Pilgrim to Unholy Places: Christians and Jews re-visit the Holocaust 9783034321945, 9783034324335, 9783034324359, 9783034324342, 3034321945

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JUDAICA eT CHRISTIANA

Raymond Pelly

Pilgrim to Unholy Places LANG

Christians and Jews re-visit the Holocaust

Based in New Zealand, the author, an Anglican priest, made a number of pilgrimages 1995–2008 to the extermination (and other camp) sites of the Third Reich, 1933–45. These find expression in Diary entries that describe the sites as they now are and scope the problems they raise for both Jews and Christians. The book thus places the Holocaust at the centre of Jewish-Christian dialogue. In face of the silence of God and the choiceless choices of the victims, the central question is how we – Jews and Christians – can talk agency either of God or the inmates. With a view to opening a conversation between Auschwitz and Golgotha, the author invites the Jewish interlocutor into a consideration of the Jewish victim Christ in the ‘no-way-out’ of the cross. Can there then be mutual recognition between the many Jews of heroic faith and self-sacrificing love in the death camps and the victim caring Christ? Three examples are cited: a Mrs Levy at Auschwitz; the Paris Rabbi, Berek Kofman; and Janusz Korczak at Treblinka. These and others like them embody an ethic of caring that allow us to be hopeful about the modern world.

RAyMoND PeLLy is an Anglican Priest living and working in New Zealand. He has an MA in Theology from oxford University and a Doctorate in ecumenical Theology from the University of Geneva. Besides serving in numerous parishes, he has taught at Westcott House, Cambridge (UK); St John’s College, Auckland (NZ); and the University of Massachusetts, Boston Campus (USA). He was also Visiting Scholar at the episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass., in 1982/3 and 1995/6. His most recent work, 2005–2014, has been as Honorary Priest Associate at the Cathedral of St Paul, Wellington, New Zealand, where he had a ministry of counselling, spiritual direction and education.

www.peterlang.com

Pilgrim to Unholy Places

Judaica et Christiana Herausgegeben von Hanspeter Ernst, Simon Lauer und Stefan Schreiner

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PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien

Raymond Pelly

Pilgrim to Unholy Places Christians and Jews re-visit the Holocaust

PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien

Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.d-nb.de›. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available.

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Foreword Father Pelly has undertaken a remarkable series of pilgrimages all the long way from New Zealand to Europe’s most unholy places viz. the death camps. With the deepest humility imaginable he has stood on grounds where just the remains of the death-­machinery are visible, none of its victims. Still, he was able to hear their cries and, having learned about some of them from survivors’ testimonies and other sources, to picture who they were. This eyewitness testimony, set in the context of the historical background, raises many questions. These are explained as the book unfolds; and is followed by answers which, of course, remain open for the fuller discussion they definitely deserve. Being a Christian theologian (Anglican), Fr. Pelly had to start from a clear Christian perspective. His key reference is Philippians 2, which is also at the basis of his definition of a pilgrim. However, the Hebrew Bible is never far away; Jeremiah 31, e.g., is a very important reference. The basic facts that Jesus was a Jew and most of the victims were Jews make it absolutely necessary to think about the relationship of Judaism and Christianity. So the author asks whether the two streams, the Torah and the Cross, could possibly meet, making explicit, however, that ‘this is a question, not a statement, an invitation to a dialogue between equals’. In Fr. Pelly’s view, this dialogue has a purpose: To make our world humane and sustainable, or, in Biblical parlance, to provide a sufficient number of people to save Sodom and Gomorrah. A glance at the bibliography shows Fr. Pelly’s wide reading in the fields of history, holocaust, philosophy, and theology. The author has very much food for thought to offer both Jews and Christians. Simon Lauer, Zurich July, 2016



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Preface This book has been twenty years in the making. Not only did it involve pilgrimages to the unholy sites of the Holocaust, starting with Auschwitz, it also required prolonged periods of writing and re-­writing imposed by the intractable nature of the subject matter itself. The text thus hammered out was for many publishers a puzzle. With its mix of scholarly rigour and personal feeling – not to speak of prayer – it didn’t fit easily into any pre-­ conceived list. Was the project to die ‘the death of a thousand rejections’? It was therefore with gratitude and relief I leaned that Peter Lang Verlag, Berne, had agreed to include it in their series, Judaica et Christiana, co-­ edited by Rabbi Professor Simon Lauer (Zurich) – who has kindly agreed to contribute the Foreword – and Emeritus Professor Stefan Schreiner, Tübingen. In this connection I should also like to thank Simone Netthoeval and Johanna Lüder at Peter Lang Verlag whose prompt and courteous handling of all matters to do with the production of this book has been exemplary. My sincere thanks also to Religious Communities that offered me hospitality on my pilgrim way. Initially the Sisters of the Love of God, Fairacres, Oxford; and then the Carmelite Communities in Auschwitz (the new one!), Dachau, Berlin, and Weimar/Schöndorf; finally, the Franciscan Community in Esterwegen, Emsland. Each in their different way offered friendship and encouragement along with space to write and to pray. To them I owe a debt I can never repay. If I single out Karmel Heilig Blut, Dachau, for special mention, it is because this has been the Community I have visited most often. There Sisters Elijah Bossler and Irmengard Schuster in particular were a constant source of informed support and understanding. No less vital to the development of my book were the wise and insightful comments of Sr. Maria-­Theresia Smith, Berlin. ‘What is a Jewish person going to think when they read what you have written?’, she would ask, a comment that went to the heart of what I was doing. It was at Karmel Dachau that I met (and talked with) the late Max Mannheimer, a Jewish survivor of Aushwitz; and besides him, other survivors who have been present or given talks at the Convent or in other centres on the Dachau Memorial Site. From them I got some idea of the sheer horror of what they as victim-­survivors had undergone. While I didn’t benefit from the feed-­back of an academic seminar or teaching situation,



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I want to thank most warmly two Jewish scholars, Rabbi Professor Paul Morris, Victoria University of Wellington, and Professor Amy-­Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. The former read a draft of Chapter 9, Jewish Responses to the Holocaust, and encouraged me to keep going; and the latter, Professor Levine, scrutinized the entire MS with extraordinary attention to detail and made many telling observations. It goes without saying, however, that neither they nor any of the above-­mentioned persons are responsible for the opinions expressed in my book or its general approach. My final word of thanks must go to my wife, Barbara Craig. Not only did she put up with the absences from New Zealand (and initially, the US) necessitated by my pilgrimages, she also ‘kept the home fires burning’ and extended warm and loving welcomes to me on my return. Without her sustained and stalwart support, the present book could never have been written. It is therefore dedicated to her, and to our children, Carla and Tom. Raymond Pelly Wellington, August, 2016

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Table of contents

Foreword

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Preface

7

Introduction: ‘Raids on the Unspeakable’

13

Part I: Diaries / Memory Auschwitz, 1995

35

Dachau, 1995

51

L’Viv, Cernitsa, Warsaw, Treblinka, 2001

59

Majdanek, Sobibór, Belźec, 2001

73

Dachau, Mauthausen, Hartheim Castle, Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, 2003

85

Berlin, 2003

103

Mittelbau Dora, Leitenberg, 2006

123

Esterwegen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, 2008

133

Part II: Reflections Theology / Ethics / Spirituality 1.

Hearing the Cries The Self-­emptying Pilgrim Christ, Philippians 2:5–11 on Kenosis

153

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A.  On Being a Pilgrim 2. Pilgrim to Unholy Places A Definition

169

3. Thinking with Your Feet The Pilgrim’s Way of Knowing

177

4. Kneeling and Surviving The Pilgrim and Prayer

191

B.  Holy / Unholy 5. Unholy Places Site-­specific Reckoning with Evil

205

6. Holy Places I Paul Celan and Grief

219

7. Holy Places II Paul Ricoeur and Memory

227

C. Jewish–­Christian Dialogue 8. Rachel Weeping For Her Children Biblical Precursor of the Holocaust

237

9. Jewish Responses to the Holocaust Agency, Divine and Human

245

10. Auschwitz and Golgotha (1) Analogue or Adversary?

273

11. Auschwitz and Golgotha (2) Impulses for a Shared Covenantal Ethic

293

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D. Learning from the Shoah 12. God as Co-­Passionate Abyss of Love, Victim-­Survivor

307

13. Christ and Horrors Engführung: Narrowing / Impasse

319

14. Recognition, Thanksgiving Honour, Gratitude

329

E. Last word 15. Real Hope in the Real World?

Appendix: On De- and Reconstructing Root Metaphors The Analogy of the Sun

343

355

Bibliography 359 About the author



367

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Introduction: ‘Raids on the Unspeakable’

The writing of this book effectively began in August 1995 when I visited Auschwitz, then Dachau. As a person born in England in 1938, I wanted to find out what had happened in continental Europe in my own lifetime. I was determined, as priest and theologian, to explore the meaning – or lack of it – of the events evoked by the one word ‘Auschwitz’, in particular its association with Adolf Hitler’s attempted genocide of European Jewry. I was also driven by the conviction that if the venerable notion of pilgrimage to holy places was to maintain its credibility, stay real, it had to include unholy as well as holy places. To be faithful to the God of history, I had to visit those places where the history of our times has in fact been wrought. Does the redemptive presence of God, I asked myself, have any meaning faced with the horrors of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, with the Holocaust in particular? In those first visits I discovered – or stumbled on – two things that were to mark the whole project from the start. First, just to survive on this bleak and inhospitable territory, I needed somewhere to stand. Not just a ‘standpoint’ but actual places where, along the pilgrim way, I could find spiritual nourishment and hospitality. By happy accident I found myself staying in the new Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz – not the old one which had caused so much offence1 – and, in 1995 and subsequent years, discovered, to my relief and delight, the Carmelite communities in Dachau, Berlin, Weimar and the Franciscan community in Birkenwerder, Emsland. Second, under the sheer pressure of the experience of visiting sites of horror, I found myself writing diaries. These try to sketch the physical remains of these unholy places as well as the overwhelming impression they made on me. In 1



For the controversy surrounding the original convent in the Old Theatre (Theatregebäude) contiguous with or abutting onto the site of KL Auschwitz I, see Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (eds), Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, Praeger, New York,1991. The new convent is situated at a respectful distance from the site, about 300/400 metres down the road.

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this way the diaries were written from the heart rather than the head. They form the first part of this book. Only when they were complete did I attempt the further task of writing reflections – theological, spiritual, ethical – on my ‘pilgrim’ experience. These, the reader will discover, are more concerned to ask the right questions than to supply answers. For now, it is relevant simply to note that this book is written in two independent yet interactive streams: the heartfelt diaries dating from 1995 to 2008; and the theological reflections where, I hope, head and heart work together. The flavour of both types of writing is conveyed by a diary entry for 19 August 1995. ‘Maybe it’s when theologians learn to cry, pray out of a broken heart, think with their feet, that we shall achieve a “pilgrim” theology that grapples with the realities of our time.’ All my reflections therefore try to stay in touch with those realities as I experienced them in pilgrimages to unholy places. Can this kind of pilgrim approach, I ask, be shared by Jews and Christians?

I. To orient the reader further into this project, a clarification about its scope. Inside the entrance to the excellent museum at Dachau there is a large map of the Third Reich in its fullest extent, stretching from France and Germany to Poland, the Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic. From this I learned that in Hitler’s Reich there weren’t just a few camps, but more like 10,000 – this number now known to be an underestimate. Many of these were small, the sub-­camps of the large-­scale centres like Dachau, Buchenwald or Auschwitz. The main camps, however, ranged from death (or extermination) camps, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec; to highly destructive concentration camps – KZ-­Lager – like Dachau, Majdanek, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück – confining myself to ones I’ve visited personally; to slave-­labour camps such as Flossenbürg or Mauthausen; to the many prisoner of war camps, the ‘Stalags’ of Colditz or Landsdorf. My concept of ‘unholy places’ – given this reality – centres on Auschwitz and the other death camps, but then embraces in widening circles samples of the other types. These, each in its own site-­specific way, were all evil or unholy places because of what 14 

was done there. If my reflections centre on Auschwitz, the epicentre of the evil I describe in my diaries, this must be read as including – like some malignant spider at the centre of a web – all the other places in their myriad interconnections. My usage of the word ‘Auschwitz’ in what follows is thus site specific, but also has these wider connotations. This is the place to signal, further, that I use ‘Shoah’ and ‘Holocaust’ interchangeably. While both words have undesirable connotations – Holocaust, a placatory burnt offering to God; and Shoah, catastrophe per se, or destruction as divine judgement – I retain them in their generally accepted meaning as referring primarily to the mass murder of Jews by German Nazis or Nazi sympathisers from other nations. In saying this, I am of course aware that the above-­named camps engulfed the lives of many non-­Jewish people, Poles, Shinti & Roma, handicapped people, homosexuals, Communists and other resisters of Hitler, Christians both Catholic & Protestant, and many others. They, however, are not the primary focus of this book. That said, I as a pilgrim have to acknowledge a double limitation. Because I live and work in New Zealand, there is a strict limit to the amount of time I can spend in Europe. Inevitably I had to be selective in the places I visited. Second, I have confined myself to the camps that were put in place in the period from January 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, to April 1945, when he committed suicide and Germany was forced into unconditional surrender. That excludes the growing number of horror sites in other parts of the world and at other times. One only has to mention Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago, Hiroshima, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Syria to know what I am talking about. To visit all of them would be logistically and psychologically impossible, would far exceed the powers of one person. It would also carry with it the temptation to play God, to try to become omniscient in relation to this terrible dark streak running through human history. There also lurks the danger that the more extensive one’s knowledge, the more superficial it becomes. One should also reflect that in relation to the traditional problem of evil, it only takes one instance to raise the theological question of how there can be evil in a world allegedly the creation of a good and loving God.2

2 M.B. Ahern, The Problem of Evil, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1971, especially pp.1–12, ‘“The Problem of Evil” and the Problems of Evil’. 

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II. The problem of evil, inevitably, is a major theme of this book. It has been said with justice that the chief and most heartfelt obstacle to belief in God – the bitter and deepest root of contemporary atheism – is the fact of undeserved, innocent and random human suffering. Faced with it – so appallingly and graphically displayed in the death camps – theologians and philosophers have wrestled with the question of theodicy: whether it is possible to reconcile the existence of a good and loving God with the seemingly endless catalogue of human suffering. While this question is both legitimate and necessary, I have chosen not to discuss ‘the problem of evil’ in the abstract, but rather to confront it concretely in the very places where its darkness became visible. Empirical and piecemeal though this approach may be – the devil, so to speak, is in the details – it also allows one, at the same time, to be alert to points of light in that same darkness. As we visit unholy places in the present, can we recall or recover any signs of life and goodness that may gesture in the direction of redemption? Connectedly, can we as Jews or Christians, insofar as we live within a faith-­based horizon of hope, and granted our different perspectives, recall any memories of hope – for all the evident hopelessness – in those very same places, hope that might encourage us to confront the horrors of today? Or does Auschwitz constitute the root of the dead weight of despair pressing down on our world? If, by contrast, we can discern points of light or signs of hope, however minuscule, how do we account for them theologically? Instead of just asking, how can we justify belief in God in the face of evil?, we might also ask, how can we justify atheism in the face of points of light in acts of heroism, caring or resistance? Which is not to imply that atheists are not capable of such acts. Clearly they were and are. My concern is simply with the way such acts are handled for and against belief. In sum, instead of trying to ‘square the circle’ with an attempt at an Auschwitz-­related theodicy – an impossible task? – I have articulated a victim-­centred account of the biblical Christ (see below) to throw light on the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the grim data of the victims of the Holocaust (as of other victims with little or no control over their own fate). Might a full theology of victimhood, I ask, be a point of dialogue for Jews and Christians? I also ask, might this approach begin to yield a shared theology or an ethic for the blood- and tear-­stained world we now inhabit? 16 

Yet even if this victim-­centred approach has promise, it must, in Christian perspective, face the question of its overall theological meaningfulness. The challenge was adumbrated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Christology and Ethics: that ‘reality’ consists in the fact that in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the world has in fact been reconciled to God – Auschwitz included. He writes: In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other. The reality of God is disclosed only as it places me completely into the reality of the world. But I find the reality of the world always already borne, accepted, and reconciled in the reality of God. That is the mystery of the revelation of God in the human being of Jesus Christ.3

My question then becomes, how and where does this revelatory and reconciling act of God ‘take form in the world’ in no matter how small ways? But then we have to question Bonhoeffer’s approach. Does it generate insight into the Shoah or is it undone by it? Suppose we substitute ‘Auschwitz’ for ‘the reality of the world’ in the above quotation, do we have theological sense, whistling in the dark or blasphemy?

