‎שואה

The Shoah in 1200 words, more or less . . .

Before I started practicing Zen Buddhism with Genpo Roshi, I was a Vipassana student and at least once a year I would go on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Those of you who know me in my day-to-day life may find this hard to believe, but breaking that silence was always hard for me. After spending days and hours in the quiet within myself, talking to someone about my cell phone provider or whether or not I preferred wheat or rye bread felt jarringly ridiculous. All words I spoke felt like lies and trivializations, disruptions from what is REALLY going on inside and all around us.

And yet, our words and our stories are in part what give us our humanity.

I have always loved that Lao-tsu’s first lines of the Tao Te Ching are, “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao. . .” And then he proceeds to put down 81 verses about the Tao.

It is in this space that I enter the stream and speak about my experience at the June 2010 Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz. These “retreats” are multi-faith and multinational in character, with a strong focus on the Zen Peacemakers’ Three Tenets:

Not-Knowing
Bearing Witness
Loving Action

Traditional Buddhist retreats tend to have a greater emphasis on creating a container to sit in silence and stillness to observe what is coming up. This retreat felt more like trying to be grounded in the middle of a bumper car ride.

Bearing Witness at Auschwitz took the traditional Buddhist practice container and placed it on its head as I spent a week crashing into The Other and Myself over and over and over again.

My understanding of Not-Knowing is to enter the stream without holding on to prior judgments or pre-conceived notions about what should or should not be happening. Bearing Witness is to simply be with what comes up, both in others and myself, and Loving Action is ultimately the aware response to what arises when I am connected to the moment and not finding a way to separate myself from my life.

I fail at following these (pain-in-the-ass) tenets all the time.

Auschwitz is an abyss.

I found Auschwitz to be a place that was incredibly difficult for me to NOT go numb to what was happening around and inside me.

I still do.

In 1933 there were around 9,000,000 Jews living in all of Europe. (About 1.5% of Europe’s total population at the time.)

9,000,000
6,000,000
3,000,000

By 1945 TWO-THIRDS GONE.

6,000,000 people violently ripped from the fabric of their everyday lives and slaughtered.

3,000,000 people left to rebuild their lives from ashes. Literally.

Bone.

Ash.

Dust.

Gone.

Today Europe is home to over eight hundred and five million people.

Only two million Jewish people are left in ALL of Europe today. (About .3% of Europe’s total population.)

The term Holocaust, comes from the Greek word holokauston which means,

"sacrifice by fire."

Genocide is not the act of one man or one nation.
It takes the collective.

The first two days of this retreat were spent in touring the Jewish Quarter and Ghettos of Krakow and then the full tour of the Auschwitz museum. After a day and a half spent focusing on what has got to be one of the darkest periods of Western history, I found myself asking the questions, “Why? How could THEY do this?”

Identifying myself as one of the Buddhists in this multi-faith gathering, I wore a samu jacket and rakusu, traditional Japanese Zen Buddhist clothing. While staring at the picture of a German solider shooting a mother and child, a Japanese man who was also touring the camp came up to me, pointed to my rakusu and asked in heavily accented English, “What country?”

“United States,” I replied.

“No!” he said and then pointed to my rakusu again. “What country?”

“Japan.”

We both smiled and bowed at each other with our hands in gassho.
In the face of all the evidence of human suffering around me by the hands of other humans that bow to a stranger and the connection it brought me became a warm, momentary respite. I, after all, was here for peace and to raise awareness for peace.

And then it hit me in the next moment that in WWII Japan was an ally to Germany. Japanese Zen Buddhism was as much a part of Auschwitz as the Catholic Church was.

I was using my condemnation and judgment of The Other, The Nazis, to separate myself from what was really going on. I was no longer Bearing Witness; I had become judge, jury, and executioner. “THEY were evil! How could THEY do this? Those fucking bastards deserve to die!”

My questions became, “Why? How could WE do this?”

Then we went to Birkenau, the ultimate 24 hour 365 day-a-year killing machine with the ability to gas around 7,000 people every 20 minutes. There were the remains of barrack chimneys for as far as my eyes could see for the 100,000 people who where kept alive to process the dead until they too were reduced to ash.

In the back of the camp was a building called the Sauna. This was where those chosen to work were stripped of everything: their family, belongings, clothes, hair, dignity, humanity.

Everything.

One of the items that most people brought with them were their family pictures. They were stripped of these too, but unlike jewelry, shoes, glasses, and hair, these pictures were worthless to the Nazis. They were found in the camp after the war. And today, the sauna holds the history of their humanity. Wall after wall of framed pictures. Baby pictures, wedding pictures, bar mitzvah pictures, family pictures, vacation pictures. . .

. . .pictures of my mother and my father and my grandparents and my sisters and my brothers and my wife and her mother and her father and her family and our children and their children.

Wall after wall of their stories.
Of our stories. . .

I asked myself, “Why? How could I do this?”

And then I knew why and how. In every moment, when I separate myself from my own feelings of anger, resentment, responsibility, helplessness, fear, denial, judgment; both towards others and myself; I have the potential to be both the victim and the perpetrator. This separation in ourselves is how an Auschwitz is created.

THEY did not create Auschwitz. WE did. WE still do. . .

When I am not Bearing Witness, I am Auschwitz.

In the shadow of The Shoah, my words and pictures are trivial.
But I have no other recourse.

Other fragments from my head:

How can I sing - My world is laid waste.
How can I play with wringed hands?
Where are my dead? O God, I seek them in every dunghill,
In every heap of ashes. . . O tell me where you are.

from “The Song of the Murdered Jewish People” by Itzhak Katzenelson He wrote this song in 1943. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

from “One” by U2

Is it getting better

Or do you feel the same

Will it make it easier on you now 

You got someone to blame

We're one

But we're not the same

Well we 

Hurt each other

Then we do it again

One love

One blood

One life

You got to do what you should

One life

With each other

Sisters

Brothers

One life

But we're not the same

We get to

Carry each other

Carry each other



One...life



One

from The Heart Sutra

Gya-te-gya-te-ha-ra-gya-te
Ha-ra-sou-gya-te-bo
Ji-so-wa-ka
Han-nya-shin-gyou

Gone! Gone! Gone! Beyond!
Gone beyond the beyond!
Bodhi Svaha!
Heart Sutra.

from Kaddish

Beyond the reach of all consolation.
Beyond! Beyond! / And say, Yes.
Amen.