Renewal

After the trip, I wrote only one brief post on social media about the trip. It was minimal, because at that point I had barely processed what had happened. This experience wasn’t exactly a like a comment kind of experience. I want to elaborate here now.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is completely and utterly empty. It is just a vast expanse of nothing. As we walked through, I heard sounds of birds chirping, bugs buzzing around; the sounds of an empty and peaceful forest. That was disconcerting, how completely peaceful it was. We were told to remember what it would have been, the ground trampled with constant footsteps, loudness and shouts, and probably the coughing sounds of fatigue and disease. 1.3 million people went through the camp. It was almost impossible to imagine that the way it was; there weren’t even many other visitors around us when we were there.

Railcar at Auschwitz-Birkenau

When we stood by the railcars, where people were selected, I had to sit down. The feeling of the place is oppressive. Most people were selected then to immediately go to the gas chambers, and never entered the camp proper. It is impossible to feel what they felt or truly understand the tragedy, it is impossible not to feel the tragedy.

The day I made the post was Ostara, a neopagan holiday of the spring equinox. It is about the return of growth and life after the death of winter, new life springing up in a cold world. When we were there, every time someone had a hard time, every time someone was overwhelmed in the place, there was someone there for them. There were people there, and certainly some of them were relatives of survivors, a new generation from those left of a tragedy. There were groups of Israelis visiting when we were. Life moves on, communities regrow. People are good.

It was deeply disconcerting and uncomfortable to find the place sometimes pleasant, a nice outdoor area with birds and wildlife and peacefulness, but the fact of the matter is that that is the cycle of life, of the world, and that it may feel wrong, but it is also good.

Read More

Interreligious Community and Friendship

Forming relationships between communities that are in strain against each other can only be formed on an individual level. Obviously, there are sociopolitical factors at work that have to be dealt with, but ultimately, it is personal relationships across communities that creates relationship between communities. Pope John Paul provides an example of how these friendships can come into a greater social play than they ever began.

Jerzy Kruger was a Jewish boy who grew up in Wadawice with Pope John Paul, where as kids they had matching nicknames: “Dudek” and “Lodek”. In his strong friendship, and living in a house owned by a Jewish family, Pope John Paul grew up with relationships between Jews and Catholics being normal.

When Pope John Paul becomes the pope, he reconnects with Kruger, who is in Rome. It is Kruger, a childhood friend, who helps the head of the Catholic Church connect to Roman Jewish and Israeli authorities and improve Catholic-Jewish relationships. He helped Pope John Paul be the first Pope in the main Roman Synagogue.

After the war, Kruger had never returned to Poland. However, showing the strength of their relationship, he returned on the request of the Pope. He read a letter for blessing an old synagogue, which was the first time in 400 years that the papal seal was used.

On his own trip, Pope John Paul went to the Wailing Wall and prayed in the manner of the Jewish people who prayed there, and left a papal blessing.

There is no way to determine what his attitude would have been were he raised in a different context, without his closest friend being Jewish, but one can certainly see how his childhood would have formed him to create relationships where there were deep rifts in community. The way he was raised, had he never become pope, he still developed an attitude that relationships with Jewish people were normal and natural, that there was no reason Catholics and Jews could not be in positive relationship, and that would be one more person in the general public who thought that way, and each person who experienced that would add up.

However, he did become pope, and the effect was greater. One friendship, the environment of one boy’s childhood, brought together two communities that were meant to be close and friendly but were instead hostile and wary of each other. Individual experience matters; individual experience form socioeconomic experience and reality.

Joy and pain, thorns and roses intertwine in our lives. May the Blessed Virgin Mary teach us to turn this lot - which often leads us to the feet of the Cross, along with her - into our merit. - Pope John Paul

Read More

Walking Their Path

When we went to Aushwitz-Birkenau, it was a very different experience than it had been at Auschwitz. I was prepared for it only so much; I had imagined it would be easier after the initial shock of the first camp.

Registration Building at Auschwitz-Birkenau

This was not true, in part because of the major difference between these two sites. One had been transformed into a museum, something modern despite our moving through buildings that had been used during the Shoah. The latter was left as it was, with only bunkers rebuilt to show what it would have looked like. It was complete emptiness and huge expanse that I hadn’t been prepared for. It’s impossible to imagine the real size of the camp before you are there.

What struck me hard during this day was our walk through the registration building. We walked on elevated glass platforms that prevented our feet from touching the true ground of the building; I am grateful as it felt like it might have been too much to have our feet on that same ground. Walking outside was different; inside became a specific place, a specific event. We followed through their fearful progress.

Furnaces for burning clothing and belongings

First, women would enter this building and be stripped of their clothes. The day we walked through felt cold to me and it was higher than the typical temperature in Poland. I had a coat on. We followed down the hallway, and along the way you could see the different rooms. At a certain point in the war, the women would have known one of their possible fates and been terrified as they believed they were walking to the gas chambers. At the end of the hall they would be shaved, and then they would get into a real shower and discover that this was not their fate.

While this was happening, all of their belongings would be being burned. This was in part sanitation, but it had the effect of eliminating even more of them off the world. The women would be cold and wet now, and stand in another hall being registered and awaiting clothes, potentially for hours.

Walking through the building made each of these moments more vivid than they ever could have been otherwise. We walked their path, quite literally, in those moments, and cold myself and somewhat on edge, I did not get shaved or stand frozen and wet. It made the image of that experience much more vivid.

Read More