III. Sensing that – albeit in Christian perspective – an adequate understanding of Christ is crucial to resolving what is at issue, the first chapter of Part II explores the account of the self-­emptying, self-­limiting (kenotic) Christ in Philippians 2:5–11. Entitled ‘Hearing the Cries, the Pilgrim Christ’, it asks: if our ‘pilgrim’ desire is to hear the cries of the victims and, in solidarity with them, enter into a wider solidarity with all those ‘who bear human form’, what is the nature of the healing – of our deafness – that enables us to achieve that kind of hearing? I crystallise my interpretation of the Philippians text in three concepts: narrowing (impasse /Engführung), co-­passion, and recognition. Not only do these throw light on the theological identity and ethical ethos of the pilgrim, they also yield insight into the person of 3



Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 6, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2005, p.55.

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Christ as victim and into the nature of victimhood itself whether sought or imposed. The watchword that emerges, then, is that ‘to be a pilgrim to unholy places is to follow the way of Christ’, limited though in practice this must necessarily be. This states the meaning of Christian pilgrimage besides being the basic theme of this book: to re-­visit the Holocaust in as heightened awareness of its Jewish victims as humanly possible; but this companioned by Christ, as Dante was by Virgil, the great poet of antiquity, as he plunged into the Inferno of his imagination – the difference being that the Shoah was as blindingly real as Dante’s inferno was vividly imagined, the contemporary Jewish victims as innocent as the damned in Dante’s account were sinners. With this in mind, the book moves on to a theological definition of the pilgrim as open-­hearted, self-­emptying or self-­limiting in vulnerability, and seeking ever-­greater solidarity with all those ‘who bear human form’, Jews, Christians and others. This Christ-­centred definition of the pilgrim’s identity also defines the standpoint from which the pilgrim’s knowing is done. The chapter that follows, ‘Thinking With Your Feet’, explores the difference between walking over unholy places in contrast to reading about them. Is there a ‘ground-­up’ way of knowing that starts with the feet and touches the heart before being processed in the mind? We then move from ‘feet’ to ‘knees’. Accordingly, the next chapter, ‘The Pilgrim and Prayer’, looks into the role of prayer and communities of prayer in the total experience of following the pilgrim call to visit places of suffering and death. This centres on certain Carmelite (and Franciscan) communities whose hospitality I have enjoyed. That also poses the question of why their founders sited these communities in proximity to unholy places. Relatedly, why does the pilgrim need to pray in order to survive? Already, then, the conception of Jewish–Christian dialogue that informs this book starts to emerge. It begins with me, a Christian pilgrim visiting Holocaust sites; and this with a view to ‘hearing the cries’ of the Jewish victims and, to a lesser extent, victim-­survivors. ‘Hearing’ is not meant literally, dead people by definition being silent. Rather it is used in the sense of ‘being attentive to’ or seeking ‘to be in touch with’ their presence in memory, given their physical absence – the sort of appalled knowing that can happen as one stands on sites where the genocidal events in question took place. This for me is the primary or raw starting point of the kind of Jewish–Christian dialogue deployed in this book. But then a question arises: given that there is no such thing as a neutral observer, what is the 18 

perspective in which I as a Christian pilgrim (observer/hearer) approach this kind of dialogue? The answer lies in trying to see things through the eyes of Christ as Jew and as victim as this is mediated through the Passion Narratives of the Gospels and the account of Christ’s self-­emptying given by Paul in Philippians 2:5–11. In other words, I’m putting my cards on the table. This particular interpretation of all that is associated with the word ‘Christ’ then serves as the perspective in which ‘I see’ (the way in which I ‘hear’). It also, I trust, serves to heal my blindness and unstop my ears – as was characteristic of the historical Jesus as the Gospels tell his story. That said, the dialogue modulates from immediate perception to a different key, that of theological reflection, the two of course never wholly distinguishable. Rightly or wrongly I came to the conclusion that Jews and Christians have a basic problem in common – and this in contemporary context of a secular or God-­denying culture: that of the so-­called ‘silence of God’ whether this be in relation to Auschwitz or Golgotha. I, along with others, call this the problem of divine agency. How can we speak of the living God in the face of so much death and undeserved suffering? Many Jewish thinkers have addressed themselves to this problem. It is these that I seek to learn from and with whom to dialogue. Both parties, as I see it, are accountable to the facts of ‘what happened’, albeit from differing perspectives. If the early chapters of Part II are largely concerned with method, the remainder turn to issues of substance. What, I first ask, is an unholy place? The challenge of this question is to remain site-­specific, but this in the context of a wider question. What was it about Nazi Germany that gave rise to the death camps? What was the ‘space’, cultural, ideological and other, that accounts for these places? To be insightful about this, or so I argue, is to be more alert to the cries of the victims through listening with an educated ear. The next two chapters are related yet different. What constitutes a ‘holy place’ in our Shoah-­centred exploration of pilgrimage? The first of these, Holy Places I: Paul Celan and Grief, looks, with the help of John Felstiner’s analysis, at Celan’s poem ‘Nah’ (Near) and its treatment of intergenerational grief. If unholy places like Auschwitz focus the grief of subsequent generations on what happened, and this never to be forgotten, is there a sense in which that same grief as ‘carried across’ from one generation to the next can modulate into something different, Celan asks, become the energy to drive fulfilments as yet undreamed of? In this way, are grief and hope mutually exclusive? For all the problems they contain, the State of Israel as place of hope for Jewish people and, more generally, the slogan 

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‘Never Again’ come to mind. Holy Places II: Paul Ricoeur and Memory, makes use of his book Memory, History, Forgetting. After an initial contrast between the superficialities of ‘commemorations’ and the genuine working through of grief stemming from truthful memory of the past, Ricoeur goes on to show how, in the ‘resurrection’ of writing, historians give voice to the forgotten victims of the past. He also tentatively explores how truthful accounts of the past can give onto forgiveness; forgiveness here conceived as that which allows people to deal with the present unencumbered by any self-­serving readings of history. Can ‘truth’ give onto ‘reconciliation’ as has been explored, for example, in South Africa? Or are there some sins that are unforgivable? And in any event, there is the question of who does the forgiving. The victims? And what is the role of repentance? The next major section – as promised in the diaries – is devoted to Jewish– Christian dialogue. If we are seeking to hear the cries of the victims, we must above all listen to Jewish voices, those of victims and victim-­survivors and their descendants. No Christian theologian writing about the Shoah who neglects to listen to these voices can have credibility. The field is vast, but I have tried, as already stated, to make sense of it by asking one central question. Is there any way we can speak of agency, whether divine or human, in and around the events of the Holocaust? Does the so-­called ‘silence of God’ betoken the incapacity of God to act? Given that most Jewish victims had no choice in what befell them, does that disqualify any talk of agency at this the human level? The fact, as I shall argue, that some albeit qualified agency can be attributed to God as to some victims becomes the starting point for some post-­Shoah reflections on understandings of God that Jews and Christians might have in common. This is preceded by a sketch of Jeremiah 31, the whole chapter, which I see as narrating an historical forerunner of the Shoah – for all the singularity of the latter. There then follow two chapters, one entitled, ‘Auschwitz and Golgotha (1): Analogue or Adversary?’ and the other, ‘Auschwitz and Golgotha (2): Impulses for a Shared Covenantal Ethic’. Their purpose is to get beyond historical stereotypes of Jews being held responsible for the death of Jesus and where Christian supersessionist theology can be seen as a central cause of the Holocaust. What, I ask, have these events in common, Auschwitz and Golgotha, when viewed – eirenically – from the standpoint of the respective victims, the crucified Christ, on the one hand, and the Jewish victims of the Shoah, on the other? More particularly, do both events disclose a set of values, as much at the root of Jewish as of Christian understandings of Covenant, old or new, or simply 20 

continuing, and the ethics that flow from it with healing potential for the modern world? The book then moves into asking what Christians can learn from the Shoah. In the spirit of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, this is written ‘with fear and trembling’, reflecting the fact that anyone writing about the Holocaust – in view of what it represents – has to do so with tentativeness and humility. Not only that, he or she must write in a spirit of dialogue. No statement can be made that is dogmatic or invested with false certainty that is not open to challenge. Rather the words must come in the form of a question – ‘It’s like that, isn’t it?’ – always inviting response and further dialogue. Chief among these questions are some reflections on the doctrine of God. If God is not omnipotent in relation to Holocaust – in the sense of not directly causative of it or redemptive of those in it – how can we retain the notes of agency and reality in our understanding of God in relation to the Shoah? What is the relation, then, between divine and human agency in the unfolding of the Holocaust? My suggestion is to see God as the ‘abyss of love’ underlying history and as ‘victim-­survivor’ in respect of God’s involvement in it. Put another way, God is both ‘all-­suffering’ and ‘all-­liberating’, the burden of my idea of ‘co-­passion’. God so understood leaves people free to respond to or reject the reality of God’s presence. These categories, I contend, make equally good sense when applied to Christ. For he too is both victim and victim-­survivor, a co-­passionate abyss of love, at once all-­suffering and all-­liberating. The merit of this, I propose, is to have a fact-­based theology – i.e. one drawn from observation of the Holocaust itself seen through the ‘pilgrim’ eyes of the Jewish, victim Christ and all those like him – that both illuminates the biblical theologies of Messiahship – a messianic person or community touched or inspired by the character or identity of God – and Suffering Servant – how God gets involved in human affairs through a people such as Israel or a prophet like Isaiah – as applied to Christ and his analogues (brothers and sisters, both Jewish and Christian) and which, at the same time, throws light on what it means to be a victim or a victim-­survivor of the Shoah itself. Again, is the Shoah an unmitigated disaster for the victims as for God? Or is there more to it, more that can be said? This exploration of the meaning of ‘God’ is then furthered by learnings from Marilyn McCord Adams’ book Christ and Horrors. If Christ historically participated fully in human horrors, is there some ‘exchange’ whereby victims of contemporary horrors can participate in his ‘life in 

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God’? Adams’ reflections span both time and eternity. We then return once more to Paul Ricoeur, this time to his book The Course of Recognition. This works with the double meaning of the French word reconnaissance, both ‘remembrance’ and ‘thanksgiving’. Granted, that is, we do the ongoing work of grieving for the victims, what is there about them that we can recognise (or remember) with thanksgiving? Here I tell the stories of three Jewish heroes – martyrs or saints we might call them – the Paris Rabbi Berek Kofman; the educator Janusz Korczak; and Mrs Zucker, an Hungarian woman gassed at Birkenau in August 1944. In each of these, I contend, we see acted out key ethical values that belong to the sustainability of human community, characteristics that, furthermore, license us to imagine recognition as between them and the kenotic Christ of Philippians 2. This, I believe, is fruitful ground for Jewish–­Christian dialogue. The book concludes with some suggestions as to how we might express a typology of resurrection – as an imminent, intra-­historical and open-­ended process – in relation to the Holocaust and its aftermath. My strategy here is to search for categories that can make connections between the historic realities of the Shoah and the ways in which the resurrection of Jesus is presented in the New Testament. The categories are: standing, communicating, touching, remembering, prophesying. I offer these as ways of speaking and acting that could deliver ‘real hope in the real world’ in years to come. Underlying this, and connected with it, are some reflections on metaphor. What are the meaning-­giving images we deploy in relation to the Holocaust? Given that the Nazis had a whole repertoire of negative, de-­humanising, death-­related metaphors to refer to what they were doing, can we linguistically re-­frame a version of the Holocaust and its aftermath that – for all the weight of death – includes a perspective of life, one that sees the victims as persons with a rich history of religious and ethical action that in some sense demands an afterlife in our contemporary world? That then is a bald summary of this book. I should add, however, that while the fifteen Reflections that follow the Diaries are inter-­connected, they do not form a tight logical, quasi-­scientific or cumulative argument. To attempt any such thing in relation to the Holocaust is, I would say, impossible not to say disrespectful to the victims. Why? Because to be subjected even to a fraction of what they suffered would be to be disabused of any easy explanations, theological or other, in seconds. This awareness is central to the ‘pilgrim’ character of this book. My approach has been to see each chapter as ‘a raid on the unspeakable’ – in Thomas Merton’s phrase 22 

glossing T.S. Eliot’s idea of poetry as ‘a raid on the inarticulate’. Thus, anything said about the Shoah is bound to fall short. That, however, does not mean we should simply remain silent – any more than the sheer mystery of God excuses us from searching for words to explore that mystery. I would therefore urge the reader to ask: do these studies, taken individually or together, generate insight into the barren, intractable subject matter of this book? If not, is that a counsel of despair? Yet the critic whose weapon is unrelieved despair has inevitably to face the question, does he or she have anything more satisfactory to offer? To that I would add a note about the literary genre of this book. Although it is deeply felt and rigorously thought through, it is at bottom a prayer, a pilgrim’s prayer that is as aware of ‘what happened’ as of the silence of God. It was out of all this that I found the approach that for me proved valid: the humility of the self-­emptying, kenotic Christ as the way factually to encounter the realities in question as a pilgrim and theologically to gain insight into fundamental issues like the agency of God that theological discourse about the Shoah cannot avoid. In sum: cautiously, and in fits and starts – crabwise? – the book moves from death to life, from silence to essays in speech; yet always conscious of the intractable nature of the subject matter, the Shoah and its victims, the Jewish people; but not forgetting the many others who suffered at the hands of the Nazi tyranny.

IV. Let us now dig deeper. In approaching ‘unholy places’, the pilgrim faces a barrage of negativities. Graphically: the big steel buffers at the end of the rail spur into Auschwitz II, Birkenau, represented the end of the line for millions of people, many of them Jews.4 This shocking fact gives onto a question: was Auschwitz, central to and symbolic of the Shoah, also ‘the end of the line’ for the theology, culture and worldview generally that the 4



The figures agreed by scholars are that in Auschwitz-­Birkenau between 2.5 and 4 million people died. Of these, up to 2 million were Jews. These figures do not include the dead of other extermination camps such as Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. Confining ourselves to the number of Jewish dead in the Shoah, the total according to Raul Hilberg was 5.1 million. Others put the figure at 6 million.

