Bearing Witness in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2022

From 31st October to 5th November, I once again joined the Zen Peacemakers International Group for 5 days of Bearing Witness in Auschwitz-Birkenau, thanks to the generosity of dear friends and companions who supported my going there. 

Welcoming the wisdom of Not Knowing, Bearing Witness and then taking Loving (Healing) Action which form the three tenets of the Zen Peacemakers, I began opening to a whole new experience - trying to let go and not attach to the experiences and memories of last year’s retreat, or the many times I visited the former concentration and extermination camps during the last year. Letting go of expectations and ideas.

Opening to the present, trying to stay with the Now, no matter how unbearable.  

Like last year, I will share parts of my personal journal that I kept during the retreat with you as well as weave in general reflections that have come up in the few days since the retreat. 

A part of the book The War Hotel: Psychological Dynamics in Violent Conflict by Arlene Audergon, one of my Processwork teachers, outlines some of the reasons behind my participation in the Bearing Witness retreats: 

“knowing about the horrible things going on in our world does not put a stop to them. In fact, when inundated by the extent of the horror in our world, we may grow increasingly numb. Numbness in the face of atrocity at a social level mirrors the numbness that traumatized individuals often experience. [...] Collectively, we might begin to break the silence and the spell of complicity, if we begin to tell this story that is ours, realizing that, even if we feel at a distance from the atrocities in our world, the way we cut ourselves off from feeling and the way we silence ourselves can be understood as part of the dynamic of our collective trauma. 

[...] Even more difficult is to feel it, to open our hearts to include what we have done to one another and what we have experienced as human beings. It leads us to ask ourselves, individually and as a society, if we can stop cycles of violence. We meet our hopelessness, our depression. When we no longer identify only as bystanders, we begin to witness, to include and grapple with the tragedies of our world and our story. This requires great compassion for ourselves, how we are linked to one another and to our terrible and beautiful history and life together on earth.” (p. 174)

Slowly, slowly. It is beginning.

With meeting (and singing with) my friends Rabbi David and Li after the official registration and opening of the retreat, it is beginning to get more real. Tomorrow we will be back in Auschwitz. Am I ready? Not really.
Yet, slowly beginning to strip away all that is worldly, earthly, letting go off all that was before, so I can fully expand and step into my purest, strongest form, to hold space for all that is to come. 

We board the bus, leave Krakow and head to Auschwitz. Our group is almost twice as big as last year’s. Many new and yet also many already familiar and beloved faces.

Questions. Living the questions. Living the questions the camp gave me as I walked around the exhibitions of Auschwitz, read the display boards, listened to our guide. 
What is innocence (or pondering the more literal translation from German: un-guilt)?
What is justice? 
What is war?
What is neutrality?

Living the questions and being with all the impressions. Not trying to find answers in this maze of overwhelm and intensity. Simply being with the questions, chewing on them, shining a light on them from different sides, moving them around.  

So good to go with Li to the Sola River in the afternoon, to offer a prayer and song to the river of ashes.

So good to sing with Li in the chapel after the council group meeting to shake off and digest the day as much as is possible. The morning in Auschwitz is always a challenge, the place in general is always a challenge, even though the introductory films we watched this year were not as brutal and painful as the ones last year.

Like last year, we begin the day with our council group sharings before breakfast. These 1.5 hours in the morning are always particularly touching and important as they allow us to share our experience and processes, our thoughts and whatever comes to our heart with a small and intimate group and bear witness to each other’s processes, as well as learn from one another. I was grateful for the group I found myself in, which included a Lakota elder, a few Jewish 2nd/3rd generation Holocaust survivors as well as a variety of different nations, ages, spiritual traditions, and contexts.

Then. Birkenau. Beginning the day again with a few hours of touring the former extermination camp.
Hard. Painful. Nausea. So much constant nausea. A difficult place. So harrowing. And yet so familiar, somewhat beautiful, like an old friend. Strange. 

Rabbi David, Hebrew, the Sauna, singing Jewish prayers and devotional songs, taking in the photographs of Jewish families… as always incredibly powerful to bring back Hebrew language and Jewish prayer into the place where so many thousands of people lost their names, their identity, their belongings, their hair… An act of justice? Redemption? Reconciliation? What even is that?

Moving. 

The feeling of walking way too fast, my feet can only do snail’s pace now. I already walk so slowly and yet, I still feel I am walking too fast. Trying to tread as carefully as I can to not step harshly onto the ashes, the remnants of the dead, that are everywhere – on the paths, in the grass, on the train tracks, in the ponds, in the rivers, on the roads, in the fields… Ashes, everywhere they put the ashes. Too many ashes from too many bodies.

We leave the camp for lunch soup break, sitting outside, next to the gate of death. Walking there from the Sauna seems more and more cumbersome, until I realise why – we are the only ones walking this direction on this particular path. Every one else had to walk the other way - from landing platform to gas chamber. No wonder that walking is so tiresome when so many are coming towards us. 
Once we’re back on the landing platform and headed alongside the train tracks towards the gate, walking gets a little easier again.

