While sitting by the railroad tracks in Auschwitz, a line from the movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt came into my head. In this film, they play a bored married couple that is surprised to learn they are both assassins hired by competing agencies to kill each other. In the middle of a gunfight in their home, Mr. Smith asks about what happened to their
happily-ever-after.
Mrs. Smith answers, “Happy endings are just stories that haven't finished yet.”
I wish that after this
Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz I could write an uplifting piece about healing and reconciliation. I can not. To be honest, I left this retreat feeling the most emotionally battered I have ever felt in my life.
And yet, I reconnected with old friends and made new ones. Krakow is a beautiful city.
Zywiec is a wonderful regional beer. I am happy to have been given the opportunity to participate in this experience.
I had moments of great catharsis where I felt a deep appreciation for my life. And moments of deep nihilistic despair. I experienced moments of compassion for others and myself, excitement, grief, irritation, satisfaction, frustration, fear, anxiety, peace, anger, jealousy, joy and just plain old boredom.
Normal every day human being stuff.
Amplified through the filter of That Place and squeezed into the practice container that was created to hold us in That Place for a week.
Every day, after our morning meditation, we would split into smaller groups and perform Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist religious services throughout the camp. In the late afternoon, before we left for the day, we would all gather together and
Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi would lead us in the Kaddish prayer. We read it four times: once in Polish, once in German, once in English, and once in Hebrew.
On the last evening, before we left the camp for the final time, we all gathered at one of the ash ponds for a final service. After that service was over,
Roshi Peter Muryo Matthiessen spoke a few words. He talked about how sixty-five years earlier, Auschwitz was a desolate place. There had been no natural signs of life left. No grass, no leaves, no animals, no birds, only mud and death. Today, Auschwitz has become a place of life. We were surrounded by blue skies, sunshine, grasses, flowers, lush trees and singing birds everywhere.
He was right. Poland experienced weeks of rain before we got there and that made the place come to life even more vibrantly. Auschwitz was SO blindingly green it made my Arizona eyes hurt.
My friend
Eric Manigian then looked down. In front of us was a small puddle of water teeming with tadpoles. The late afternoon sun was beating down on this little island of water. We could see that it had shrunk to at least half of its original size in the last few days. Eric looked and me and said, “If the sun keeps beating down on them like that, the water will be gone in a day or two. All of them will die.”
I pointed my camera to take a picture and then stopped. I was filled with shame that I wanted to capture an image of the tadpoles’ imminent demise to illustrate the story that I was already forming in my head. And then I felt like a dick for all the pictures I had been taking the whole week in Auschwitz, and for all the stories that were being formulated in my head in an attempt to create some sort of understanding of this place.
I put my camera away and walked quietly out of the camp.
I’m glad I didn't take that picture.
I wish I had taken that picture.
“I would like to prompt the viewer: be patient,
patiently read everything that is recorded in these pictures.
These are my ‘words that are drawn’ for you.
You have to read them.”
Marian Kolodziej
Much of the artwork that I have been using in these posts has been photographs of drawings by
Marian Kolodziej, Auschwitz prisoner number 432. The collection of his drawings is called
Images of Memory – The Labyrinth, and is housed in the basement of
St. Maximilian Kolbe Franciscan Church in Harmeze, Poland, located about 6 miles from Auschwitz.
Marian was a 17-year-old in the Polish Resistance when he was captured at the beginning of the German occupation of Poland. He was arrested in 1940 and later deported to Auschwitz on June 14, 1940 as one of the first Polish prisoners to be transported to the new concentration camp, Auschwitz. He became number 432. After evacuation of Auschwitz at the end of 1944, 432 was sent on various death marches to other camps until he was liberated by the American Army on May 6, 1945, from the
Ebensee concentration camp in Austria, some 350 miles west of Auschwitz.
He weighed 79 pounds.
Returning to Poland, he enrolled as a student of painting at the Fine Arts Academy in Krakow, graduated with a degree in stage design, and went on to became a successful production and stage designer in theater and film.
For close to 50 years he did not directly speak of Auschwitz, until 1993 when, at 70, he was debilitated by a stroke.
“And in the hospital room, weak and close to death, he lay on his belly, a pencil taped to his hand, and began to recreate on small sheets of paper the details of a life he’d tried so hard to forget but that was more vivid to him half a century later than his more recent career as Poland’s most renowned theater set designer. Those pages multiplied and spread into gigantic murals and drawings . . .” (
In Memoriam: Marian Kolodziej)
And with the support of his beloved wife, Halina,
he returned to Auschwitz,
For us.