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victims brought with them? In the gas chambers, did God prove to be a figment of the human imagination? And with it, trust in the human spirit as able to surmount any adversity no matter how terrible? Did the horizons of human hope shrink to accommodate a view of life as a thinly veiled abyss of horror? Some of what is at issue comes out if we consider each of these questions further. If God is the creator of our universe, why – when it comes to the point, as in Auschwitz – did God not exercise comparable power either to protect people from evil and suffering or to rescue or redeem them from it? This is particularly poignant where it concerns the Jewish people. For are not they supposed to be the Chosen People, to enjoy an unbreakable covenant relationship with God? Here God’s failure to act is perceived as being either God’s abandonment of his people or, worse still, irrefutable evidence for God’s non-­existence. Either way, to deny agency to God or to experience God solely as abandonment, is to conclude that God is effectively no longer part of reality. A God who, in time of need, makes no practical difference, is as good as no God at all. All that remains is religion, interesting (even fascinating) in itself, but evacuated of any life as stemming from God.5 The picture as regards humankind is correspondingly bleak. The ‘death of God’ far from occasioning the liberation of humankind from religious tutelage, seems, where the death camps are concerned, to have ripped the moral and spiritual heart out of the human condition. With few exceptions, most people under the extreme constraints of Auschwitz swung between ruthlessly putting their own survival first or else collapsing into hopelessness where death became preferable to life. Instead of some core of belief and cherished ethics as the heart of any humane conduct, the cruel force of circumstance dictated what people did or did not do. This means that under the extreme constraints of death camp conditions – starvation, slave-­labour, cold, filth, sleeplessness, disease, random and mass death – survival became the primal motivation or goal for those trapped in such horrific places. Still more radically, even survival itself was not a function of inspired human striving – the allegedly indomitable human spirit – so much as largely a matter of chance. Human ingenuity and tenacity could take you so far; but 5

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There are, I am aware, other sources of contemporary atheism. Science (and secular discourse generally) is considered by many to yield an exhaustive, transparent account of reality. Others, especially in affluent parts of the world, feel that their human needs are met by available culture, education, medicine, housing, information technology and so forth. In either case, God is made redundant.

in the end shootings around Auschwitz were random, unpredictable; and gassing, even if postponed by slave labour, was, in the end for the vast majority, unavoidable.

V. Jewish and other thinkers have accordingly spoken of ours as an ‘anti-­ redemptory age’.6 The mass deaths occasioned by the Shoah (and related events), they argue, carry implications – however unwelcome – about the finality of death and the meaninglessness of human existence. Starting from a conception of the human person as essentially embodied,7 they urge a conception of death as final. The absence of the victims is real, irreparable. When the body dies, the whole person dies. Further, because God-­talk is itself suspect, we can’t speak of people as being in the ‘peace’ or ‘care’ of God. Here, as in relation to evil and suffering, God is denied agency and, with it, existence. If God can’t survive Auschwitz, then neither can the human person – or so it is implied. Moreover, given the option, the dead themselves would rather be in the ‘care and peace’ of life, not death. Hand in hand with this anti-­redemptory stance goes the ban urged by Theodore Adorno: that we must not try to make anything of the Shoah, be it an aesthetic in the form of poetry, novels, art, music; or a history, in the sense of an ordered, satisfying story; or even a theology, where God, Christ or some other agency or personage is brought in to explain or give meaning 6

7



James E. Young, for instance: At Memory’s Edge: After-­Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000. On pp.37–38, he writes, ‘The Holocaust was an irredeemably terrible experience […], had a terrible effect on many survivors’ lives, and endows its victims with no great moral authority now. Categories like good and evil remain, but they are now stripped of their idealized certainties. Neither art nor narrative redeems the Holocaust with meaning – didactic, moral, or otherwise.’ Sarah Coakley (ed.), Religion and the Body, Cambridge University Press, 1997. On pp.3–4 of the Introduction, Coakley writes, ‘Devoid now of religious meaning or the capacity for any fluidity into the divine, shorn of any expectation of new life beyond the grave, it [the body] has shrunk to the limits of individual fleshliness; hence our only hope seems to reside in keeping it alive, youthful, consuming, sexually active, and jogging on (literally), for as long as possible.’

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to the events in question.8 Human artefacts or explanations offered in relation to the realities of what actually happened inevitably disintegrate, prove partial or are exposed as attempts to bring false comfort to their authors or creators.

VI. This raises the question of blanket ideologies, be they redemptory or anti-­ redemptory. Do they in effect, for all their good intentions, actually block the kind of detailed access to the Shoah and Shoah-­related events open to the pilgrim to unholy places? The issue is taken up by Irit Rogoff.9 Using the example of the search to construct memorials to German Jewry, she detects the suspect language of resolution: ‘to heal, to make amends, to work through, to commemorate, to pay respects, to lay to rest’. But that is not all. Just as reprehensible in her eyes is the desire to reduce Holocaust memorials to artefacts that only convey absence. Both tendencies, she feels, mirror the way historically German opinion of Jewry has swung between Hitlerian demonisation and contemporary, guilt-­ridden liberal idealisation. ‘In neither case’, comments James Young, ‘are the victims recalled in their multiple, variegated, and individual lives – but only as blocks for the projection of Germans’ limited grasp of their victims.’10 In this way Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe at the heart of Berlin can be considered an instructive failure. Its very meaninglessness – each of its 2,711 blocks slightly out of alignment with all the others – gives it the character of an open, unhealed wound at the centre of German life – and indeed human life in general in so far as the Shoah, without prejudice to its singularity as a specifically Jewish event, can be seen as a crime against humanity. Yet it is left to the Information Centre located underneath the Memorial to bring out some of the human meaning of what 8

Adorno wrote, ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, Neville Spearman, London, 1967, p.34. Later he modified this hard stance. ‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream’, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, Seabury, New York, 1973, p.362. 9 Quoted in Young, At Memory’s Edge, p.144. 10 Ibid.

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is formally commemorated above. The stories on display of individuals and families make clear that the Shoah concerned the brutal and racially motivated murder of countless actual people: living, working, praying, creating, begetting, child-­bearing, loving, dying, mostly as parts of large and close families and communities. One’s sense of the human tragedy involved deepens exponentially – as does one’s grasp of what actually happened.

VII. One might say, then, that all that remains is memory/yiskor. The victims should be remembered in as great depth and detail as available – given that many of the victims have no name, known grave or memorial. At Treblinka, for example, Jews from the surrounding districts and from the Warsaw Ghetto were killed without their names being known to the Nazis or recorded by them. Memory, nevertheless, is the approach of institutions like Yad VaShem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, or the museum at Auschwitz itself. These contain research centres where human memory is enhanced by growing access to archival material allied to databases and modern information technology. There is also, it needs to be said, the cry of ‘never again’. Learning from the past, in this case the Shoah, should, it is argued, give humankind the wisdom to avoid such catastrophic breakdowns of civilisation in the future. This may or may not be so; is debatable as the theory that the death penalty deters murderers in the heat of their killing frenzy. As always with the Shoah, nothing is straightforward or simple. Does Auschwitz deter genocide?

VIII. Faced with this barely mitigated barrage of negativities, what does the pilgrim do? In a word, get off the big train of human certainties about God, humankind, meaning, be they negative or positive, and start walking. Instead of succumbing to the paralysis or deep cynicism that the above-­ 

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stated negativities might engender, the pilgrim – in my case, a Christian pilgrim – resolves to hear the words of Rabbi Jesus to the paralytic, ‘pick up your bed’ and walk.11 Where to? To ‘unholy places’, that is, to the very sites where the atrocities we read or hear about or see on film actually took place. Half a century and more after the events, this, I believe, is the nearest we can get to them, assisted and informed of course by survivor testimony, written or recorded. But even at this distance, to visit such places in awareness, albeit partial, of what happened in each of them is a shattering experience and few will attempt it. Somehow, and in a way that defies analysis, the ‘aura’ or backwash of what was done or suffered there, for good or ill, lives on undiminished. It belongs to the vulnerability of the pilgrim to stand open and exposed to whatever he or she is able to take in of the history of that particular place in so far as this can be discerned or remembered. Remembered or not, it remains present. More on this later. For now, let it simply be said that this gut intuition of ‘presence’ – of the events themselves to the body-­self, the heart, of the pilgrim – is the indispensable empirical starting point for any doing of theology ‘after Auschwitz’. If the negativities laid out above can be broken through or out-­flanked, it will be in this pilgrim way. For the Christian – in the spirit of a treasure entrusted to him or her which, if genuine, can be offered as gift to others – there is the fact, so well attested in the Gospels, that it was in the presence of Jesus – his person, words, actions – that the dumb learned to speak, the deaf to hear, the blind to see, the paralytic to walk, the crippled to leap for joy. This is the Christ who, Virgil-­like, companions the pilgrim to unholy places on the pilgrim way. The self-­emptying Christ is thus also the healing Christ. More of what this means will occupy us shortly. For now it should already be clear that the pilgrim’s way of knowing is not one of dogmatic certainties – in fact, it could be seen as a ‘dark night’ or purgation of all knowing – so much as a method, a way of being, a stance, a vulnerability, a human solidarity. Central to it is a dialectic. This proceeds from the conviction that empathy – or what I call co-­passion: sympathy with the victims and, in equal or greater measure, a ‘hunger and thirsting’ for justice and new life – is the originating act of being human, whether this be in relation to the victims or to the living or to God. For may not co-­passion be the very currency, the reciprocity, as much between pilgrim and victim 11 The incident is recorded in all three synoptic Gospels, viz. Matthew 9:1–8; Mark 2:1–12; Luke 5:17–26.

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as between pilgrim and the living, kenotic Christ? The task, then, is to hear the cries of the victims in as raw and immediate a way as possible and, in so doing, to be alert to anything that might generate a co-­passionate empathy amongst the living and between the living and the dead.

IX. In adopting this stance, there are certain bits of wisdom I have taken to heart. The first I owe to Melissa Raphael, a Jewish, feminist theologian.12 In a way that crystallises the approach of this introduction, she warns that the transcendent mystery of God is such that no creature – no pilgrim! – is in a position to construct a theodicy that justifies the ways of God to humankind, especially not in relation to the Shoah. To attempt any such feat means to achieve a standpoint ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ God from whence to justify God’s apparent inaction in relation to Auschwitz or any other instance of evil. Not only is this knowing via some allegedly cyclopean or extra-­terrestrial ‘eye’ in principle impossible, it also deeply contradicts the logic of the pilgrim’s way of knowing: site-­specific and with feet firmly on the ground. This implies that the pilgrim/knower must be content at most to say ‘God is’ and leave it at that; or, very tentatively, to wait until he or she feels able to complete the sentence in some fashion: thus, ‘God is […]’. Here in nuce is the whole task of the pilgrim-­theologian. Raphael spells out what this might involve. While the necessary failure of theodicy involves a salutary ‘falling silent’, this silence is in the presence of the ‘numinous’, what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, whence, argues Raphael, ‘while the ability to think about the divine is highly circumscribed, the ability to experience it is not’. She adds, ‘The transcendent relation of God to the world is primarily felt or intuited by Ahnung [Vorahnung, presentiment, foreboding]’.13 The ‘unholy places’ visited by the pilgrim are nothing if not numinous, full of foreboding and things that exceed our capacity to understand. Whether they are holy or unholy places – or perhaps both – is a question this book explores. They 12 See her book, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, p.207. 13 Ibid., pp.207, 95. 

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are, in any event, the places where in an inescapably experienced-­based way the pilgrim’s knowing and not knowing of God is wrestled out. Even if, however, we follow an empathetic/intuitive way of knowing, we cannot avoid the question of the basic model that underlies it. How is the felt absence (or presence) of God to be interpreted? A prime biblical model is that of hester panim, the turning away of the face of God. In Deuteronomy 31:17, 32:19–25 this is presented as a deliberate act of God. ‘Have not these troubles come upon us because our God is not in our midst?’ In line with this it would be tempting to see the Shoah as divine punishment for some grave sin – for example, idolatrous assimilation to an alien culture. This is to be rejected for two reasons: the punishment, Auschwitz, grossly exceeded the alleged sin; and, once again, it rests on a claim to know more about God than is humanly possible. There remains, we might say, the authentically modern sense that all is not well with the world, that things have gone radically wrong.14 Instead of the image of the turning away of the face of God, we might speak of darkness, an absence of the light that God is. The question then becomes: what sort of a darkness is this, a permanent and total blackout, or a temporary eclipse? Nicholas Lash, who has given thought to this problem,15 pleads for the latter; that the contemporary sense of the ‘death of God’, partly occasioned by the Shoah, is not permanent but rather a transition in which humankind is undergoing a deep paradigm-­shift in its understanding of God. Perhaps; but for the pilgrim this is a question that should remain open, not be foreclosed prematurely. With his or her policy of solvitur ambulando, the pilgrim holds onto the basic credo ‘God is […]’ and, in the darkness of unholy places, dares to pray for light, in stammering, half-­articulated, broken speech, whether this be for the wordless clarity of the mystic or the illuminating power of authentic prophecy. And all this accountable to a ‘hearing of the cries’ of victim and victim-­survivor. 14 I am reminded of a former student, severely brain-­damaged after a terrible car-­smash, lying in his hospital bed, struggling to articulate one single word. From the sounds he was making, one could identify the word ‘wrong’ endlessly repeated. 15 See Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God, SCM Press Ltd, London, 1988. The book is largely focused on the work of Martin Buber whom Lash quotes as saying, ‘Eclipse in the light of heaven, eclipse of God – such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing. But […] an eclipse of the sun is something that occurs between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun itself’: Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy, Humanity Books, New York, 1999, p.23.

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In sum: just as it is a first principle of theology – whether in respect of the transcendence or immanence of God – to uphold the mystery of God, so in relation to Auschwitz and any of its analogues, we should be mindful of the unspeakability of what took place. Words indeed fail, and this inclusive of their ethical inadequacy. This need not, however, amount to a total ban on all speaking about God or Auschwitz. That too could be artificial, even absurd. Rather, what is being called for is a proper respect or restraint when speaking about either God or Auschwitz in which the true mystery of the one yields a real sense of the unspeakability of the other; the unspeakability of Auschwitz forcing us to articulate ever more deeply the mysterium tremendum of God; the mystery of God rebuking any superficial or premature generalisations about Auschwitz – of any matter of life or death whatsoever. This restless dialectic or rule of speech underlies and disciplines both the pilgrim’s sense of place and any approach to speaking about God. This salutary wisdom about the limitations yet necessity of language – we might say its self-­emptying – can be filled out by Paul Celan, by common consent the great poet of the Shoah. Reflecting on his poetic practice,16 Celan insists that language has ‘to pass through its own answerlessness’, that there are ‘no words for what happened’. Nevertheless, he feels, language ‘could come to light again’, language, that is, that is ‘in movement’, ‘underway’. ‘Toward what?’ he asks. ‘Towards something standing open, occupiable, perhaps towards an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.’ This view of poetic language – in Celan’s case, the German language – in face of the Shoah, most nearly describes the self-­emptying of the pilgrim in respect of his or her inherited language, be this national, ancient, theological or other – the assumption being that our operative language, including or especially our affective language, is at the centre, heart or core of our being. My supposition is that the more radical this self-­emptying becomes, the more likely we are to enter the kind of nakedness or ‘dark night’ in which we shall begin to hear the cries of the victims and, possibly, be open to intuit or come closer to the mystery of God. In this way, the pilgrim’s language, like that of a poet, is ‘underway’, in something like the way that he or she is underway. But as the word ‘self-­emptying’ implies – 16 These reflections, especially ‘Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen’ (1958) and ‘The Meridian: Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Georg Büchner Prize’, are printed in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner, W.W. Norton, New York, 2001. 

