That Place

World leaders are gathering today at the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland to make the 75th anniversary of its liberation on this day in 1945. It is a day of remembrance and, I have no doubt, for those few survivors who are still alive, a day in which the wounds of the horrors they endured in that infernal place are reopened, if they ever healed in the first place. 

I visited Auschwitz twice, the first time with a friend - in that visit I could ponder in my own time what had happened there; the second visit was leading a group and then I could see the reaction of people who had only encountered the place in books and films - it was not pleasant. To visit such a place might seem strange - if there is a place that symbolises hell on earth, it is Auschwitz and its sister camps, so why go there? Why dignify the place with our attention and presence? Or, indeed, does visiting somehow undermine the agony of those who suffered and died there? It should never be a mere tourist destination, if anything it is, at best, a pilgrimage, a via dolorosa. The Jew tells us that the holocaust should never be forgotten, in going to Auschwitz and the other camps I hope we can say that we are honouring that request.

Like many of you, I'm sure, I grew up reading about Auschwitz. There were snippets of its awful history in some of the things we saw and read, but the first encounter for me was when I heard the story of St Maximilian Kolbe. Having been educated by Franciscan Brothers, when he was canonised in 1982 we learned a great deal about him and encountered the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp in its rawness for the first time. I maintained an interest, reading history and the accounts of survivors. When I went to university there was a priest in the Theology faculty who had served as a chaplain in either the US or British army during the war, who had been part of the liberating force of one of the camps, I can't remember which one, for some reason Belson comes to mind. Some of his students had mentioned it and we were chastened by what we heard about his experiences. 

Three writers, former prisoners of the camps, also made an impression: Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Viktor Frankl. I read a number of their works and I was struck by the differences. All of their accounts are poignant, the brutal reality of the camps was all too clear. In each case we see men who struggled, not just with what they endured and what they witnessed, but at the deeper level, they struggled with the very nature of humanity itself - humanity in what they encountered in their fellow prisoners, in what they saw in their persecutors, and, even more horrifying, what they saw in themselves. The encounter with evil in its own domain on earth undid men and women to the core of their very being. And there is no doubt, the camps were hell on earth, not merely in symbolic terms but in reality - the very realm of Satan himself. But, as we see in some accounts, even there God was present: in the very courage and heroism of so many, we see not just defiance, but victory.

That may sound strange. But the people who emerged from the camps, from Auschwitz, may have seemed like shadows of humanity, but they became prophets - the suffering they endured, senseless as it may seem to some, bore tremendous significance and stands as a warning to us today, and for all time. That it was the Jewish people who bore the weight of this, while utterly unjust, makes their relevance for the world even more urgent. God's Chosen People of old, who, as we see in the Old Testament, by their very nature point to God, represented God on this patch of the universe, now stand before the world pointing to a reality the world has forgotten. They remind the world of the existence of evil, of what it does to men and women, how it annihilates the good and turns its collaborators into monsters, defrocks them of their humanity. A number of years ago a friend of mine suggested that in trying to destroy the Jewish people, Hitler was trying to destroy God, wipe Him and His influence from the earth in true Nietzschean terms, so he looked to those who always represented God - His people, and sought to destroy them. It's an interesting point.

Of the writers I read, I found great depth and poignancy in Primo Levi, though his suicide seems as if the whole weight of what he endure just overpowered him. Elie Wiesel is also poetic in his work, but in Night his suffering leads him to affirm what Nietzsche had so arrogantly proclaimed, that God is dead. Then again, many come to such a conclusion when it seems heaven is silent to their pleas. Many writers had to grapple with that, including C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain. Viktor Frankl took another path, his sufferings led him to struggle with the same questions and devise logotherapy - he sought meaning in all of it, a meaning that would help him (and others) to overcome it. Others have reacted in other ways. For many holocaust has destroyed faith - I remember hearing one Jewish person say that after the death camps Judaism had to redefine itself as a religion without a god given what had happened. Perhaps it was in response to such thoughts that the poet Chana Bloch said in one of her poems, 'After Auschwitz, no theology', although she goes on to say 'After Auschwitz, a new theology:/ the Jews who died in the Shoah/have now come to be like their God,/...They have no likeness of a body and they have no body'.

Without doubt I will return again to Auschwitz; I like Poland and I will in time return, and even that awful place will be on the itinerary. I am reminded of a poem by Linda Ashear in which she speaks of a visit to the camp. In the opening lines she notes the reaction of her travel agent, 'Why do you want to go there?' An interesting question. In that poem she is reduced to silence at the end as she holds the remnants of bones in her hand. It is a place that renders you silent, but it must - in a world that tries to distract itself from metaphysical realities, too much discourse to push away what we need to encounter and understand. Auschwitz makes one face up to reality and what human beings are capable.

I cannot end this post without describing two experiences I had. The first was at the larger Birkenau part of the camp. For the most part it is a large field with the remains of the shacks built to house the prisoners; running up the centre of the field is the infamous railway track. Standing there I was aware of deathly silence, it seemed to absorb everything. I made my way to the point in the track where the Jews were disembarked from the trains and the decision as to whether they lived or died was made. An ordinary patch of ground, and yet, pivotal in the lives of so many. As a Carmelite my thoughts of course turned to St Edith Stein - she stood there, surrounded by the children she was caring for; and from there she walked to the buildings behind the trees, now destroyed, where she and the little ones were gassed and then cremated, their ashes scattered as if they never existed. But they did, their memory remains and, we believe as Christians, they found a home with God. Edith had said, as she was arrested in Holland, 'Let us go for the sake of our people'.

The second incident was in the old camp, in Block 11 where St Maximilian Kolbe had starved with nine companions and was finally killed by lethal injection. It is an evil place, an underground bunker where so many people endured a horrific passion. Standing at the door of the cell where he died, for some strange reason I felt light in my soul, that what had happened there was not only not without significance, but achieved something - salvation. The sacrifice of Maximilian Kolbe had been a light in the midst of the darkness of that place - a sign of hope that evil will not triumph, that what was endured by some many will bear fruit for humanity. Many may not agree with me on that, but that was what I experienced and what I believe. And with that in mind, we must ensure that what the Jewish suffered in that place with so many others is not forgotten, but in fact becomes an important lesson for us.

May God have mercy upon all of them.

May God have mercy upon us.