Can the witness of Yad Vashem lead to Peace?

I hesitate to write about my experience of Yad Vashem. To me it as a sacred place, a place that bears witness to an almost incomprehensible experience of suffering by one group of people at the hands of others. I feel, when I walk through the memorial, that I am walking among the wounded souls of a people. I ask God, whenever I visit, to touch my soul with the anguish of the Jewish people, reflected in the pictures and quotations, in the art and the exhibits. And I ask God to show me what this means for me as a fellow human being of those whose suffering is represented in this place.

The memorial is full of powerful images and striking quotations, many which scar one’s emotions, and others which lift one’s spirits.

“slay them not [the Jews]…scatter them abroad” (Augustine)

“where books are burned, human beings are also destined to be burned” (Heinrich Heine)

“the personification of the devil, as the symbol of all evil, assumes the living shape of the Jew” (Hitler)

“a country is not just what it does – it is also what it tolerates” (Kurt Tucholsky)

The exhibits bear witness to a feeling and perception of Christian ambivalence toward Jews and Judaism, and traces the attitudes and events in Hitler and Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jewish people:

The concept of German vs. Jewish “blood”

The so-called “Jewish question” and “Jewish problem”

The policy of Aryanization and discrimination

Anti-Jewish racial laws

Economic boycott

Stripping of civil rights

Forced registration and wearing patches

Vandalizing and expropriating of Jewish businesses

Flight, creating a refugee problem (no one wanted them)

The destruction of a whole Jewish way life

Experience of terror, jail, humiliation, abuse

The burning of synagogues

Confiscation of homes, real estate, factories, businesses, artistic and cultural treasures

The creation of ghettoes – incarceration behind fences and walls, large numbers of people being restricted to small sections of a city (as an interim measure to eventual total removal)

Resettlement, deportation

The final step in dehumanization and demonization of a people – the “final solution” – total annihilation, with gas chambers, and plans to murder 11,000,000 Jewish people

And the fact that (for the most part) fellow citizens and other nations did not notice, did not care, did not take action, or in some cases, acted as accomplices, directly persecuting Jews or taking advantage of their suffering and loss.

It is too much to take in.

“the world is divided [for Jews] into places where they cannot live and places where they cannot enter” (Chaim Weizman, 1937)

“all of us, dying here amidst the icy artic indifference of the nations, are forgotten by the world and by life” (Avraham Levite, Auschwitz, 1945)

And after the war, the fact that most Western countries did not want, would not accept, Jewish refugees.

There is a small bright spot in the witness of Yad Vashem, the testimony to those called “the righteous among the nations,” non-Jews who saved Jewish lives, people it says were (are) “a model of heroism, humane and moral behavior, and the preservation of the sanctity of human life.”

“God created all of us in the same image…everyone has the right to live” (Mary Szul, Poland)

“I do not know what a Jew is, we only know what human beings are” (Pastor Andre Trocme)

"I know that when I stand before God on Judgment day, I shall not be asked the question posed to Cain -where were you when your brother's blood was crying out to God?" (Imre Bathory, Hungary)

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

(Martin Niemöller, a German pastor and theologian)

And the reflections after the war, after the Holocaust, of a world lost:

“an entire Jewish world that existed and was destroyed”

“their dear ones had been murdered, their culture crushed, their homes ravaged, and they had been torn from their childhood places of origin – persons without a homeland, categorized as ‘displaced persons’”

“all is imprisoned within the cell of memory” (Itamar Yaoz-Kest)

“my people is no more” (Yitzhak Katznelson)

And praised. Auschwitz. Be. Majdanek. The Lord. Treblinka. And praised. Buchenwald. Be. Mauthausen. The Lord. Belzec. And praised. Sobibor. Be. Chelmno. The Lord. Ponary. And praised. Theresienstadt. Be. Warsaw. The Lord. Vilna. And praised. Skarzysko. Be. Bergen-Belsen. The Lord. Janow. And praised. Dora. Be. Neuengamme. The Lord. Pustkow. And praised… Amen.

(an excerpt from the book The Last of the Just, by Andre Schwarz-Bart)

How does one internalize such a witness? How does one answer the question that was ringing in my head as I tried to comprehend such large scale inhumanity, “how should we then live?”

I ask God to help me to understand, to give me sympathy for, the suffering of the Jewish people. And not to contribute to it. And Yad Vashem helps me to understand, in a small way, the importance of the nation of Israel to the Jewish people - having a place, a home of their own, a refuge. And the mentality that I think I see, of fear, acting like a cornered, threatened animal, striking out because of the spectre of being struck again, of annihilation as a people. I ask God to help me understand.

I can’t help but think – visiting Bethlehem and Ramallah and Hebron and Jerusalem – of the current experience of the Palestinian people, their suffering, their loss. And to think of the words I have heard so often (including from Jewish Israelis), of the tragedy of the abused becoming the abuser, the victim becoming the victimizer.

And I wonder what the lesson of the Holocaust and of Yad Vashem should be to us, all of us? Can Yad Vashem be a witness for peace?