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with its allusion to Philippians 2:5–8 – the cost involved is high. Celan’s script for the poet is therefore valid for the pilgrim, ‘stricken by and (yet) seeking reality’. He also urges that we ‘trust the trail of tears and learn to live’.17 This rings true of the heart journey of the pilgrim. The final piece of wisdom in this ‘getting underway’ of our book-­ pilgrimage I owe to Sister Gemma Hinricher, OCD, founder and first Prioress of Karmel Maria Regina Martyrum in Berlin.18 In a remarkable and prescient lecture delivered in May 1990, shortly before her untimely death, Sr Gemma warns her fellow Christians against premature appeals to God in relation to the Shoah. Rather, she urges, we must learn to live with the unfathomable ‘silence of God’. Such ‘experiences with the silence of God’, she continues, ‘allow us to come closer to the Jewish experience of God in Auschwitz, even if we have to say that the deathly silence of God in Auschwitz is something that is completely beyond us’. Having said this, she goes on to explain what she means by ‘living with the Shoah’. ‘Out of the silence, that we have suffered and endured, arise the true questions that bring us closer to the mystery of God.’ This is the utterance of a contemplative nun, a Carmelite living the vowed life of the prayer of ‘love and silence’, and spoken within three months of her impending death from cancer. She ended her lecture with these words. ‘May we be open to the questions which reality, our own as also the reality of Auschwitz, pose to us. May we be open in face of God in such a way that we bring our questions to him.’ A fitting way to end this introduction is simply to allow the reader to ponder these words.

17 Ibid., pp.388, 389. 18 Nach Auschwitz von Gott Reden, available from Karmel Maria Regina Martyrum, Berlin, Heckerdamm 232, 13627 Berlin, Germany. My translation.

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Part I Diaries / Memory

Auschwitz, 1995

Tuesday, 8th August Board a night flight from Logan Airport, Boston, to begin a pilgrimage to the worst of the Holocaust sites, Auschwitz, and the first of the concentration camps, Dachau. Part of a study ‘Touched by the Wounds’ I’m undertaking on recovery from personal tragedy and social reconstruction after public atrocity. Lots of questions buzzing in my head as the plane howls its way across the Atlantic. • Has the world yet come to terms with the singularity of the planned technological genocide of European Jewry? • Can belief in God survive the apparent impotence of God in the face of human evil on such a scale? • Is the Shoah the sign that the world is dominated by the self-­interest of powerful nations, with the concomitant difficulty of mitigating their worst excesses? • If we buck the trend of forgetting, how do we deal with memories of mass murder, memories that can assail us like demons out of order and out of time? • Can we remember the victims in such a way that they become prophets of a more humane future? • Am I willing to undergo the self-­emptying, religious and other, necessary to hear the uncomforted voices of victims and the testimonies of survivors? I ponder some words of Lawrence Langer: In our search for the meaning of Auschwitz, to our dismay, we meet only its absence; what we forgo to establish contact with such barren terrain is the theme that absorbs most writers who venture into it […] When the goal of moral being is not virtue, but staying alive, then our sense of character loses its mooring in literature, scripture, or philosophy and succumbs to circumstance […]19 19 Lawrence Langer, ‘The Literature of Auschwitz’, in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds), Anatomy of Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1994, pp.603, 611. 

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Wednesday, 9th August Arrive Heathrow. Make my way to the Anglican Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation at Fairacres, Oxford, Mother House of the Sisters of the Love of God. Hospitality on my pilgrimage to be provided by this and two other convents: of the Communion of Saints/Communio Sanctorum, Auschwitz; and of the Precious Blood/Heilig Blut, Dachau. Communities of prayer might give me some of the basic security – and perhaps the perspective – I need to deal with the reality of the unholy places I’m due to visit. My arrival at Fairacres coincides with the Feast of Edith Stein (Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross).

Saturday, 12th August A friend, Joanna, drives me to Heathrow. Over coffee at the airport she asks if I can talk resurrection after Auschwitz. Can I? Board flight to Warsaw. Poland, all new territory for me. Big fast train from Warsaw to Katowice. Small, slow, local train from Katowice to Oświęcim/ Auschwitz as night fell. First impressions can be devastating. Slowly clanking its way through the dark, the train moves to a rhythm of da, da, da, dum. Local teenagers in the carriage nod their heads in time with it and laugh. Similar sounds were audible throughout the three nights I spent in Oświęcim. Accessibility by rail was a major reason why this criss-­cross of trunk routes was chosen by the Nazis for the site of their largest extermination camp. I thought of people crammed into cattle trucks – a hundred to each – and brought here from all over Europe.

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Buffers/end of the line. Unloading ramp, Birkenau/Auschwitz II

For them the big buffers at the end of the rail spur into Auschwitz II/Birkenau were the end of the line. And for how much else of taken-­for-granted ethics, theology, and a whole web of cultural assumptions around humanism and science? Lodged that night in the Catholic-­run Centre for Dialogue that was hosting an international conference on some Holocaust-­related matter.

Sunday, 13th August I feel a bit of a fraud. There’s no denying that to visit Auschwitz fifty years after its liberation by a Russian Infantry Division is to do so from a safe distance. One is not a prisoner. Spared what Charlotte Delbo, the Samuel Beckett of the Holocaust, described as, ‘the smell of corpses and diarrhoea enveloped by the thicker, suffocating odour of the crematorium’.20 One is 20



Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995, pp.82, 111.

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not attacked by vicious dogs with the SS runes emblazoned in red on white patches on the sides of their winter dog-­coats. One is spared the constant threat of death by gassing, starvation, cold, shooting, beating, disease, work. Even so, one does not emerge unscathed. But it all takes a while to sink in. My first day spent at KL Auschwitz I, the so-­called main or original camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim itself. In summer and at weekends, overrun by tourists and visitors of every sort. On a sunny day it can seem almost harmless, like any other museum or monument: more like an open day at the old Polish cavalry barracks that it once was. Gradually, though, I get some impression of the enormity of the place. For five or six hours I walk around the various national museums. Slowly. ‘My sorrow is continually before me’ says the Jewish Memorial (quoting Psalm 38:17). I notice the heaps of human hair and possessions like shoes and suitcases. In a cabinet, a collection of outsize syringes: used to inject phenol (carbolic acid) into the hearts of prisoners. A commonly used killing technique. Among numerous other images, a photo of a Nazi youth rally: all giving the Heil Hitler salute – ‘Hitler is salvation’ – their open mouths in the photo like black holes. ‘If the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness’ (Matthew 6:23). The picture conveys insight into the mysterium iniquitatis of our time, the opening of young hearts to shared madness, to great influxes of evil. The noise and violence of it all. Outside on the cobbled streets and the Roll Call Area/Appellplatz I see the steel gallows, perhaps the ones mentioned in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Big enough for several people to be hanged at once. My perceptions of the place deepen.

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Steel gallows/room for six. Appellplatz, Auschwitz I/Stammlager

I descend into the cellar/bunker of Block XI, one of the barracks. In it, three horrors: narrow upright brick cells measuring 35 x 35 inches with one window 2 x 2 inches for confinement of four persons who stood in their own excrement to be led out to work the next day; a cell where Fr. Maximilian Kolbe OFM and others starved to death or were dispatched with injections to the heart; a passageway where Zyklon B gas pellets containing prussic or hydrocyanic acid was first used experimentally on a group of Russian prisoners of war. By then I’d had enough. I repair to the Carmelite Convent, once the focus of heated controversy, now re-­located a few hundred metres from KL Auschwitz I. Brand new, in process of construction. My room austerely beautiful with its white walls, plain crucifix, wooden bed, bare table and sunlight pouring in through the big south-­facing window. A few hundred metres away I can see people bathing in the River Sola, tributary of the Vistula. The weather is warm and summery.



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Monday, 14th August Feast of Fr. Maximilian Kolbe. I attend Mass in the Convent Chapel. We remember his whole life, in particular his deed on 29 July 1941. That afternoon a Polish prisoner, Zymunt Pilawski escapes. Camp Commander Fritzsch chooses fifteen hostages in retaliation. During the selection Fr. Maximilian volunteers to substitute for Franciszek Gajowniczek, one of the hostages, thereby gifting him over fifty years of life – and losing his own.21 In his homily Fr. Piotr makes reference to the fact that Fr. Kolbe’s and my baptismal names are the same: Rajmund/Raymond.22 This jolts me into the realisation that the moral (and spiritual) heroes of Auschwitz, Jewish and other, are part of the meaning – or better, praesentia Dei – in that place. Breakfast in the Centre for Dialogue. Straight to execution site between Blocks X and XI – pistol shots to the back of the head – where a large gathering of Polish Catholic priests celebrate a Memorial Mass for Fr. Kolbe. Liturgically uninspiring. Restraint might have been better. No agreed solution yet as to what religious acts are acceptable on site, if any. A group of conservative Catholics brandish banners proclaiming ‘Bring back the Sisters’. The place is still fraught with deeply conflicting emotions. Then a quick taxi ride to Brzezinka three kilometres away. In German, Birkenau or KL Auschwitz II.23 The sheer size of the place is what is hard to take in. A square kilometre? At least. It took me the rest of the day to walk round it. My right foot hurting. I measure the place step by step. I stand on the notorious ramp beside the rail spur that leads under 21 For these (and other) details, see Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle 1939–1945. Henry Holt, New York, 1990, p.76. 22 In the death certificate (Sterbeurkunde) made out for him by the Nazis and dated 24 January 1942, he is named as Pfarrer Rajmund Kolbe, römisch-­katholisch. 23 Construction of Birkenau, the major killing centre of the Holocaust, began in October 1941 and was completed in 1943. There was also a KL Auschwitz III a few kilometres to the west of KL Auschwitz I and II (Stammlager and Birkenau) in Monowice/ Monowitz. This was a slave labour camp where a firm called IG Farben erected a huge synthetic rubber and fuel manufacturing plant (Buna Werke). It was the headquarters of a veritable archipelago of some 40 lesser slave-­labour camps in the region. Nothing of Auschwitz III/Monowitz now remains. It was where Primo Levi et al. were incarcerated. At its furthest extent, Auschwitz II/Birkenau measures 1.5 x 1.5 km.

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the brick archway into the camp. Here people were separated by the Camp Doctor Eduard Wirth, assisted by underlings like Josef Mengele, either to the left – any sign of weakness by age or infirmity, for immediate gassing in crematoria hidden in trees less than a few hundred metres away; or to the right for slave labour, ‘destruction through work’, Vernichtung durch Arbeit.

‘Picnic’: Where Jews waited for backed-­up gas chambers, Birkenau/Auschwitz II

I try to imagine what must have taken place. Between 16 May and 7 July 1944, to take the most shocking example, some 470,000 Hungarian Jews arrived at Birkenau for extermination, the trains pulling in at the rate of three or four per day, each train containing between 3,000 and 3,500 men, women and children. Sometimes the system got backed up. Groups were forced to ‘picnic’ in the woods nearby as they waited their turn in the queue. I remember the story of Mrs Zucker who, having been selected for slave labour, sees a girl child standing alone in the group marked for extermination. Without hesitation Mrs Zucker walks over to the other group, takes the child by the hand, goes with her into the gas chamber. I begin to understand what it means to bow to greatness or to prostrate oneself in the presence of the sacred. As the Samaritan leper did at the feet of Jesus (Luke 17:16). 

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How does one imagine such a thing, such horror? The mind recoils into blankness. All I could do later that day was to walk through the woods behind the crematoria, the Birkenwald /Birchwood, endlessly repeating My God, my God, my God… There was nothing else to say. The sheer scale and cold rational efficiency of the operation impossible to take in. My first reaction was to feel nauseated, then deeply shaken, and then to tremble with the kind of vulnerability that needed the comfort of someone else but which soon modulated into the rage of wanting to lash out at the perpetrators. This reinforced by the fact that of the 7,000 or so SS personnel who worked in Auschwitz from 1940–45, only about 10 per cent have ever been brought to justice since the War.24 Incongruous details: around the same woods Polish peasants are picking blackberries. Birds sing. Children’s voices can be heard in farmhouses adjacent to the site. Somehow life goes on. My God! My God! Suddenly I realise I was spontaneously repeating – I hope not blasphemously – Christ’s cry of dereliction or abandonment on his cross. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34; Psalm 22:1). It was like the morning I got news of my daughter Cathy’s drowning. Only far more dire in its consequences. Was I being drawn inexorably into the vortex of humanity’s descent into hell, the black hole in moral and spiritual space where, by a kind of infinite negative gravity, even God is scrunched into impotence? Or does the word ‘God’ continue to resonate with life even in hell? ‘But thou continuest holy, O thou worship of Israel’ (Psalm 22:3). The question, however, remains: is the rail spur into Birkenau the end of the line for God as for hundreds of thousands of innocent victims? Or is God the victim-­ survivor even of this? To go on pilgrimage to Auschwitz is to be faced with this – the bitter root of modern god-­forsakenness. The articulation of the question is the throbbing wound that will not allow us to rest until confronted. Is Christ’s cry of abandonment – and all its analogues in human history – a statement of the absence of God? Or the beating heart of the swelling chorus of humankind’s cry of need, of desire, for God, naked, raw, ever more passionate? If theology has an authentic starting point, it is surely here.

24 See Aleksander Lasik, ‘Postwar Prosecution of the Auschwitz SS’, in Gutman and Berenbaum (eds), Anatomy of Auschwitz Death Camp, pp.588–600.

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Remains of gas chamber, Birkenau/Auschwitz II. Starting point of theology?

Later that afternoon I get the first glimmer of an answer. I remember Joanna’s question about resurrection over coffee at Heathrow Airport on Friday. I walk on through the Birkenwald to emerge in a large empty space. This was where the SS or their slaves scattered the ashes of the approximately 1.2 million people, mostly Jews, who were gassed and cremated the other side of the trees. Today large white wooden stars of David and a few much smaller crosses occupy the space – along with an ugly black steel pylon that once carried the power lines into the camp that supplied everything from the electric perimeter fence to light bulbs and heating for the guards. But resurrection? Might there be some connection between this empty space and the empty tomb of Christ? Might there be some strange effect whereby public atrocities – like personal tragedies – can open up terrible empty spaces that are palpably places of absence yet in another way may become places of presence – and not just in memory? In any event there is the burning question of what the survivors and their succeeding generations do in the terrible spaces thus opened up. Commit more atrocities? Or avail themselves of some other countervailing vision or energy?



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Open space/scattered ashes, Birkenau/Auschwitz II

On the way back to the entrance to Birkenau – the low brick building, the guard tower, the rail arch – I have a surprise encounter. Surprise – key feature of resurrection? I see a black steel plaque standing – is resurrection to do with who or what remains standing? – on two struts in the ruins of one of the early crematoria, the so-­called Little Red House – evidently a farmhouse where they gassed people by blocking out windows and doors and throwing Zyklon B in after them. On it the name Edith Stein. I subsequently discovered – such was my ignorance – that she, as Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, and her sister Rosa had arrived in Birkenau in a train from Westerbork in Holland on 7 August 1942, to be gassed on 9 August, the very day – her Feast Day – when I had begun my pilgrimage at the Convent of the Incarnation in Oxford. In this place, Birkenau. Aged 51. To personalise the Holocaust is one way of feeling the shock of it. In another it was, as with Mrs Zucker or Fr. Kolbe, to encounter holiness. For had she not wanted to be in solidarity with her own Jewish people? ‘Come, Rosa, we’re going for our people’ – her words as she left the convent in Echt to be taken to the Westerbork transit camp. ‘For’ at least meaning ‘with’.

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By now it was getting late. So I quit Birkenau and walked the three kilometres back into Oświęcim. Though for me it was a way of ‘winding down’, I knew I’d never be the same again. It dawned on me, too, that this was the pilgrim’s way of knowing: with the feet.