The progress of his recovery and
the growth of
The Labyrinth became one.
Marian quotes the words of poet
Zbigniew Herbert,
“You were not saved in order to go on living.
Time is short—You must bear witness...” 
At the entrance of
The Labyrinth Marian writes:
Auschwitz is now a museum. My snapshots of That Place are essentially postcards of history. And postcards can be discarded or overly sentimentalized. The ink from Marian Kolodziej’s
Images of Memory – The Labyrinth has gotten under my skin, like a permanent tattoo. His images shifted the focus of Auschwitz into the confines of my own heart and cracked me open.
“The apocalypse is a kind of dream. It is a picture that a teen-age boy saw in a dream, remembering Duerer from reproductions hanging in his school corridor. During the first years we slept on the ground crammed together in an unimaginable fashion, squeezed close. The whole room on its left side because that's the way the first man lay down. If the first man lay down on his right side, then everyone had to lie on his right side. The head of the man in the second row on your knees, and in that way you got five hundred sleeping in one stinking room. By the door, a latrine barrel filled to the brim with urine and excrement.
And I'm there too. I sleep and see the massed attack of the many-headed Beast, of horses, of dragons and of reptiles - it is the whole cruelty of the day united with the loathsomeness of the night, it is the kapos, criminals, degenerate murderers, executioners, sadists, it is the everyday life of the camp. It is like in the Bible. The Four Horsemen, the Whore of Babylon, plagues from the sky. Everything according to the verses of the Apocalypse of St. John, but all crammed into the camp, into the reality of the camp.
We made this Apocalypse in ourselves, for ourselves.
And today I dream in the same way and I dream the same things. In these dreams the Beasts come back, repugnant, brutal, predator, cruel - people.
Through the smoke from the crematorium that I will dream about for all eternity, I do not see the sky. Sometimes there is only a cry. Someone is running through the camp and calls out,
"Where are you, God?"
All the while, life in the camp goes on normally.
Someone brings a barrel with food.People eat, relieve themselves, die.
Today, from the perspective of the years, I am absolutely certain that,
if I am as I am, it is because of those experiences in the camp, because of the hell that I went through. I learned and I taught myself to live - in isolation and in the herd and for the herd. To live honestly and worthily, to have a conscience. Maybe it was worth going through all that? 
Looking in advance from my life's close at this twentieth century of ours which is coming to an end, I see that after Auschwitz not only did nothing change on earth - though it was supposed to - but it is worse.
The laws of the camp still govern the world.
The factory of death has been modernized, computerized,
The monstrous Apocalypse from my drawings endures.”
I have been told that Marian has also said that although he surely endured the hell of Auschwitz, he spent the rest of his life in the heaven of his wife, Halina’s presence. And that when Marian and Halina looked into each other’s eyes, the power of their connection and love was palpable to everyone in the room.
Marian Kolodziej died last year.
Halina returned to the camps, for the last time, on the last day of our retreat to sprinkle some of his ashes on the grounds of Auschwitz.
There are no happy endings.
Halina spoke to us that day and ended by saying that ultimately all there is, is love.
Every day, at dusk, we walked back to the
Center for Dialogue and Prayer to the room that I shared with seven men, and I would attempt to take a shower (generally ice cold), wash my sweaty clothes in the sink, eat dinner, buy an espresso in the lobby café, and use their Wi-Fi connection with my laptop to
Skype Helene for 10 - 20 minutes before going back into the evening schedule.
On most Buddhist retreats, once it has started, I do not speak to my wife until its end. In Auschwitz she was my lifeline. I saw too that for the other men in my room, emails, phone calls, and daily incoming photos of the kids became their lifelines through this labyrinth we had immersed ourselves in.
I began to feel
Viktor Frankl’s words in
Man’s Search for Meaning:
“We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us.That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun, which was beginning to rise.A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, 'The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.'"
Writer
Primo Levi in his book
If This Is a Man says that if a note could have been smuggled out of Auschwitz it would read, “Enjoy your life.”
Primo Levi is said to have committed suicide in 1987.
I was in the soup line outside the camp one afternoon with a friend, talking about all those who survived Auschwitz only to be overtaken by the shadow of Auschwitz later and end their own lives. The woman behind us joined our conversation and said she grew up next to a couple who had both survived the Holocaust and married after the war. She told us that the husband committed suicide, and when someone suggested that part of the tragedy was that he had survived the holocaust only to take his own life later, his widow said that the real tragedy was that her husband had not survived the Holocaust.