After lunch we set up the circle on the landing platform for the first meditations.
It is icy cold while meditating today.
And then, finally, the wind stops and I realise how peaceful and calm I feel. My body still aches a bit, the back, the shoulders, the eyes, the legs are tired and heavy, the constant nausea, but inside me is a lot of peace. 
I hardly have any words. – I also don’t need any words. 
I hardly have any thoughts. – I also don’t need any thoughts. 
I entered a different time and space. Everything is a little softer, gentler, more open, more vulnerable, more silent. 
The work of the last year seems to have brought some peace to me, at least for the moment. I can meet the place differently. 
I don’t know yet how I should continue serving this place. But I also know that I will find out. When time has come, I will know. Until then I can trust that my time here is not over yet. 

Questions that I don’t need to engage with now, because all I hold in me is calmness and equanimity. 

The inner stillness that comes after you’ve faced the demons and have not run away but walked through the fire of discomfort. When you don’t fight or rebel but just surrender to what is. Surrender. Acceptance. Not avoiding, not wanting to change (the cold, the wind, the body pain, the horror of this place) but simply let go and surrender, to accept all that is, opening wide, opening wide. 
How can this work be brought to Germany? This deep work? Where would be good points of acupuncture? Important places? Places of antisemitism and islamophobia? What and where is really the root (of collective trauma and the gruesome past, but also of the patterns of the present)? Where to begin?
What did the chancellor after Hitler do to deal with the remnants of the Nazi regime and a country and society in ruins? How do you rule a people, a nation after something like this…? 

My thoughts keep wanting to dream me away from this horrible place. Stay present! Stay with the feeling of nausea, the physical discomfort, the breath. The breath as greatest prayer. 

The air is so thick that every word, every step, every movement leaves a trace. 

I am glad and grateful to be here again with this group. 

This is no place for the ego. It’s a place for deep humility, humbleness. 
Maybe none of this work is shiny and glorious. Maybe it’s rather like kneeling in the dirt of Auschwitz, treading carefully amongst the ashes of the dead, trying to make sense, trying not to make sense, to be present and just breathe through it all. This is no place for the ego. 

In the evening, we again return to the Labyrinth, the stunning and shocking drawings by Marian Kolodziej. Since it is All Souls Day (Nov 2nd), we decide to stop at a graveyard in Oswiecim since this day is big in hyper-catholic Poland. As we walk around the graveyard, brightly lit by thousands of candles, I cannot unsee the heaps of rubbish and plastic just outside the graveyard gates. I also begin to ponder how different it feels here, on this graveyard. We spend all day in an enormous graveyard, or rather mass grave, and yet – this one feels more at peace – the souls are well cared for, the graves are cared for, the souls were put to rest by the ones who love them. In Auschwitz and Birkenau, no souls have been lovingly put to rest. Hardly any family members or friends come to light candles and care for the dead.
And yet, if you know you are walking on a mass grave, on ashes washed into every millimetre of ground, you walk differently. You just walk differently.

Today seems to be the day of children, and parents, and honouring ancestors. Not just in the sharings in our council group, but also because of our visit to the children’s barrack.
Grieving and mourning the great injustice (of the children, particularly, as it already began yesterday in the Sauna). 
Interesting how strange and wrong it had felt to not be in the children’s barrack (closed due to restauration works) but in a different barrack to sing children songs and share stories. The children called me, especially after we’ve established such a strong connection last year, and yet all I could do was to stand outside the construction fence and cry, the path to their place was blocked. 

The children - who were only kept alive for Mengele and his experiments.

How easily and quickly a (child’s) life is destroyed and traumatised…

In the afternoon, after the meditation and before the group split into different religious services on the grounds of Birkenau, Li and I left the group and headed back to Auschwitz. We both felt a need to return to Auschwitz and so we gladly accepted each other’s company and took the shuttle bus that runs between the museums together.

My feet first took me into the exhibition of Slovak Jews – why, I don’t know. I couldn’t take in much of the information on display but ended up spending some time looking at the photographs of beautiful young men and women before their deportation to Auschwitz.
Slovakia was the only country that paid Hitler for taking the Jewish population to extermination camps. This bit of information stayed.
I also entered the exhibition about Austria, wandered around, read the survivor’s quotes and some other accounts. Just before leaving, the last story of a survivor cracked my heart open (wider).  
Then I had to return to Block 27, the Shoah, to spend a lot of time there, grief and cry and feel rage and anger. Why, I don’t know. But I trust that it had to be.
It had to be that I saw this number.  

0.8% – the number that shocked me so hard. 
0.8% - not even 1% - was the Jewish population in Germany before the war. Before the war. 0.8%. And that was enough to do all this? 

Incomprehensible. 