Tuesday, 15th August Feast of the Assumption, known as ‘the feast of hope’. Attend Mass again. The sisters, hidden by a grille, not visible, but audible by their responses and the alleluias for the day. Beautiful soaring melting sound. Like people speaking in tongues in a charismatic gathering. For all the ambiguity of their presence, these women living vowed lives shed light on Auschwitz by their prayer, their hospitality, their ‘sounding’ of the notes of hope. In this costly hidden stream of prayer – even in Auschwitz itself – can we ‘draw water from the wells of salvation’ (Isaiah 12:3). Maybe St Paul is right. ‘Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’ (Romans 5:20). Outside it’s raining. Auschwitz I, which I re-­visit, is rain-­swept and with many fewer people than at the weekend. The place becomes dark, claustrophobic and evil, the brick barracks, the walkways, the double electrified barbed-­wire fence, the guard towers, the steel gallows, the gas chamber and crematorium declaring themselves for what they were: the instruments of systematic extermination. Near the perimeter fence I come across a young couple in an embrace of grief under a flimsy umbrella. Overwhelmed by the horror of the place and perhaps memories specific to their families. I recall the question of a Hindu sage. ‘Which is greater? The oceans of the world or all the tears that have ever been shed?’ In Auschwitz this becomes a serious question. Or, Grünewald’s great Isenheimer altarpiece of the Crucifixion with its depiction of the ever-­flowing river of human grief behind the cross.



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‘My sorrow is always before me’. Couple embracing by perimeter fence, Auschwitz I

Then I move on to the gas chamber and crematorium. Can’t quite make out whether this is the original or a reconstruction. Probably the latter. I crouch in one corner of the gas chamber watching people come and go, taking flash photos, trying to take in what this place represents. Dirty, dark place of death. The flaking paint on the walls blue – if I remember correctly. Apertures in the ceiling for emptying gas pellets onto the victims. Absolutely no redeeming features. The crematorium the same. Nearby a single wooden gallows. Here Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 and previously commandant of Dachau and adjutant of Sachsenhausen, finally faced death. Of him Danuta Czech writes, ‘an assiduous, petit bourgeois executive, he organized mass murder with technical and administrative meticulousness’.25 Arrested in 1946, he testified at the Nuremberg trials. Extradited to Poland and tried. In April 1947 he was sentenced and hanged here in the grounds of the camp he had commanded. In the time that was left I stood outside the notorious Block X where Drs Clauberg, Mengele and others conducted their infamous ‘experiments’. Clauberg: looking for a ‘cheap and efficient’ method of making women 25 Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, note 4, p.814.

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sterile, he injected corrosive liquid into the womb and without anaesthesia. Mengele: commandeered identical twins, often Gipsies, to see if he could establish the balance of hereditary and other factors in human development. The victims of these experiments, once completed, brutally discarded – some say by being thrown directly into crematoria or open fires by Mengele himself. Block X closed that day. I prayed that it might signal closure for any demonic misuse of science here or elsewhere. It was time to go. I’d only become aware of a tiny fraction of what Auschwitz represents. Yet can the whole become visible even in a fragment? In any event, what little I had seen in the course of three days was overwhelming. Return to convent. Pack up my rucksack. Evening meal at Centre for Dialogue. Settle bills, say my good-­byes. Taxi to station. Retrace the slow journey from Oświęcim to Katowice. It was already dark. In Katowice pick up the night train to Prague. This was an ‘express’ that went slowly. Stopped for a good while at the Czech border and for rail repair works outside Prague. Seats hard and upright. A night of the spirit to begin processing the impressions of my stay? Sitting opposite me, a Hungarian, big and strong. If I were a Jew, would I trust him? But who should swim into my consciousness but Heinrich Himmler who, by some ghastly parody of the doctrine of gratia capitis, was somehow the incarnation or apotheosis of the ‘spirit’ of Auschwitz. His speech – an outburst of virulent, merciless racism justifying the Final Solution – to a gathering in Poznań/Posen of SS Generals and local governors /Gauleiters came to me. A principle that must be strictly adhered to by every SS man is: to be honest, decent, loyal and helpful to everyone of our own blood but to no one else. The fate of a Russian or a Czech is of no interest to me whatsoever. We shall take from these people all the good blood of our kind which is to be found, where necessary we shall steal their children and bring them up ourselves. Whether these people live in prosperity or perish from hunger, interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture. I have otherwise no interest in them. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging an anti-­tank ditch only interests me in so far as the ditch must be finished for Germany.

If Bolsheviks were Untermenschen, Jews – here unmentionable – were vermin. Himmler went on to say:



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Most of you will know what it means to be confronted by 100, 500 or 1,000 corpses at one time. Having endured this experience without losing our decency – apart from the occasional signs of human weakness – has hardened us. This is a glorious page of our history which has never and never will be written.26

Or, I recalled the Himmler, ex-­chicken farmer, who, on car journeys to Auschwitz or to view the progress of ethnic cleansing in Poland, repeatedly halted the vehicle to make contact with the soil. His friend, Henns Johst, records how, … the Reichsführer-­SS stopped the car, climbed over the furrowed ditches, walked into fields ploughed over by grenade shells, took some dirt between his fingers, smelled it thoughtfully with his head bowed, crushed the crumbs of the field between his fingers, and looked then over the vast, vast space which was full to the horizon, with this good, fertile earth. Thus we stood like ancient farmers and we smiled at each other with twinkling eyes. All of this was now German soil!27

In this fanatic for ‘blood and soil’ we see the initiator of the invariant pattern of secrecy, concealment and deception that characterised the death camp operation from the start: the falsification or destruction of medical and other records, the transportation of Zyklon B gas canisters across Birkenau in a vehicle made to look like a Red Cross van, the setting up of Theresienstadt or the Children’s Block in Birkenau to deceive the outside world as to the true nature of what was happening, the crematoria dynamited, to destroy vital evidence of the Final Solution, and the ultimate deception of kidding people about to be gassed that they were only going to take a shower. I slept only fitfully, if at all. I remembered Charlotte Delbo’s words: ‘After all, better not believe these ghastly tales, for if you do, you’ll never sleep again.’ There were, further, the all-­too-prophetic words of St John in his Gospel that the devil was ‘a murderer from the beginning […] a liar and the father of lies’ (John 8:44).

26 Speech, 4 October 1943, Dachau Museum Catalogue, 16th edition, 1978, p.125. 27 Ibid., p.197; also, op. cit. note i, pp.102–3.

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Wednesday, 16th August The train was late into Prague. Mad dash in a taxi across the city to the airport to catch a 9:10 am Lufthansa flight to Munich. Just made it. As we cross the Czech border to enter German airspace, the stark disparity of wealth between Western and Eastern Europe becomes visible. How prosperous West Germany looks by comparison: the big barn-­like farm buildings, the well-­maintained roads, each bit of land well-cultivated and fertile. And I wondered how near we were to KL Flossenbürg. Somewhere up there on the Czech border.



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Dachau, 1995

Wednesday, 16th August Arrive Munich. By suburban train and taxi I make my way to Dachau, to Karmel Heilig Blut on the Alt Römerstraße. The road runs along the perimeter wall of KL Dachau before passing the convent. It has been there, as the name suggests, since Roman times. The contrast with Poland is stark. In Auschwitz, especially Birkenau, everything is run-down, tatty, falling into disrepair. Here at KL Dachau, in a rich and prosperous nation, the whole site has been cleaned up, sanitised, a splendid museum built and various memorials erected – Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox. The colour scheme is generally grey relieved by the green of grass and trees. Accessible from the road, the convent can also be entered from the site itself through a gate set into one of the guard towers.

Guard tower, entrance to convent, Dachau

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Located at the eastern end of KL Dachau, the convent, whose architecture echoes the shape of the prisoner barracks, was once the recreation area for SS Guards – where they played volley-­ball and soccer. Inside, the convent resonates warmth and hospitality: the glow of the wooden floors, the bunches of flowers, the neat adequate rooms, the refectory, the light airy feeling of the whole place. After what I had been through, this felt like a homecoming. And indeed the guest mistress, Sr Irmengard, sensing my need, went out of her way to make me feel at home. Having visited the Inferno of Auschwitz, I had, like Dante, to emerge, if not into the Paradiso, at least into the Purgatorio.

Thursday, 17th August After a night’s sleep and Morning Office and Mass with the sisters, I felt ‘safe’ again and able to function. Sr Irmengard, who speaks excellent English, invited me into one of the interview rooms for what we in New Zealand would call a ‘chat’. Soon we are communicating in depth: she relating how she has survived cancer and what is was like to be brought up as a girl in Bavaria where her father was a Lieutenant in the German Army; and I beginning tentatively to find language to describe what I had just seen and experienced in Poland. For the rest of the day – besides praying with the sisters and talking with the other guests at meals – I move slowly round the museum and the site generally. I discover to my amazement that the number of camps in Hitler’s Reich – extermination, concentration, slave labour, transit, prisoner – was at least 10,000. Auschwitz, for example, was surrounded by a complex of forty satellite camps. The wrought-­iron gateway into the camp contained the well-­know macabre slogan Arbeit macht frei – ‘frei’ here meaning ‘dead’. In one way Dachau is small beer compared with Auschwitz: 38,000 dead compared with 1.2 million. But because one can get one’s mind around the lesser figure, perhaps just as devastating. A concentration camp that, while it contained some Jews, was not an extermination camp largely focused on them. People from all over Europe where brought to Dachau. Opened by Himmler, at that time Chief of Police in Munich, in March 1933, and first of the concentration camps, it specialised in clergy, catholic, protestant, orthodox and other opponents of Nazism, particularly communists. And Russian POWs. ‘Medical’ experiments too: subjecting prisoners to 52 

extremes of cold to test out survival gear for Luftwaffe pilots destined to ditch into the ocean. Dachau, I found, was like a well-­groomed dog that gradually shows its teeth. One can only imagine what the people in the Cell Block were subjected to. Nicely hidden behind some trees is the crematorium and ‘new model’ gas chamber. The latter was never used, the prisoner-­builders effectively slowing down its construction until they ‘ran down the clock’ on it. Thanks be to God! Even so, some 3,166 were trucked to Hartheim Castle at Alkhoven near Linz in Austria to be gassed in the facilities there. Behind the crematorium was the execution site. Again, pistol shots to the back of the head. Standard Nazi practice. Nearby a particularly moving bronze statue of a prisoner – the Dachau Memorial to the Unknown Prisoner by Fritz Kölle – overcoat, baggy trousers, beclogged, hollow-­eyed, emaciated, defiant yet desperate. As they were. On it an inscription: Den Toten zur Ehr Den Lebenden zur Mahnung

To honour the dead For the living, a warning

Prisoner Memorial, Dachau 

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And so much more. The electrified wire fence where many prisoners committed suicide when life became unbearable. But, as Abba Kovner has wisely said, ‘To remember everything is madness; but to forget is betrayal.’ On the way back to the convent I pass by the Protestant Church. One of the inscriptions on an inner wall reads: ‘What have you done? Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!’ (Genesis 4:10). So much to account for – the sense of ultimate accountability – ultimately to God – ‘but Thou remainest holy, O thou worship of Israel’ – part of any ‘theology’ of Auschwitz–­Dachau worthy of the Name. Otherwise, or so it seems to me, the Nazis have won. With what consequences one dare not imagine. Then suddenly I see it. There, imposing in its burnished golden bronze, stands a kneeling figure, a torso. At its base a plaque inscribed, ‘Für Diet­ rich Bonhoeffer’, a fitting memorial to the martyr of Flossenbürg which I’d come close to yesterday on the Prague–­Munich flight. Rajmund Kolbe, Edith Stein, Mrs Zucker and now Dietrich Bonhoeffer – to meet them in Auschwitz–­Dachau was a deeply humbling experience. In Bonhoeffer’s kneeling posture – here in his memorial and at his execution – I see the force of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s call that theology must be ‘eine knieende Theologie’/a kneeling theology, i.e. one done by people not sitting at their desks but on their knees. Kolbe, Bonhoeffer, Stein, Zucker – for me as a Christian they provided bridges I could cross to encounter the Hitler’s intended victims of the Holocaust: the Jewish people.

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Gas chamber, unused, Dachau

They, so to speak, and with the Jewish people, were the angels I would have to wrestle with at the fords of the deep and dangerous river represented by these places, the modern vortex of hell. To them I say, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me’ (Genesis 32:26). Once again I knew that I had hit my limits. Like an army after a bruising encounter, I retreated to the safety of my base camp, Karmel Heilig Blut.

Friday, Saturday, 18th, 19th August Two days of quiet reflection before I returned to Boston. A desert or wilderness time that oddly began to bloom. Two things stand out. I remember again Joanna’s question at Heathrow Airport two weeks before. Can one talk resurrection after Auschwitz? I start doing a pencil sketch/outline of what later turned into a small book.28 I reason: the whole thing is so huge. 28



Raymond Pelly, Auschwitz–­Resurrection: Lazarus Remembers – Victim–­Survivor Reflections on Resurrection in the Century After Auschwitz. St Peter’s Publications, Wellington, 2000.

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Take one fragment and see what you can make of that. So I adopt the standpoint of the victim-­survivors and ask: What might resurrection mean for them? My answer in nuce was to juxtapose three columns, each five items deep: images of the Shoah, New Testament good re. resurrection, and the corresponding theologies. Thus: Image of the Shoah

NT/Resurrection

Theology

1. Empty Space

Empty Tomb

Standing

2. Black Smoke

Appearances

Communicating

3. Mutilated Body

Thomas

Touching

4. Forgetting

Remembrance

Remembering

5. Silence

Proclamation

Prophesying

The leading idea is what – in the way of resurrection/reconstruction – the victim-­survivor can effect in the empty space opened up by the absence of the victims. Can absence turn into presence? The rather cryptic headings under ‘Theology’ could be expanded thus: • Standing. Resurrection as ‘standing for’, ‘standing with’ & etc. in the space/clearing of God’s holy, life-­giving energies. • Communicating. Resurrection as opening channels of communication, or better communion, with God (and therefore with the living and the dead). • Touching. Resurrection as touching the mutilated body of Jesus. The same for all other mutilated bodies. The same intention and effect. • Remembering. Resurrection as ‘the future in the memory of suffering’ (Johann Baptist Metz). • Prophesying. Resurrection as the prophetic word of life in the early dawn of human affairs after the ‘night’ of suffering; the early dawn as the gospel time of resurrection, the time of keenest longing and greatest hope. Then I thought: maybe the conclusion/coda to all this could be a section entitled: ‘Lazarus Comes to Town’. Certainly he’s not going to lie down and die! Rather do all the things alluded to above: standing, communicating, touching, remembering, prophesying. And no doubt more. I remember a Maori proverb, good advice for young warriors on the battlefield. ‘Kia noho, kia mate. Kia tu, kia ora/If you lie down, you will die. If you stand

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up, you will live.’ And the great German New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann: ‘The nett effect of the resurrection is to turn the world into a battleground over the Lordship of Christ’, meaning the values stemming from him. That was Friday. On Saturday I take it easy. Walked round the site once more. Prayed. Bought a bronze cross in the convent shop that now hangs on the wall in my Anchorhold at home in Wellington, New Zealand. ‘Anchorhold’: a room where you go apart to ‘drop anchor in the love of God’; where I pray, write, see people for pastoral care and spiritual direction. My final act on Saturday was to have a second conversation with Sr Irmengard. It was time to share some of my reflections with a fellow Christian, great-­souled, great-­hearted, and with a vast knowledge of the Holocaust and all its ramifications. As I spoke I began to realise how deeply the last ten days had affected me. Like all good conversations, it started to go deeper and deeper. What had been the true cost of the Holocaust and the Second World War generally? Even now, fifty years later, we still don’t really know. The question focused itself around the innocence of the Jewish people – innocent in that they were murdered for no reason other than their race; and around the martyr/witnesses I had met here and at Auschwitz: Kolbe, Stein, Bonhoeffer, Zucker. As Irmengard and I talked on, we both wept. Later I reflected: maybe it’s when theologians learn to cry, pray out of a broken heart, think with their feet, that we shall achieve a ‘pilgrim’ theology that grapples with the realities of our time. At any rate I acknowledged that I wasn’t much good at the ‘inter-­textual’ game of most scholars: to produce yet another text which dialogues with other texts – and expects the same in return! Is it tears that make the desert bloom?