Is the message, “never again will we (the Jewish people) allow this to happen to us”?  Or should it be, “never again will we (all people) allow this to happen to any human beings, and never – by God’s grace – will we (any of us) be the perpetrators of dehumanization and villianization of other human beings”?

May God allow us to internalize the witness of the many Muslims, Jews and Christians I have met in Israel and the Occupied Territories whose message is that we must treat every human being we meet as our brother, our sister, our friend, ourselves with a different language or religion or ethnicity, and that we must stand and work for societies, and a world, where every human being is treated with respect and dignity, their rights and humanity protected.

This, to me, is the message of Yad Vashem.

Postscript: as I walked out of Yad Vashem, looking over the beautiful countryside, wooded and serene, I found myself asking, “is there not room in this land for both peoples, for all people?” and then the thought turned inward, and I wondered, “is there room in my heart for all people? And can I see in every person a human being, created in the image of God and loved by Him?” For there will not be room in the land (any land) for different people, until there is room for them in our hearts. This is a something I am learning from my heroes for peace – Jewish, Muslim, Christian – that I have met in the land.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

This is an old post, from November, that I somehow failed to publish:

I watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas tonight. Overall, not sure what I think of it. Some of the greatest horrors in history, seen from a child's uncomprehending perspective.

The brightness of the leaves, the beauty of the piano, all leading to what? An accidental death? A German child burned to death with his Jewish friend? So that his parents can learn a lesson? Can experience the reality of the horror?

The one part that really got to me was the beginning. The haunting paradox of the idyllic German household and the liquidating Jewish ghetto. Of living a normal life, a simple life, oblivious to the horrors taking place within your country's borders.

Looking back, how would you make sense of it? The decaying monstrosity that had taken place while you had been happy, while life had been normal. How do you recover from such an awakening?

Elie Wiesel's Night

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my Faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

-Elie Wiesel, Night, 32

[Wiesel] had seen his mother, a beloved little sister, and all his family except his father disappear into an oven fed with living creatures. As for his father, the child was forced to be a spectator day after day to his martyrdom, his agony, and his death.

It was then that I understood what had first drawn me to the young Jew: that look, as of a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed, stumbling among the shameful corpses. For him, Nietzsche's cry expressed an almost physical reality: God is dead, the God of love, of gentleness, of comfort, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, has vanished forevermore, beneath the gaze of this child, in the smoke of human holocaust. . . . On that day, horrible even among those days of horror, when the child watched the hanging of another child, who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone behind him groan: " 'Where is God? Where is He? Where can He be now?' and a voice within me answered: 'Where? Here He is--He has been hanged here, on these gallows.' "

And I, who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner, whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Jew, his brother, who may have resembled him--the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished? Zion, however, has risen up again from the crematories and the charnel houses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. . . . We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.

-Francois Mauriac, foreword to Night

I read Elie Wiesel's Night for the first time this past week. The autobiographical account of his survival (or destruction) in the Nazi death camps. Winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.

Once more, I am shaken and undone.

For the first time, in a long time, I begin to believe that maybe, maybe, the Holy Land is a gift. A miracle. Where else would we have had them go, the survivors, those turned to ash, yet still breathing? What else would we have had them do? I have always wished them peace, but maybe peace is more fervent than that. Do I wish them well-being? Life, and laughter, and happiness, in their own land? Away from fear and torment? Do I wish it as fervently as I wish it for the Palestinians? -- those who wear the star today, made of identification cards, ghettos, and violence ["'The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it. . . .' (Poor father! Of what then did you die?)" (Night 9)]. My heart can maybe feel two kinds of pain (the Holocaust has always torn my soul apart), but can it breathe two kinds of joy? The Arab earth of olive trees; the Jewish homeland. My foundations shift, crack, crumble. And I long for peace. An end to humanity's destruction of itself. An end to our continual murdering of God. The Eternal may not be held by any grave, but that does not make the death any less real. The death of God. On a tree, a cross, a gallows. In the ovens. How many times have we killed the Divine? How many times will we do it again? When will we stop?

Schindler's List

I put my hand over my mouth.
I tremble in silence

for the absence; for the ash
for the scalding, burning,
grief of remembrance

I put my hand over my mouth.

* * *

"The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf."

I watched it again today: Schindler's List. It's very possibly the most powerful movie -- the most powerful story -- I've ever encountered.

And it's true.

I'm overwhelmed by the weight again. The horror. Who am I to say this is wrong, or this is right? Who am I to say anything at all?

The furnaces. The ghetto. The children. And a man crying for one more life. Just one more.

May God forgive me for my arrogance.

"He who saves a single life, saves the world entire."

