember looking up at the gas jets inside those “showers” and imagine myself inside one.

I’d read a lot of Holocaust literature before this visit, but after I experienced Auschwitz, I couldn’t anymore. I couldn’t bear one more story of horror, even if it ended in heroic virtue like Kolbe’s.

Auschwitz: Triumph of Utilitarianism

If contemplation is “the celebration of what’s too good to be used,” Auschwitz represents the failure of contemplation and the triumph of utilitarianism where everything was used for selfish purposes. The Nazis looked at Jews, Romani, gays, priests and nuns, Poles and other Slavs, people from every European country, and did not see sacred human lives but slaves for the Third Reich, working and starving them to death. They looked at human hair and saw material to be woven into draperies, at human skin which could be made into soap or lampshades, and human bones which could be ground into fertilizer to grow vegetables for the white supremacist Master Race.

They x-rayed their prisoners to locate any jewelry they may have swallowed and then dissected these precious human beings to send the precious metals to the German Empire. With terrifying cunning, they transported the Zyclon B gas for the death chambers in Red Cross ambulances. The witch doctor of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, used women for his sterilization experiments and twin children for his genetic research.

Were the Nazis monsters or “normal” people? They sent millions to the gas chambers or piled up their bodies in mass graves by day, then went home at night, kissed their wives, played with their children, and listened to classical music.

Auschwitz has been called the biggest cemetery in the world. John Paul II called it the “Golgotha of the modern world.” On his visit there the year after he became pope, he said, “Oswiecim is a reckoning with the conscience of mankind. It is impossible merely to visit it.”

A Liturgy for Auschwitz

When I got home to Nova Nada after the trip to Poland, I felt gagged. I was so overwhelmed by the suffering I witnessed, I couldn’t talk about it. I’d brought all kinds of presents for the community, including luscious Polish vodka and Russian champagne, but I couldn’t unpack anything. I had to pray with the community first in a special liturgy of sorrow and forgiveness I created. We meditated on the Book of Lamentations:

The foe stretched out his hand to all our treasures…. Come, all you who pass by the way, look and see whether there is any suffering like my suffering…. Our eyes are ever wasted away, looking in vain for aid; from our watchtower we watched for a nation that could not save us. Men dogged our steps so that we could not walk in our streets; our end drew near and came.

And we prayed these remarkable words of forgiveness, scrawled on wrapping paper near a dead child in the Ravensbruck death camp where 92,000 women and children died:

Lord, remember not only the people of good will but also those of ill will.
But do not only remember the suffering they have inflicted on us.
Remember the fruits we have brought, thanks to this suffering:
our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, the courage, the generosity,
the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this.
And when they come to judgment, let all the fruits we have borne be their forgiveness. Amen.

My time in Auschwitz confirmed me in my contemplative vocation, a vocation which celebrates all of life because it’s “too good to be used.” It is impossible merely to visit Auschwitz, a reckoning with our consciences even today. Look and remember. And commit yourself to a contemplative life. Amen.

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The opening illustration is a photo I took of a wooden sculpture carved by a Polish artist in 1977. It shows Jesus hanging on an invisible cross in the uniform worn by every prisoner in Auschwitz. The title of the piece is “Auschwitz Gehenna” or “Auschwitz Hell.” David Denny created this moving version with the quotation from another Jewish prisoner in Cologne.