Sunday, 20th August All packed up. Sheets in the washing machine. Room swept and clean. Then I attended Mass in the chapel with the sisters, guests and sundry local residents. No incense, just the substance of Catholicism in praesentia Christi. Simple, no frills, deeply prayed and thought and celebrated solemnly yet joyfully – in einer feierliche Weise. Great singing. Then it was time to go. As I exited the chapel I turned spontaneously and made a sign of the cross 

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as I faced the community. I felt a wave of goodwill and love come my way. I knew I would be back. Then a fellow guest, a kind lady with whom I’d talked a good deal and whose son was teaching Physics at Auckland University, whisked me away to Munich Airport in her BMW. Boarded a plane to London, Heathrow, where I got the connecting flight to Boston. The pilgrimage was over.

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L’Viv, Cernitsa, Warsaw, Treblinka, 2001

Thursday, 12th July Depart Athens 0400 am, arrive L’viv (poln., Lwów), Ukraine (via Warsaw) 0930 am. Previously, when part of Poland, Lwów. Now part of the Ukraine, L’viv, a whole nationalist agenda riding on the change. Old and de­crepit airport lined with mothballed/rusting military aircraft. Met by my son Aidan, teaching English in L’viv. Proceed by clapped-­out incredibly cheap taxi to George Hotel in centre of town. Built c.1900, commodious and old-­fashioned. The city itself has many grand buildings with façades intact but now converted into rabbit warrens of cheap apartments. Aidan has to work. So I settle in and get straight into the work of pilgrimage. Find the sole remaining synagogue. As Lwów, L’viv had been a thriving centre of Jewish life since the early Middle Ages. Ashkenazi Jews from Western Europe. It also boasted a distinguished university. Seventy per cent of lawyers, 60 per cent of doctors in Lwów /L’viv were Jewish. As the German invasion of Russia entered the Ukraine, the Lwów Jews were first herded into a ghetto and then, in 1942, transported to the Operation Reinhard death camps at Belźec or Sobibór. The remainder were taken outside the city walls and shot – with assistance from local anti-­semitic Nazi sympathisers. Nobody seems to know where they are buried. In total, 200/300,000 people. To get to the synagogue you take Tram 9 from the city-­centre. After three stops and a short walk, there it is, a poor run-­down building in a back street of the former Jewish quarter. The Rabbi is from New York, with wife and small children. There is an active kitchen and boys playing basketball in the courtyard. An attendant showed me into the synagogue itself. I stand wearing a yarmulke/skull cap in this high-­ceilinged wooden building. Very plain and bare, but in what it represents, a precious remnant in cautious recovery mode. At one end of the street a large Catholic church towers over the synagogue, filling the visual horizon. It speaks volumes about Christian–­Jewish relations in L’viv.



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Surviving synagogue, L’viv, Ukraine

Dinner with Aidan. Great chance to catch up and plan the next few days. Borsch, salad, pungent sausages.

Friday–­Sunday, 13th –15th July Plan to visit Černivci/Czernowitz with Aidan. On the Saturday we take a trip to the Carpathians. Our guide, Zoia Danilovich, a university graduate with excellent English. Her husband, we learn, had died of a heart attack in February. Her son, aged 27, qualified lawyer but unemployed, lives with her in a small apartment. They speak Russian. Our driver is Alexander – Sasha – who speaks only Ukrainian. In the mountains we find Vyznycja, a small town at the crossroads of important trading routes. It was once a thriving centre of Jewish commerce and education with two schools. The main synagogue is now the public library; and the rabbi’s residence, formerly home to a famous ‘wonder-­working rabbi’ who emigrated to New York around 1917, is now a military recruiting centre. The small synagogue

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next door has been turned into a dairy factory. The whole place is colourful, picturesque – I see a woman in a magenta skirt and headscarf. But no Jews. Bizarre detail. A side-­road leading to a café called ‘Diana’. On one wall of the dining room is a huge blow-­up portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales. The owner and his wife are a splendidly lively couple. His career had been as an officer – finally a colonel – in the Siberian fire brigade. Now they have aspirations to build a small hotel attached to the café. While we ate a lunch of salad and cold cuts outside on the terrace, he laid the dust with a hose. Later, as we paid the bill, he boasted of his great and continuing sexual prowess. I said to her: He seems to have had a life-­long obsession with hosepipes! She laughed. As we drive around, have a swim in a deep river, admire the storks nesting in rooftops and power poles, we learn that the slave labour camp and killing centre for the Jews (including the poet Paul Celan’s parents) in Galicia/Bukovina was at present-­day Mohyliv-­Podil’s’kyi, 120 km east of Černivci. The local rivers, Murafa and Bug, were said to have run red with the blood of murdered Jews. ‘Bug’ in Polish means God. Was there a deliberate Nazi desacralising joke, then, in choosing the Bug/God River, both here and in Poland, as the major bloodletting site for Polish and Ukrainian Jews? A further 100 km to the NE is Vinnitza, Hitler’s forward HQ for Operation Barbarossa. Where the German invasion of Russia started to go wrong. We also learn that during the post-­war Russian occupation, there was a major weapons-­related chemical spill west of Černivci. For years this was denied.

Sunday, 15th July The following day, we tour Cernitsa itself. Birthplace of Paul Celan, poet of the holocaust and personal grief. Zoia takes us to the synagogue, the only remaining one of fifty-­two. It survived because it was small, unimpressive and in a backstreet. The Nazis and their eager Ukrainian collaborators must have thought it not worth bothering with. We met the rabbi, Mr Noy/Noi? Small, bespectacled, quick, intelligent, mercurial. He talks with people all day long, Jews and non-­Jews, about matters sacred and profane. He is regarded as a combination of counsellor and faith 

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healer. He is working with a woman who is considering marriage. The buzz: they’re expecting a visit from some New York Jews. Big lift, and perhaps some money. We then visit the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in the centre of town where the Orthodox Liturgy is in full swing. Crowded and gripped by strong and demonstrative religious fervour. I could see that it moved Aidan strongly. Lots of Paul Celan stuff – one reason for coming to Cernitsa. A statue gifted by the Austrian government, two family apartments, schools that he attended, a café where Celan and other poets/artists/intellectuals would gather. A German-­speaking enclave, Cernitsa was obviously a thriving cultural centre with many writers. The theatre is a gem. There was also a Jewish theatre. The ‘icons’ on the façade of the former are Shakespeare and Wagner. I don’t know what they would have made of each other! We saw the site of the ghetto and were shown where the unscaleable perimeter fence had run. One could imagine the brutal, ruthless – and racially motivated – terror. [I was to see pictures of what happened in Lwów in the photographic museum at Wannsee in 2003.] There were few if any survivors. Paul Celan fled, his parents, fatally, returned to their house to collect some belongings … Dotted around the landscape as well as here in Cernitsa are statues of Russian military, tanks and soldiers – in 1944/5 the liberators! But the occupation quickly turned into an oppressive, totalitarian, imperial régime. Many of the statues, particularly those in rural settings, have been defaced by local people. A key date for the Ukraine, therefore, is 1991, the year it was freed from Russian occupation. Independence, freedom! But they haven’t yet worked out what to do with their freedom. I quoted Carlyle’s dictum to Zoia. ‘Freedom is a good horse. But you must ride her somewhere!’ She laughed ruefully. The Ukrainian economy is still heavily dependent on Russia. Natural gas, the main source of heating in winter, is piped from the Russian Federation and can be cut off any time. Payments are in arrears. Apart from one Dutch brewery, there is little foreign investment and few export links with the rest of the world. The country is still dominated by strong men and crooks, the rule of law fragile or non-­existent. Banks are guarded like fortresses; the airport a graveyard for rusting aircraft, mostly military; the airport buildings cramped and impractical.

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Monday, 16th July Return to L’viv and the George Hotel. Spent most of the day in my hotel room. A ‘solitary’ day resting, reading, praying and generally catching up with myself. I was tired after our time in Cernitsa and two 12-hour night journeys in Ukrainian trains: dirty, slow, uncomfortable, noisy, stuffy, hot. On the return journey the window jammed and couldn’t be opened even with a crowbar! Twelve hours to do 300 km. Stopping in sidings to let faster trains go by to Odessa and the Crimea, and at every little station or rural halt. There is no internal air service to Cernitsa. Aidan was great company; and he brought a heap of magazines, some water bottles and filled rolls to sustain us through the journey. One other memorable visit in L’viv: to the Benedictine/Studite convent. There I met Sister Gerontia and we conversed in French. The original Gerontia, she tells me, was a saint who died in full spate of singing the praises of God. The community, a contemplative one, seemed quite dynamic. Their rule, the Rule of St.Basil: eight hours of prayer, eight of work, eight of rest. The church has been beautifully restored. Offices and worship regularly offered there. They have their martyrs, a priest who, like Ossip Mandelstam, disappeared into the Gulag Archipelago never to be seen again. Most impressive to me was their emphasis on the Resurrection. This comes out in a display of exquisitely decorated eggs (by one of the sisters) and through a wonderful icon of the Resurrection showing Christ emerging from his descensus ad infernos and offering his hand – and therefore life – to Adam and Eve who lay benighted and y’bounden. Gracious Lord of Life, so deeply needed in a country whose history includes much bloodshed and violence, both suffered and perpetrated.

Wednesday, 18th July Arrive in Warsaw. Met at the Airport by Dorota and her husband, and Adam, Anna Pierkaska’s sister and father, Anna my wife’s university colleague in Wellington. Very kind and helpful. They take me to a restaurant where we have a plate-­sized potato fritter each. We then move on to the Guest Flat 

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for Visiting Scholars in the Psychology Department of the university. The building has a history. Once a hospital, during the war it was the Gestapo HQ and holding prison for deportees from the adjacent Warsaw Ghetto. My room – just below street level – was a prison cell; and over the road is the Umschlagplatz (normally, ‘transshipment place’ or ‘sales hub’ used for commercial goods), the walled space and dispersal centre where Jews from the ghetto were marshalled before being taken by train to Treblinka. I have a feeling of being woven willy-­nilly into a terrible strand of history.

Umschlagplatz, Warsaw, embarkation point for Treblinka

On the way there Dorota’s husband regales us with a string of jokes. One, a Polish put-­down on the Ukraine, goes: ‘Once a man bought a house, a house in considerable state of disrepair. So he hired a builder to work first on structural damage. After two weeks the man comes to the new owner to say, “There’s nothing more I can do”. “Why?” says the owner. “Well” says the builder, “turns out you’ve bought a bus stop!”’  In one way, he’s right. At the airport I was told that Ukrainian currency, the Hryvnia, was worthless outside the Ukraine. That night I got an early bed and read the section on the Warsaw Ghetto in Martin Gilbert’s excellent book, Holocaust Journey. I’d visit it in the morning. I planned my trip to Treblinka. 64 

Thursday, 19th July Spent the whole day walking round the Warsaw Ghetto. Much that was unforgettable. The eighteen-­foot-high wall; Janusz Korczak’s orphanage; the property that once housed the Nazi administration; the monument to the 1943 Warsaw Uprising featuring its leader, Mordecai Anielewicz; numerous war memorials; the Pawiak prison where Fr. Maximilian Kolbe was held before being taken to Auschwitz; the site of the former Great Synagogue, now occupied by a glittering high-­rise building; the Jewish Library with a large map in the foyer showing the hundreds of Jewish settlements around Poland – and of course the terrible history of the Warsaw Ghetto itself; the existing Synagogue with a Jewish theatre adjacent – obviously a place of thriving Jewish life and culture; Grzybowski square flanked by buildings that once housed Jewish families and businesses. Again, the square, as with the synagogue in L’viv, dominated by a big stone Catholic church featuring pictures of Papieża Jana Pawla II. Most moving of all a graffito in an alley near the remaining fragment of the wall: a cross with a Star of David hanging from the crosspiece. In effect, Christians make crosses, but Jews suffer them. I’m reminded forcibly of many things: that Jesus was Jewish (Matthew 1:2; Romans 1:1); that because Judaism has known suffering, it has great moral authority; that the Holocaust can perhaps be seen as a contemporary – yet unchosen, forced – recapitulation of the Passion of Christ as of all the other suffering of Jews down the centuries. Unchosen, but real; and, in the case of Edith Stein, also unchosen and real in that she died as Jewish convert to Christianity. Can the latter be as redemptive as the former, the Holocaust, is anti-­redemptory? So much we have to know before any dialogue with Jews can take place. Particularly to be avoided: all talk that suggests the ‘Old’ Testament is inherently inferior to the ‘New’. To Jews this suggests that Christians are downgrading God in favour of their own cult-­hero, Jesus. How deep and intractable the misunderstandings are! Should we not speak of the Bible as one continuum, the whole revelatory sweep of God’s covenanting with His people, Jewish or otherwise? Lunch: KFC chicken from an outlet across the road from the Jewish Library. The salesperson called Monika, cheerful and very helpful. Enjoyed my meal.



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Friday, 20th July Treblinka. You get there by taking the Bialystok train from Warsaw Central Station. Halfway you cross the Bug River and the train stops momentarily at Malkinie, a scruffy little place on the edge of a forest. After a tough negotiation with a rapacious taxi driver, we re-cross the river and follow the rail spur past the village of Treblinka to the death camp itself. Fiftyseventh anniversary of the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Colonel Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg et al. One sees why Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, joined the conspirators when once he learned what was happening in places like Treblinka. On the day I found the site too raw and overwhelming to write anything. Horrible murderous place. Like Sobibór, hidden away in a forest. Here pines growing in sandy stony soil. Had about three hours before the taxi returned. Treblinka is memorialised by stones ranging from the great central monument to stones representing Jewish communities to boundary markers where the perimeter fence once was. The message, ‘Never Again’/‘Nie Wieder’; but, in the light of contemporary history, one wonders.

