Auschwitz is always a harsh lesson¯a slap, a rebuke, an indictment. This is a proof of what humans can do. This is a monument to what humans can be. There is no one who is not guilty, there is no one who is not shamed, there is no one who is not shown a mirror by that vile camp the Nazis built in conquered Poland to dispose of many of the lives they said were unworthy to live: Jews, mostly, and Gypsies, and troublesome Poles like Maximilian Kolbe, and the weak, and the infirm, and the different.
In one sense, anything we might learn from Auschwitz is hardly news: Ever since Cain first picked up a rock and went looking for his brother, murder has been the human story. That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third / were axioms ¯although W.H. Auden goes on: to him who’d never heard / of any world where promises were kept / or one could weep because another wept. But to visit Auschwitz is to know, more fully than anywhere else, that this is not a world in which promises are often kept, and we are not beings who can be counted on to weep just because others weep. Man’s inhumanity to man may be an old story, but the death camps of the Nazi holocaust streamlined and magnified murder with all the new efficiency and practicality of which modern times was capable. These were not old-fashioned slaughterhouses. They were factories , manufacturing death by the gross lot.
As a result, the Holocaust can seem too big to learn any particular lesson from. As a metaphor, it trivializes anything it is used to describe¯or, worse, it gets trivialized itself. "Holocaust on Your Plate," proclaims the pro-animal group PETA, juxtaposing pictures of the Nazi death camps with photos of modern farming. "The Jewish Holocaust Was Then, The Palestinian Holocaust Is Now," explains the Arab Al-Jazeerah .
It’s as though nearly everyone wants to use the Holocaust for something : to advance some modern political purpose or thicken some contemporary moral claim. The temptation is almost overwhelming¯and understandably so, for Auschwitz truly is a lesson, and it seems to demand that we apply that lesson, here and now. It seems to demand that we change our lives, here and now.
In itself, that ought to be a warning. The examples are endless: A few decades ago, the anti-Western Soviets declared that the Nazi death camps demonstrated Communism’s superiority to the bourgeois West; a few years ago, a popular anti-Christian historian wrote a book claiming that the Holocaust proved that organized Christianity must dissolve itself. If the Holocaust merely confirms you in the stands you already have, then you haven’t learned the lesson of the Holocaust.
Pope Benedict XVI visited Auschwitz on Saturday, and many of the initial news reports concentrated on his cry, "Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?" In some ways, that revealed the inability of the press to grasp the heart of the pope’s speech "not to join in hate but to join in love." But, in other ways, the press reports were exactly right, for Benedict has just given one of the great pontifical speeches¯and he did it by refusing to use the Holocaust for any purpose except itself.
There will be more to say in the coming days about the speech Benedict gave at Auschwitz on May 28, as we think more about his words¯particularly about his analysis of the Third Reich’s anti-Semitism. It sprang, he argues, from two sources. The first and most deadly was a desire to destroy both the Jews and their religion, from which had come the civilization the Nazis were determined to overturn. But there was as well a second source, Benedict suggests, for the Nazis aimed ultimately to eradicate the Christian morality they hated, by striking at its Jewish roots.
Here, courtesy of the news-service Zenit is the full English translation:
To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible¯and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a Pope from Germany. In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread silence¯a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?
In silence, then, we bow our heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death here; yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again.
Twenty-seven years ago, on June 7, 1979, Pope John Paul II stood in this place. He said: "I come here today as a pilgrim. As you know, I have been here many times. So many times! And many times I have gone down to Maximilian Kolbe’s death cell, paused before the execution wall, and walked amid the ruins of the Birkenau ovens. It was impossible for me not to come here as Pope."
Pope John Paul came here as a son of that people which, along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place and, in general, throughout the war. "Six million Poles lost their lives during the Second World War: a fifth of the nation," he reminded us. Here, too, he solemnly called for respect for human rights and the rights of nations, as his predecessors John XXIII and Paul VI had done before him, and added: "The one who speaks these words is . . . the son of a nation which, in its history, has suffered greatly from others. He says this, not to accuse, but to remember. He speaks in the name of all those nations whose rights are being violated and disregarded . . . "
Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people. For this very reason, I can and must echo his words: I could not fail to come here.
I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people¯a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.
Yes, I could not fail to come here. On June 7, 1979, I came as the archbishop of Munich-Freising, along with many other bishops who accompanied the Pope, listened to his words and joined in his prayer. In 1980, I came back to this dreadful place with a delegation of German bishops, appalled by its evil, yet grateful for the fact that above its dark clouds the star of reconciliation had emerged.
This is the same reason why I have come here today: to implore the grace of reconciliation¯first of all from God, who alone can open and purify our hearts, from the men and women who suffered here, and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at this hour of our history, are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns.
How many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?
The words of Psalm 44 come to mind, Israel’s lament for its woes: "You have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness . . . because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!" (Psalm 44:19,22-26).
This cry of anguish, which Israel raised to God in its suffering, at moments of deep distress, is also the cry for help raised by all those who in every age¯yesterday, today and tomorrow¯suffer for the love of God, for the love of truth and goodness. How many they are, even in our own day!
We cannot peer into God’s mysterious plan¯we see only piecemeal, and we would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. Then we would not be defending man, but only contributing to his downfall. No¯when all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!