In 1987,
Elie Wiesel said that really, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier."
On February 1, 2007 Holocaust denier Eric Hunt attacked Elie Wiesel. Hunt tried to drag Wiesel into a hotel room but failed to do so. Wiesel was not injured. Hunt fled the scene but was found and arrested. On July 21, 2008 Hunt was sentenced to two years, but was released on probation. Currently, he maintains a website promoting Holocaust denial.
No one survives.
Survival comes from our ability to move with Loving Action through this existence for others and ourselves.
To treat each other with dignity, generosity, compassion; to use our humanity as wisdom to empower each other with our humanity; to look, with gratitude, into the eyes of another and bear witness; to bear witness to just this. . .
Loving Action is the only response. Everything else (desire, judgment, ignorance) is a knee jerk reaction to this death trap.
Ultimately, all there is, is love. And yet . . .
Some of the people on that retreat annoyed the hell out of me. They were so shallow compared to me. They didn't get it at all. Obviously their practice was not as deep as mine. Others were just stuck in their own self-pity. Then there were those who treated the whole thing like it was some kind of Death Camp Disneyland complete with Auschwitz gift shops.
“Really, gift shops at Auschwitz?” I thought to myself indignantly. “What the hell are they going to sell there:
Anne Frank key chains, Elie Wiesel Night-lights, second hand shoes?” Mostly, the shop was filled with books, autobiographies of survivors, histories and commentaries written for different age groups and levels of understanding, a bound collection of
Marian Kolodziej’s drawings.
Tasteful.
And then I saw a sign that said, “Postcards: 1 zloty or 4 postcards for 3 zlotys.”
“Postcards from Auschwitz!?” I got angry again. “Who would you even send that to? And what could you possibly write on the other side? ‘Sitting in Auschwitz thinking of you. Wish you were here!’ How arrogant and disrespectful to create such a commodity,” I thought. And then I bought one.
At night I slept among a symphony of snores in a stiflingly hot room. The windows could not be opened because apparently they have not invented screens yet in Poland and the mosquitoes there were always right outside the locked glass.
The first night in Auschwitz, one of the men in the room screamed in his sleep in German. The rest of us sat up in our beds looking around, startled and shocked. The next morning he apologized for his outcry. I thought to myself, “I guess if I was German and in this place I’d probably be screaming in my sleep too.”
On the last night in Auschwitz, I was again awakened in the middle of the night by a cry. I sat up in my bed, but every one else remained still. Shocked, I wondered if the scream had been real. I wondered if it was I who screamed.
Sweaty, with my heart beating fast, I got up, splashed cold water on my face, looked in the mirror, and thought, “Was it just a dream? “
The next day, Eric asked if I knew who it was that screamed in the night. “That was real?” I asked. “If someone screamed, how come no one but me got up? I thought I dreamed it? Was it me?”
“I don't think so. It didn't come from your side of the room.”
“So who was it?”
"I don’t know, maybe we all just dreamed it.”
According to
Bernie Glassman, much of life is dealing with diversity and Auschwitz is an extreme example of how we deal with diversity; kill everyone that is different from me.
Standing in the Karkow airport, waiting for our flights, I told Eric that the next time we plan a trip together it should be to the Caribbean with our wives and his son. Next time, we should spend our days drinking beer on the beach and our nights playing in the dark.
Eric was heading back to New York to his family, and I envied him. I still had another week in Europe before I was finally heading home. Spending time in Europe after Auschwitz seemed like a good idea when I had planned the trip but in that moment my plans felt shortsighted. All I wanted to do was fly home and enjoy my every day life with Helene. Instead, I was flying to Amsterdam to wander without aim in a foreign city and hang out with Juriaan and Martin in the evenings at the
Wilderman. I guess that was okay too.
Eric got on his plane. I had over an hour before I could board my plane, so I sat in the airport alone feeling broken and grateful.
I unzipped my backpack, pulled my worn copy of
The Eye Never Sleeps, by my teacher
Genpo Roshi, and read these words:
“Nothing is really static. Yet what are we always trying to do? To make everything stay put! . . . There is nothing to hold onto, nothing we can depend on; it is all moving too quickly. There is only one time when we will be safe and secure: in a pine box! Only then will you be secure; . . . You will be very, very secure when you are dead, but then it will be too late to enjoy life.”
I will end this post with a song:
О, зачем тебя назвали Даниилом?
We have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Out on the streets where I grew up