Great Monument, Treblinka

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I remember making a prayer to the effect that if the dead are in the care of God – if we say we believe that – then this only has integrity if the prayer contains an equally strong commitment to caring for others regardless of their gender, beliefs, ethnicity, social status or whatever. So I put a small memorial stone of my own amongst the others. I too want to be one who remembers, who says ‘never again’ in solidarity with the victims and victim-­survivors. My Treblinka stone also represents deeper insight into my calling as a pilgrim-­solitary. ‘Be faithful to your call.’ On the surface it looks like cussed nonconformity, but in its depths it draws on the deep wells of God. It entails: 1. Follow through with my Holocaust studies to get further light on the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries and, at the same time, to find starting points for theology. Of what will redemption consist in an anti-­redemptory age? If Auschwitz/Treblinka and their like are among the causes of the death of faith in our time, what will its resurrection be? On-­going reflections, explorations into the meaning and contemporary experience of God. 2. Go on learning to be a decent bloke in the context of marriage, family, fatherhood; parish/priesthood; counselling, spiritual direction; friendship. 3. Rooting all this in sustained and – I hope – deepening prayer. Prayer is my moral and spiritual compass – how and where I get my bearings, where I process stuff. Also the wellspring of my energies and life in general. I then get involved in a drama that was only resolved days later. It too concerns a stone. I pick one up, put it in my bag. A souvenir, the action of a tourist, not a pilgrim. Wouldn’t it go well, I reason, in my place of prayer in Wellington NZ, my Anchorhold, a challenge to greater awareness if placed at the foot of my Dachau cross? In the days that follow, second thoughts assail me. What does this stone mean? Who owns it? Where does it belong? It witnesses, surely, to the murder of 950,000 Jewish people in this place. A silent witness, maybe; but an enduring one to their bitter cry for life. I remember biblical texts about blood ‘crying out from the ground’ (Genesis 4:10). Surely the pine trees of the forest, the official memorials, the pit, the ramp, the rail track, the road, the boundary markers are like the stone: witnesses that, in their own way, cry out. I could say of this stone that it is holy or sacred, authentically sacred, sacred to the memory of Miriam, 

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Yitzak, Abram, Sarai, Moshe, Esther… and all the other living persons who died at Treblinka – first names of otherwise nameless people so movingly inscribed on the memorial at the Umschlagplatz. None of this, it increasingly hits me, was to be touched or trifled with; but respected, the sacredness the basis of the respect. I ask myself: if someone made off with a chunk of my parents’ grave, how would I feel? Made it part of their collection? Used it to promote themselves and their religion? Words fail. No, the stone was indeed sacred; to be respected, listened to, learned from. God says to Cain, the murderer of his brother, Abel: ‘Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!’ The stone challenges us to be attentive with a fraction of the attentiveness of God. Yes, the stone is indeed sacred, charged with meaning, holy with something of the holiness of God. The stony ground of Treblinka, all bloodied, cries out to God. Like other rubble or ruins it carries a message in the wake of an outrage. To hear it we have to be still – like the friends of Job before they became verbose – attentive to what is other, beyond, more than us, the holy Thou of God who will show us the way of life. And if we are deaf to the voice of God, at least we can stand still long enough to hear the voices of the victims, become part of their on-­going task of addressing the barbarism that killed them. Five days later in Zamość (southern Poland) on my way to Belźec, I take the stone out of my bag, place it where I feel it belongs: high on a windowsill on the crenulated façade of the disused synagogue. Once a centre of Jewish life, now the public library.There, I trust, it can be at home, rest, speak. But Treblinka hadn’t finished with me yet. If it taught me something about the authentically sacred, it also brought me up against the uncannily evil. Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as, ‘that which ought to have remained hidden but which has come to light’ came to me. So there’s something factual. But there’s also something psychological: how we deal with the facts – or fail to deal with them. Freud, building on Schelling, said that ‘the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and established in the mind and which has become alienated from it […] through the process of repression’. These are powerful points of reflection that become radicalised and sharpened for me in Treblinka, Sobibór and Belźec. Model for repressions of Holocaust memories, as of God.

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Janusz Korczak Memorial, Treblinka

For in 1942/3 when the Nazis were trying to erase all traces of their crimes in the Operation Reinhard death camps, they were faced with a fact that was as terrible as it was awkward. Corpses from the gas chambers had been flung or bulldozed into large pits or mass graves. Earth had been dumped over the top of them and rolled down. This, however, turned out not to be the permanent (or final) solution they had hoped for. What happened is described by the historian Yitzak Arad. As a result of the hot weather of 1942 [he is referring to Sobibór], the buried corpses swelled, and fully packed mass graves rose up above the surrounding surface. The entire area became infested with vermin, and a terrible stench pervaded the camp and its surrounding areas. The camp commanders feared that the drinking water, which came from wells, would be contaminated and poisoned. Therefore the decision was made to start burning the bodies […] A big excavator was brought to the camp; a special group of Jewish prisoners was also assigned to this work. The decomposed corpses were taken out of the pits by the excavator and arranged on a big roaster built from old railway tracks laid over an empty pit.29

29 Yitzak Arad, Belźec, Sobibór, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Camps. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1999, p.171. 

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The pattern at Treblinka and Belźec was similar. That’s all in the past. Now – as I stand in these unholy places – I’m assaulted by the sheer uncanny emptiness of them – the absences – as I am by the pain of remembering what happened there. For this – the absence and the pain – are not what we want to know about in a pagan culture given over – ever quixotically – to the pursuit of happiness or pleasure – with its buzz words of choice, fun, privacy. We prefer euphoria cushioned by oblivion in life or death. No moral accountability or sense of God. How, then, can we unrepress all this – the memories, the moral sense and sense of God – in a repressed culture? Freud’s question is a good one, though not deep or radical enough. For myself, I feel driven to use the language of good and evil for all the usefulness of talking about repression and its opposite.

Body-­burning rack, Treblinka

So: to become aware of the depth of the evil that was perpetrated in this particular place, yes. To stand in the place of the absence of thousands who might otherwise have lived, yes. To allow the space thus created to remain open and uncluttered by inappropriate monuments, ideological or theological fixes, yes. There is something else, though. What I would call the willingness to be visited by the sheer raw awfulness of the place once 70 

memory’s work is done. Otherwise repression and avoidance take over. Yes, the absence of people is uncanny, unimaginable yet real; and the anti-­ redemptory impulse that emerges from that as powerful as it is corrosive. ‘Let be, let be. Will Elias come to save him?’ – lettering on a Colin McCahon painting. Play on Mark 15:34–36. But is that all we can say? There can be no easy answers. Yet for the pilgrim these words resonate with the various gospel witness to the crucifixion. ‘Let him come down from the cross and save himself ’- the cynicism, the mockery. Yet what started as mockery ended in respect and amazement. ‘Surely’, says the centurion, ‘this was a son of God’; and the disciples fled from the tomb ‘in terror and amazement’ (Mark15:30–31, 39; 16:8). Certainly the victims suffered the mockery and cruelty of the Nazis. Have we, by contrast, any good reason for withholding our respect and amazement? Have we any inkling of the sheer terror the victims must have felt? The very Jewishness of the passion – whether of Christ or of Holocaust victims – the shared background of commonly held texts, the Scriptures – can put us in touch with God; the raw emotion surrounding the events; the deepest levels of response of which we are capable. If we have the stomach for it. That may be the real terror, the deepest repression. To call such dark knowledge of God a gift would be to belie our own feelings of shakenness, terror, surprise at the presence of this cruciform God in such unholy places. Yet if we identify as pilgrims, open-­hearted, self-­emptying in vulnerability, can we let go into Christ’s own nakedness and abandonment and, companioned by him, into that of the victims? This identification – with Christ or the victims – is at best partial and can become schmalzy or blasphemous. But in so far as the pilgrim standing or kneeling or prostrating at the foot of the cross in rawness and nakedness of spirit is moved to cry out to God – My God! My God! – and to reach out in care to others, the identification with Christ will be genuine and generative of hope. Dare we say redemptory? In this way the blood of Jesus – crying out from the ground, be it holy or unholy – may turn out to be the most eloquent of all (Hebrews 12:24). Get the train back to Warsaw. Stay with these raw, inchoate feelings. Arrive at a suburban station. Two tram rides before arriving back at the Psychology Faculty. Dinner at a little restaurant off Papieża Jana Pawla II Avenue. Fish soup, chicken salad, a beer and a glass of wine. Time to recover; go on processing the day. Again, friendly staff. Waitress spoke English.



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Majdanek, Sobibór, Belźec, 2001

Saturday, 21st July Paid for use of apartment in Warsaw. Train to Lublin. Stay at the Garrison [Garrisony] Hotel. Now called The Husar. Formerly accommodation for Russian officers. Reasonably cheap at 200 slotys per night. Other hotels 400+. Early dinner, rest up, read. Asleep by 10:30 pm.

Sunday, 22nd July Broke a tooth at breakfast on some robust muesli. After a said Mass in a packed Capuchin church, I take the bus out to Majdanek. Quite full because the town cemetery is right next to the camp. Majdanek, stomach-­ churningly awful place, is visible from the road. The great monument – heavy, broken, curved as if to heaven – first catches the eye. Then the rest gradually comes into view in what was a cloudy, overcast day: the SS doctor’s house; the perimeter fence and guard towers; the mausoleum full of human remains with its domed roof; the crude gas chambers, the crematorium, the tell-­tale chimney; the barracks; the execution pits; the little museum. The crows working their way over the site, their raucous cries, heighten the impression of horror. All this makes its impact. Horribly and viscerally distressing.



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Crematorium, Majdanek

Majdanek wasn’t strictly an extermination camp like Treblinka, Sobibór and Belźec. More an omnium gatherum internment camp for 300,000 prisoners in 1942/3: 50 per cent Jews, 30 per cent Poles, 20 per cent Russians (approximately). Of these, 235,000 were murdered – gassed, shot, drowned, hanged, starved, frozen. Majdanek was, in all this, the scene of Operation Harvest Festival (Erntefest). After the 1943 revolts at Sobibór and Treblinka, all Jews in slave-labour camps in the Lublin area were declared dangerous. On 3rd November the Jews at Poniatowa, Trawniki and Majdanek were shot. In all, about 44,000, 18,000 at Majdanek. My benign childhood memories of Harvest Festivals in the village church at Orford in Suffolk (UK) are violently subverted. I remember a remark by Tommy Lott, black philosopher at the University of Massachusetts. ‘If you have the power, you can do anything you want.’ Just as shocking is the proximity of Lublin to the camp. The camp begins where the city ends. Back to back. I was shocked by the reckless boldness of the Nazis and the feckless spectatorism of the locals leaning out of windows to see ‘what was going on’. Does this, I reflect, characterise the TV world we now live in? Are we a people, all-knowing and all-seeing, yet without humane or spiritual values? Powerless? Reflection: Is the best

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we can do – as a world community in a violent world – to police the worst excesses? By yet more violence? As I exit the camp I visit the little barrack/shack of a museum. The curator, a small bespectacled man, is intrigued that I come from New Zealand. ‘For us an exotic country’ he says – and a desirable place of immigration? A few moments later he approaches me again. His daughter collects coins. Did I have one from New Zealand? I delve into my bag and find a 20c piece that I gladly give him. No more dreadful job than his can easily be imagined.

SS doctor’s residence, Majdanek

Back in the Hotel I read more of James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge. Brilliant book that is helping me crystallise and revolutionise my thinking. The book is beautifully and sensitively written as it ranges over attempts in comic strips, art or sculpture to memorialise the Holocaust. Young’s question: Is it possible to talk redemption in an anti-­redemptory age? Or – my gloss – is ‘total realism’ the hidden lingo of redemption? But isn’t ‘total realism’ impossible without a re-­r un? And who wants that?



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Monday, 23rd July Monday. Sobibór. Like Treblinka, hidden in the forest. Birch as well as pine, the colours lighter than at Treblinka. Apart from being a death-­cult, Nazism was a culture of lies, secrets, silences, deceptions. Sobibór: a place where 250,000 people – 1,000 of them Poles, the remainder Jews – were ambushed by death. Again I remember John’s characterisation of the devil as a ‘murderer from the beginning’ and ‘the father of lies’ (John 8:44). It fits all too well. Of Death Camp Sobibór, however, almost nothing remains except the 50-foot-­high central guard tower, now one end of a soccer pitch, the railhead and the commandant’s house. There is a double absence: of the victims and of the perpetrators. By its very emptiness the whole place is unrelievedly – should I say ‘unredeemably’? – horrific. One of the high-­water marks of Nazi hubris in its revolt against God and its flouting of any moral order. All one can do is pray and shudder at the deliberate wickedness of what was done, the shakenness one feels wholly salutary, if not redemptive. There are a few monuments: an anguished mother and child – the mother ravaged by pain and starvation; a solid, multi-­stoned rectangular box stood on its end – 20 feet high x 8 feet wide – not the ‘bundle of the living’ but the solidarity of the dead?; and a dome, smaller than at Majdanek, housing ashes. The mother and child lack the supernatural associations of a Christian Madonna and child, but in the circumstances, all the more powerful for that. Something ultimately vicious is going on – the Nazi subversion of a value basic to all human culture and civilisation: the sacredness of the bond between mother and child. The motherless child and childless mother – all sucked down into the vortex of murder and lies. Took some photos, including peasants working in the fields. My way of taking notes – or taking note of what’s there. When the camp was in operation, the peasants – whether out of conviction or fear – were almost universally hostile to Jews, especially escapees. There are horseflies everywhere. They bite. Near the exit/entrance is a small basic museum. The curator ironically – like the guards at some death camps – was a Ukrainian. Nice enough guy. He shows me the exhibition of the camp, its layout and history. In an upstairs room he lets me watch a video of the 76 

film made of the Sobibór uprising. I had time to watch about three-­fifths of it. Must come back to it sometime. Brings Sobibór to life – like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. No substitute of course for the real thing.

Water hydrant, Majdanek, for freezing prisoners in winter

As I leave he presses me to write something in the Guest Book. I write, ‘The things that were done in secret will one day be shouted from the rooftops’ (Luke 8:17; 12:2–3). My prayer as I left, ‘Show me the way of life!’; and that this, I dimly discern, has to do with awareness of extremes of life and death in the past – somehow gathered up in the death and resurrection of Jesus? The only way to get back to the bus station in Włodawa, the neighbouring town, is by taxi. The usual rip-­off. A hundred slts there and back (about 24 km). There seems no way of getting around this. My return to Lublin was not by the quick direct mini-­bus I’d taken in the morning, but by a slow old country bus that took two hours instead of one. It never got above 50 kph and, while it motored up hills, the driver switched the engine off to coast down the other side. To save petrol. We stopped at many tiny villages in the fields or in the forest. These too were all denuded of the Jewish people who had lived there since the early Middle Ages. One can begin to imagine the partisans in the forests along the route.



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When I got back to Lublin a thunderstorm was brewing. Had dinner at a café called the Old Pub. My table is rickety, legs resting on flagstones in a courtyard. Suddenly it tips over and my dinner, beer and all, spills onto my lap. Felt deeply upset, disturbed. Didn’t know just how stressed and wound up I’d become. Got back to the Hotel just before the storm burst. Thunder, lightning, heavy rain. Washed out my soiled clothes; sat down to write up the day in my diary; shower; prayer. Tomorrow: Za­ mość and Belźec. Will be glad when I make my way back to Warsaw and England. I’ve just about had enough.