And our cry to God must also be a cry that pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God’s hidden presence¯so that his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism.
Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether it is the abuse of God’s name as a means of justifying senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith in him.
Let us cry out to God, that he may draw men and women to conversion and help them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence¯a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser.
The God in whom we believe is a God of reason¯a reason, to be sure, which is not a kind of cold mathematics of the universe, but is one with love and with goodness. We make our prayer to God and we appeal to humanity, that this reason, the logic of love and the recognition of the power of reconciliation and peace, may prevail over the threats arising from irrationalism or from a spurious and godless reason.
The place where we are standing is a place of memory. The past is never simply the past. It always has something to say to us; it tells us the paths to take and the paths not to take. Like John Paul II, I have walked alongside the inscriptions in various languages erected in memory of those who died here: inscriptions in Belarusian, Czech, German, French, Greek, Hebrew, Croatian, Italian, Yiddish, Hungarian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Romani, Romanian, Slovak, Serbian, Ukrainian, Judeo-Spanish and English.
All these inscriptions speak of human grief, they give us a glimpse of the cynicism of that regime which treated men and women as material objects, and failed to see them as persons embodying the image of God.
Some inscriptions are pointed reminders. There is one in Hebrew. The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. Thus the words of the Psalm: "We are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter" were fulfilled in a terrifying way.
Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone¯to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world. By destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.
Then there is the inscription in Polish. First and foremost they wanted to eliminate the cultural elite, thus erasing the Polish people as an autonomous historical subject and reducing it, to the extent that it continued to exist, to slavery.
Another inscription offering a pointed reminder is the one written in the language of the Sinti and Roma people. Here too, the plan was to wipe out a whole people which lives by migrating among other peoples. They were seen as part of the refuse of world history, in an ideology which valued only the empirically useful; everything else, according to this view, was to be written off as "lebensunwertes Leben"¯life unworthy of being lived.
There is also the inscription in Russian, which commemorates the tremendous loss of life endured by the Russian soldiers who combated the Nazi reign of terror; but this inscription also reminds us that their mission had a tragic twofold aim: by setting people free from one dictatorship, they were to submit them to another, that of Stalin and the Communist system.
The other inscriptions, written in Europe’s many languages, also speak to us of the sufferings of men and women from the whole continent. They would stir our hearts profoundly if we remembered the victims not merely in general, but rather saw the faces of the individual persons who ended up here in this abyss of terror.
I felt a deep urge to pause in a particular way before the inscription in German. It evokes the face of Edith Stein, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross: a woman, Jewish and German, who disappeared along with her sister into the black night of the Nazi-German concentration camp; as a Christian and a Jew, she accepted death with her people and for them.
The Germans who had been brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau and met their death here were considered as "Abschaum der Nation"¯the refuse of the nation. Today we gratefully hail them as witnesses to the truth and goodness which even among our people were not eclipsed. We are grateful to them, because they did not submit to the power of evil, and now they stand before us like lights shining in a dark night. With profound respect and gratitude, then, let us bow our heads before all those who, like the three young men in Babylon facing death in the fiery furnace, could respond: "Only our God can deliver us. But even if he does not, be it known to you, O King, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up" (cf. Daniel 3:17ff.).
Yes, behind these inscriptions is hidden the fate of countless human beings. They jar our memory, they touch our hearts. They have no desire to instill hatred in us: Instead, they show us the terrifying effect of hatred. Their desire is to help our reason to see evil as evil and to reject it; their desire is to enkindle in us the courage to do good and to resist evil. They want to make us feel the sentiments expressed in the words that Sophocles placed on the lips of Antigone, as she contemplated the horror all around her: My nature is not to join in hate but to join in love.
By God’s grace, together with the purification of memory demanded by this place of horror, a number of initiatives have sprung up with the aim of imposing a limit upon evil and confirming goodness.
Just now I was able to bless the Center for Dialogue and Prayer. In the immediate neighborhood the Carmelite nuns carry on their life of hiddenness, knowing that they are united in a special way to the mystery of Christ’s cross and reminding us of the faith of Christians, which declares that God himself descended into the hell of suffering and suffers with us. In Oswiecim is the Center of St. Maximilian Kolbe, and the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. There is also the International House for Meetings of Young people. Near one of the old prayer houses is the Jewish Center. Finally the Academy for Human Rights is presently being established. So there is hope that this place of horror will gradually become a place for constructive thinking, and that remembrance will foster resistance to evil and the triumph of love.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, humanity walked through a "valley of darkness." And so, here in this place, I would like to end with a prayer of trust¯with one of the psalms of Israel which is also a prayer of Christians: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff¯they comfort me . . . .I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long" (Psalm 23:1-4,6).
In addition to which :
In the June/July issue of First Things , Jason Byassee, assistant editor of Christian Century, examines the sad story told by his former teacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book Leaving Church. Byassee writes: “For those younger than Taylor, it seems apparent that for any interesting rebellion we have to leave the deconstructive work and reembrance historic Christian doctrine and practice. I’m glad Taylor helped teach me what a joy that embrace can be—before she herself left the Church.” Isn’t it time for you to subscribe to First Things ?