Place a Pebble

Place a pebble on a gravestone and remember
6 million individual holocausts
1 Holocaust of 6 million
For every life taken on the journey
add another
For every life given to protect the weak and innocent
add another

For the few soldiers who said
"I won't"
And died add one more

One more
For all who survive with the pain of memories
For those who cannot take a train journey or a shower
Visit a doctor
Hear a door bang
Or a 100 thousand daily mediocrities without being jolted
back to hell

For those who perpetuated the evil
and felt remorse

For those who still believe that what
they did was right

For those who could remain un-
touched by what they saw

For standers-by unwilling to speak
out when it began

For those whose love of God
grew stronger
And faith remained a strength
to those around them
For those who were the Face of
God to others
For those whose faith was
weakened or destroyed
For those who felt abandoned
For those to whom God is dead

For the pain of separation
Broken bands of selection
Terror and calmness
Resistance
and acceptance
Grief
Numbness
Disbelief.

For those who starved
and thirsted yet shared
their meagre scraps with
strangers

For the Judas who sold a Jew
A gay, a communist, a Roma
A brain damaged child,
For goodwill, bread or freedom,
Place a pebble and remember.

-Rev. Maria Shepherdson
From Both Sides Now: Poems for the Journey -- Auschwitz to Palestine

Both Sides Now: Introduction

Here is the introduction from Rev. Maria Shepherdson's From Both Sides Now: Poems for the Journey -- Auschwitz to Palestine:

The peoples of the Holy Land are held very close to my heart and in prayers before God. The situation they face is complex in the extreme and all peoples, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Jew, Christian, and Muslim, suffer.

The poems offered in this book are those written at two significant moments of discovery. The first at Auschwitz, tracing a Belgian family lost in the Holocaust, when I discovered the true meaning of God with His people and what it means to be part of God's family in Christ. I also understood more fully the 614th commandment and determination to survive that prevails amongst Jews in Israel: a determination strengthened by anti-Semitism through the ages and the Shoah in particular.

The second was during a visit to the Holy Land, teacher training in Gaza, where I witnessed the fear and pain of the Palestinian people, their suffering and their wish to survive and thrive. A wish that echoes that of their Israeli brothers and sisters.

Most of all I understood the deep hurt caused to Christian Palestinians, forbidden the right to travel and worship at the Holy Places of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

These poems reflect one person's journey of discovery. As you read them I ask you not to take sides but to hold all the pain of all peoples in the Holy Land up to God. Hold them before Christ who weeps over Jerusalem still and pray earnestly for peace.

Both Sides Now: Auschwitz to Palestine

While at Bethlehem Bible College this past week, I picked up a booklet of poetry about the Holocaust and the Gaza strip. It's called From Both Sides Now: Poems for the Journey -- Auschwitz to Palestine, and is written by Rev. Maria Shepherdson.

The inscription on the cover reads: "Unless you see from both sides of the divide you cannot begin to travel a mile in the other person's shoes. Unless you travel that mile your prayers will always be one dimensional when they need to be all encompassing, all embracing."

When I first opened the book at random, I found myself reading the second half of a haunting poem. Haunting because it speaks of a complicated reality. A reality that I can't quite fit my mind around. A reality where there are no monsters -- no convenient orcs to demonize -- but only humans. Humans that can love and hate, kiss and kill.

I wish I could swear I would have been different, had I been there. That I would have been one of the few, risking my life to save another. Not having lived through it, we all believe it to be true: we would have been different. But what are we doing now, today, about Bethlehem? About Gaza? About the ghettos and the walls?

It's not the same. We say it's not the same. No one's dying. At least, not to the same degree. This isn't a holocaust. It's just a protective barrier. A war against terrorism.

How quickly words protect us from the truth.

What scares me, is that the Holocaust was not an act of creation: something out of nothing. It was a process. A slow road of dehumanization. A separation of "us" from "them". Stereotyping and demonizing. And when you build a wall, and allow your young boys to carry guns (as though there were rabid dogs roaming the street -- dangerous and savage), and implement collective punishment, and deny a race of humans their rights to lawyers and courts and laws and justice, where does the road lead? Where has it already led? Sabra, Shatila, Hebron, Bethlehem.

May God have mercy on a generation that has looked, is still looking, the other way . . .

* * *

(the last four stanzas are my favorite)

Where is God?

Christ carries His cross
And five Arimethean Joseph's lift the timbers off his lacerated back
Themselves torn apart by grief, hunger, angry pain and
Resignation

The boots were stolen from one who became smoke
Consumed by flames in the giant bakery of the enemy
It did not lessen the sickening thud of impact
Nor make the bruises less waspish in intensity

The foot belonged to a fellow Jew
A human whose humanity had long ago been traded for an extra crust
A chance to survive
Through serving a whimsical master-overseer of Life and
Death
One more day in a hell marginally less hellish than for others.

The voice that shrills a threat
Has also cooed and chortled to a child
And whispered love nothings to a wife
Spoke out the texts
And prayers
In Church

The eye that witnessed such degradation
Without being moved to pity or protest
Once wept for the death of a wounded bird.

And Which would we have been

Christ crucified
Josephs petrified
The booted dehumanised
The watcher desensitised?

-Rev. Maria Shepherdson