It was terrifying to return to Auschwitz alone, but it also had to be. And in the end, it was good to return.
To see the photographs of the beautiful Slovak Jews. 
The films of Jewish lives before the war in Block 27 (Shoah) always make me sob. And the Nazi propaganda recordings terrify me, every time.
Why I had to return there? Who knows. I trust it makes sense. 
And I am glad that my capacity to face horror and trauma and just hold space for it and bear witness has grown. 
Widening my cup so I can hold more space… 

Afterwards, there was a deep peace and stillness in me as I rejoined Li and we walked back to our accommodation together.
Until the 0.8% storm surge hit again and I sat crying with grief and rage in the circle and tried to share my experience - under the compassionate eyes of the group during the spiral council in the evening of day 3. Maybe all this had to be heard and witnessed by the large group. 
Who knows what sense it may make. All I can do is trust that my feet walked me where I had to be, to do what I had to do. 

Until the next morning I could still feel the aftermath of the storm surge in me, only slowly my inner calmness was returning. 

0.8% … incredible. Incomprehensible.

“Remember only that I was innocent, and, just like you, mortal on that day. I, too, had had a face marked by rage, by pity and joy, quite simply, a human face!” - Benjamin Fondane, murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944
(the quote on the wall at the end of the book)

“On an emotional level, there is a collective frozen atmosphere around the story and trauma, and a general incapacity to relate on a feeling level to history. […] Still frozen in the collective trauma […] many Germans are unable to have any feeling of contact with the period of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust […] they still suffer from an extraordinary collective shock and the incapacity to contact their feelings about it.” Writes Arlene Audergon in The War Hotel (p. 185f.).

I am glad I can allow the feelings to arise in me and fully feel them.

This place… this horrible place…

But I am glad that I can engage with it more maturely by now, and also ride the storm waves differently by now.  

The visit to the women’s barrack in the morning of day 4, the moving sharing of the others, my “loosen, loosen baby” song, sitting on the ground. Then outside on the grass, connection to the land. The barrack in which so many women had waited for their time of death to come.

In the afternoon, after meditating and reading names of people killed at Birkenau, I again skipped the religious services but instead ended up walking to the other end of the camp, standing by the fence and pondering escape - how could you escape from here? - before visiting the ruins of the “little white house”, that used to contain several gas chambers, and the souls there. 

In the evening of day 4 we returned to Birkenau, to spend a few hours in one of the quarantine barracks – simple wooden horse barracks repurposed to house several hundred (sometimes even a thousand) prisoners – and listen to moving stories from the lives of retreat participants. While it was beautiful and touching to hear such vulnerable and honest accounts, I was also longing for silence, to feel the place and the souls. I was filled with a longing for a night vigil with song and candles in Birkenau like they used to do during retreats (before it was no longer allowed). 

“It takes just one candle to light up the darkness” – as Koho said.

Pondering forgiveness.

After council groups, breakfast and the first meditations on the landing platform, the last day was again commemorated with a Kaddish for the souls and a lighting of commemoration candles by the memorial. Then, after our last soup of the retreat outside the gate of Birkenau, we returned to the extermination camp one last time to do a memorial walk from the gate to the crematorium and eventually one of the ash ponds. Like last year, I was invited to read an eyewitness account at one of the stops. Last year’s text about the camp orchestra had already been painfully hard. This year, as one of the few Germans, I was asked to read something about the perpetrators and their ability to be both human and tremendously inhumane. Challenging, and yet an honour to read for the group and the land.

Our walk ended at the big ash pond where Rabbi David sang one last Jewish song celebrating life before we wished each other Shabbat Shalom and slowly returned to the gate.
It was done.

Our week of Bearing Witness to this most gruesome of places had ended.
Now we returned to our accommodation (some by walking, some by bus as every day) to rest and prepare for the Shabbat celebration and dinner, followed by Mikko’s (Order of Disorder) hilariously silly nonsensical performance.

Like last year, the evening ended with songs shared and performed by Li, Rabbi David and me. Bruno, a participant from Brazil, and Koho also joined to share some songs.

And so, my 32nd year ended like it began – sharing songs and love in a circle of beautiful souls, at the end of a week of bearing witness.
We stayed awake until midnight so I could I receive the first of many birthday songs and blessings.

Then it was the end.
And my birthday.
33.
What a beautiful number.

Somehow so much is swirling around my head now - and somehow also nothing. 

Right now, I don’t feel a desire to keep poking around in the darkness and abyss of human atrocities. Right now, I want to celebrate life, with lightness and light-heartedness and lust for life, exuberance and vibrancy.
Focus on the light and all that is liveable and loveable. Going deeper and deeper into my humanity and openheartedness. Deeper and deeper.  
And at the same time, I could sleep for 3 days straight.
Inner emptiness.

Humility. Surrender. Humbleness. Humanity. These are some of the words that I take with me from the retreat. Lessons from the land, the place, the souls. 
Every moment an act of service. 
Every breath a prayer.

Tremendous gratitude for the time with Zen Peacemakers International in Auschwitz and Birkenau. Until next year. I look forward to returning.