Tuesday, 24th July Zamość. Travel to Zamość without hassles – 80/90 km that takes 1 hour 10 mins in a minibus. Passed Izbica where the Nazis left a locked-­in trainload of Jews in a siding at a rural halt until all inside were dead. Paradox of a landscape innocent in its beauty, but far from innocent in its history. On arrival at Zamość bus station I take a taxi to the Tourist Office in the centre of town (just off the magnificent and colourful central square). Find out the Zamość–­Belźec–Zamość bus times for tomorrow; and Zamość–­Warsaw for the day after. The women in neat red uniforms point out accommodation possibilities in Zamość. I choose the cheapest, a pension nearby. Very basic. Smells of horseshit and puke. Quickly open the windows in my room. Buy an ‘air fresh’ spray in the nearest pharmacy. Fumigate the place, make it habitable. Much cheaper than the Garrison/ Husar Hotel in Lublin: 80 slts for two nights compared with 200 per night. Lublin my big expense in Poland, Warsaw apartment 56 slts per night mercifully already paid. I’m beginning to run out of money. Today’s agenda: make camp in Zamość and have a look round. As I do, a theme more and more starts to obtrude itself: repentance! Warsaw–­ Treblinka–Lublin–Majdanek–Sobibór–­Zamość–Belźec: what is it about people like me that makes Holocaust-­type crimes possible? I name to myself: complacent Christianity; being well-­off and comfortable; ignorance and prejudice about ‘the other’; leaving action to others while I pre-­occupy myself with ‘higher’ matters… This self-­interrogation will doubtless con-

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tinue tomorrow at Belźec. Yesterday’s prayer ‘show me the way of life’ is being answered in one word: repentance. Early afternoon had lunch in a Chinese/Korean cuisine restaurant. Watery wanton soup; chicken curry, onions, rice. Not bad. Boning up on Zamość in a guidebook I discover it had been the home of Ludwig Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto and birthplace of Rosa Luxemburg, the socialist who, with Karl Liebknecht, made such a stir in Germany before they were assassinated in 1919. Then, with Martin Gilbert’s invaluable help, I followed what is locally known as the ‘Via Dolorosa’ from the Old Jewish Quarter – where it used to be, near the present-­day bus station and Hotel Jubilat – to the train station along Partyzantow Street. In April 1942 about 4,000 Jews, men, women, children, young and old, were marched along this route and put on trains to Belźec and perhaps Sobibór. I pictured a kind of reverse exodus: from freedom and ordinary life to slavery and death. With virtually no redeeming features. And in fact the death they were forced too die was lingering and painful. Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibór and later of Treblinka, relates how, as the camp was under construction, he took a truck to Lwów where he bought an old V8 petrol engine that had once powered a tractor or a truck. It was installed so that its carbon monoxide exhaust fumes were piped direct into the sealed gas chamber. This was pre-­Zyklon B. Once the victims were jam-­packed inside, they started the motor. People often took 10 to 15 minutes to die. A slow, choking, lingering, horrible death. No survivors. Sometimes  – especially on cold mornings  – the motor wouldn’t start. The victims, all packed together naked, freezing and in total darkness, would have to wait. One sees where Paul Celan’s line in his poem ‘Tenebrae’ about Jews ‘clawed into one another’ comes from (ineinander verkrallt).

Wednesday, 25th July Belźec. Get the 8:20 a.m. bus to Zamość–­Tomaszów–Belźec. Arrived about 9:30 a.m. Belźec has a railway station and rail yards – now rather overgrown with weeds, yet still functional – its attraction to the Nazis, 

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along with its forest and proximity to Lwów (about 50 km). It also has one shop, a few houses and some industry: a sawmill, and a factory that makes artificial stones and monuments out of amalgam. I start walking south in search of KL Belźec. Three km later no sign of it. Ask some people at a lake for directions. One man, spray-­painting over blemishes in his van, isn’t sure. A boy who is fishing gives me precise instructions. I’ve overshot. So I walk the 3 km north again! Yes, the entrance to the camp is virtually in Belźec, but inconspicuous, the sign hidden/lost amongst many others. Buried under a heap of clutter – a parable of modern memory? Almost indistinguishable from forgetting. It’s as though the locals are content to ignore the camp; almost hope it will go away. But of course one can’t and it won’t – a place where 600,000 people died with only two or three survivors.

Memorial Statue, Belźec

In fact almost nothing remains. Some brick rubble; a disused rail spur; bits of the rusting perimeter fence; a steep bank along one side, the remains of an anti-­tank ditch. The main access to what was there is via the memorials, crumbling and in disrepair: two emaciated figures, the one attempting to lift the other – not great art, but a valid question; must victims in extremis necessarily be in competition with each other? Various solid blocks marking

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the sites of burial pits; and things like big pots with conical tops containing ashes. All around trees are gradually encroaching on the site. The whole place gives an impression of neglect and hopelessness. A place in the act of forgetting. The only signs of life are the little memorials that people have left: flowers, candles, stones and a tin can construction by high school students from Israel, the grandchildren, grand nieces and nephews of the victims. And the occasional visitor. Belźec is off the beaten track. Not a tourist destination.

Visit of Israeli students from Haifa to Belźec

The only other access to Belźec is books. Martin Gilbert’s Holocaust Journey again invaluable; and Yitzak Arad, Belźec, Sobibór, Treblinka. Both mines of well-­presented and shocking information. With the help of Gilbert, I pace out in the woods the site of the gas chamber and crematorium. Nothing remains now, only a small clearing. Nothing that memory can get a hold on. Just a blank, an empty space. Arad tells us that when the camp was decommissioned, local peasants invaded the site with spades and trowels in search of the gold they were convinced had been left behind by Jews. So great is the power of myth. At the entrance to Belźec a peasant dwelling. A man sits outside ‘top and tailing’ red berries.



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One major thing I had to sort out at Belźec. I’d intended to say my Office there. Wasn’t God there? – especially there? – I reasoned. I even had the Divine Office with me. In the end I didn’t. It wasn’t just the lack of anywhere to sit, the sticky heat or the biting insects. More, it was a feeling that silence was the only appropriate response; silence as expression of respect for all the people who were killed there; silence as marking the fact that such an abyss of horror beggars not only any attempt at explanation but language itself. So silence. And solitude. Stillness? No, agitation, turmoil. More disturbing than the shakenness I felt at Majdanek. Here I feel deeply agitated, moved. Maybe this is the only valid way of conducting exploration/research into God. To wait, to listen, be factual, honest. Certainly I have this impression of accessing ‘deep memory’, the uncanny, painful memories like furies in and out of time that assail one or loom through the woods like trainloads of victims. Or are these only the forerunners of an even deeper, more powerful sense of the sacred, the holy? If one has the stomach or steadfastness for it. Again, I get some inkling of what it might mean to ‘unrepress’ – or admit into my secular consciousness – some living sense of God. That evening on returning to Zamość I put my Treblinka stone on an outer windowsill of the synagogue. Remarkably it’s right next to the pension where I’m staying. Some things, one would almost say, are providential. I go inside. The wall decorations of the synagogue are still there in the library, a mute but eloquent witness to what once was. Tomorrow, pack up my few ‘pilgrim’ belongings. My sandals are beginning to need a go through the washing machine at home. Catch the bus back to Warsaw; and the plane the following day to London. No travel hassles, I pray. So I’ve done it: L’viv, Cernitsa, Warsaw, Treblinka, Lublin, Majdanek, Sobibór, Zamość, Belźec. The words remind me of the dedication of Paul Winter’s book, On the Trial of Jesus, that I read forty years ago: ‘To the Dead in Auschwitz, Izbica, Majdanek, Treblinka. Among whom are those who were Dearest to me.’ What can one say? Everything from A–­Z is on trial. It’s certainly been the trial of me, and a venture fraught with risk far exceeding my expectations. I recall Coleridge’s ploy in repairing to a cottage in the Quantocks, as he put it, ‘to rediscover the foundations of religion and morals’. One sees the latter in Janusz Korczak, Jewish educator and orphanage keeper. Memorialised at Treblinka, Korczak went with his orphans into the gas chambers. 82 

Here our notions of ‘care’ are stretched to their utmost: in a self-­giving where ‘self ’ is a redundant notion, so total is the giving in disregard of this very self. The paradox of an identity that is self-­less rather than self-­ish. Of God it is said, ‘In you the orphan shall find mercy’ (Hosea 14:3). Is the ‘self ’ of God so radically and continuously given in caring, upholding, repairing… that we’re always trying to describe or fix a moving target? And always more or less failing. But we have the face of Jesus – and of many others – where little or much of this overflowing, resurrecting energy of God is reflected (2 Corinthians 4:6). Is this why his face shone (Matthew 17:2; Revelation 1:16)? Like the sun? Does this license us to use language like presence, the holy, the sacred, of the mystery of God where unlikeness will always exceed likeness? Certainly it throws into relief the uncanny depths of evil. And maybe gives us grounds for hope.



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Dachau, Mauthausen, Hartheim Castle, Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, 2003

Friday, 1st August Arrive at the Dachau Carmelite Convent ‘Heilig Blut’ (Of the Holy Blood). After Compline I wander out into the courtyard to look through the closed gateway under the guard tower into the concentration camp site itself. I stand quietly taking it all in. Suddenly a voice behind me. ‘Raimund!’ I spin round. ‘Irmengard!’ A big hug and a few tears. Of joy. It is Sister Irmengard, the guest mistress with whom I’d had conversations in 1995. Who has recognised me and made contact again in this resurrection-like fashion (John 20:11–18)! We stand talking and ‘catching up’ in the warm summer evening.

View of site, Dachau

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Saturday and Sunday, 2nd– 3rd August What a blessing this place is! I use the time to rest and recoup before the rigours of what lies ahead. The Mass so simple, so clear, so rich, so profound. And the Offices all in German and beautifully sung. I understand it all and join in wholeheartedly. In the guest house we take meals together, the conversation again in German. Mine is up to participating. Somebody says, ‘Having you here helps us to talk about painful things’ – this strange pilgrim ‘aus Neuseeland’. Are convents in this way places ‘where gifts can be given’? I wear shorts, T-­shirt, sandals. Nobody seems to mind this Kiwi informality. On the Sunday afternoon I walk round the display in the Concentration Camp Museum. It’s been greatly improved since 1995. The best overview of the whole Nazi nightmare that I know of in Germany.

Monday, 4th August The pilgrimage starts in earnest. Visit Stadelheim, major execution site in Munich. Needs a bit of initiative/‘get up and go’ to find. Bus 724 from KZ Dachau → S Bahn Dachau → S2 München Giesing → Schwanseestrasse. Strassenbahn, two stops → Stadelheimstrasse. Walk. Huge prison: Justizvollzugsanstalt = Hauptefängnis Bayerns, i.e. the central prison for Bavaria. Used my mobile phone to call Frau Drexler in the prison administration for permission to enter the prison where the ‘White Rose’ Memorial/Gedenkstätte is located. A friendly guard meets me in the holding room in the entrance and takes me to the memorial. Not the actual place where the White Rose/Weiße Rose people were guillotined – Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Prof. Kurt Huber and Hans Leipelt. That’s now a cell in daily use. The memorial though has a block like an execution block. On it an inscription: Den Opfern der Gewaltherrschaft von 1933–45

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For the Victims of the Tyranny 1933–45

and above an abstract resembling a guillotine plus a set of beams that people could be hanged from. One is reminded of Hegel’s description of history as a ‘butcher’s block’ or shambles. The whole place is enclosed by concrete walls, but open to the sky, the heavens. The impression is of imprisonment, yet ultimate freedom. My theological reflection: If I as a pilgrim – with some effort and ingenuity – can seek out such a place as my own act of memory and homage, surely God can seek out and care for the lost and make them a source of blessing for many – as indeed they were. Part of the all-­too-rare opposition to Hitler in the university – and for several members of the Weiße Rose, in the Army as well. Approximately 1,400 people – mostly political opposition – were guillotined in the Stadelheim Strafgefängnis.

Tuesday, 5th August Hire a Renault Twingo, little eggshell of a car, and set off along autobahns for Mauthausen in Austria. Recently I seem to have lost my nerve for driving on German autobahns or motorways in general. The big trucks scare me. Once or twice I feel so terrified that I turn off into side roads. Stop to pluck up courage to continue. I do deep breathing. Was I hyperventilating? I say things like, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me’ (Philippians 4:13). I decide that driving on autobahns in a Renault Twingo is like walking on water. Risk, faith, courage all run together in the act of sitting behind the wheel. With great relief I arrive in Mauthausen late afternoon, find a gasthaus (‘Zur Traube’) with a room looking out over the Donau/Danube. Wonderful sight as the sun goes down throwing rich colours on the brown waters – very low this year after the ‘Hochwasser’ of the year before. All day I had been buoyed up by a picnic hamper Srs. Irmengard and Elija – the historian and archivist of the Dachau convent, a new friend – had packed for me. I finish it up.



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Wednesday, 6th August Nothing prepares one for KZ Mauthausen: the dark granite construction; ‘the wall of lament’ (Klagemauer) where new prisoners were kept standing in all weather, summery or freezing, for as much as 24 hours as they entered the camp; memorials with hands uplifted in grief and supplication; the ‘death staircase’ (Todesansteige) down into the granite quarry up which prisoner-­slaves carried large blocks of granite day by day; the ‘parachute jump’ where prisoners suicided – often in groups – by jumping off the granite cliff down into the quarry… As Sr. Elija the night before so eloquently put it, ‘Also man kann nur weinen’ – when all’s said and done one can only weep. I marvelled too at what liars the Nazis were. For here, as at Flossenbürg, Hitler’s architect/offsider Albert Speer quarried the granite blocks intended for the grandiose edifices of the Reich. He knew. Late in the afternoon I walk out of the back of KZ Mauthausen. Skirting a wood and crossing some meadows, I stumble across the place where they dumped the ashes of the dead. The Ash Dump/Aschenhalde. Around 100,000 people. Just unceremoniously, out of dustbins. No tourists in sight. Just me, a memorial stone and a dark wooden cross. Once again, as at Birkenau, the empty space seemed to resonate with the empty tomb. Further, what’s ‘out there’ strangely corresponds to what’s ‘in here’. For the heart too can be a place of grief and human helplessness but also a place of humility, receptivity and raw openness to grace. God like a depth charge that surfaces all this stuff. In this silence/solitude I feel – as far as one can – a certain solidarity with the victims and victim-­survivors. That afternoon I had met two men from Slovakia whose fathers had been in Mauthausen-­Güsen. I recall my own definition of a pilgrim as open-­hearted, self-­emptying in vulnerability – one who seeks out, visits unholy places; who remembers in a strong and immediate sense; and so is willing to be broken, to learn, to witness. This in turn gives me insight into ‘who is Jesus Christ for me this afternoon’. He is the one who seeks out the lost, cares for victims and victim-­survivors alike. To look him in the face is to face the one who has faced up to what was done at Mauthausen and in other unholy places. For here and just in one single place the horror is humanly unbearable. I see Jesus as ‘the victim of victims’, the crucified one – in solidarity with all the others – or representative of all the others before and with God. Somehow 88 

his story recited in my heart in this place feels like the story of a living one. I remember my definition of God as ‘victim-­survivor of the twentieth century – as of all other centuries’. This ‘fits’, resonates with the Jesus of the Mauthausen ash dump. I thus feel free – freed? – to bless Jesus as my – our? – Lord in his abundant co-­passionate life: ‘there’ for victims in their suffering as in their desire for life, for freedom – in God? There for me as for countless – all? – others. ‘Thank you’, I keep repeating. I take off my sandals. Two biblical texts come to me. Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. (Exodus 3:5) Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ (Genesis 28:16–17)

Is anything but the biblical language adequate? That evening I visit Güsen and Ebensee, sub-­camps of Mauthausen. About as much as I can take. Rest up in the Gasthaus. Find a sit-­outside restaurant for an evening meal. Start to believe this really was the Feast of the Transfiguration! For had not Jesus spoken of the ‘exodos that he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem’ (Luke 9:31). Why not in Mauthausen too?

Thursday, 7th August Quit Mauthausen and drive via Linz to Alkhoven to find Schloss Hartheim. Can I say, like the disciples at the Transfiguration, ‘It’s good that we are here’? At any rate, here I am. A beautiful renaissance Schloss/château with onion towers in a little village not far from the Danube. The place is exquisitely preserved and with a bookshop and café for visitors. Inside are two exhibitions. One, ‘Life Worthy of Life’ (Lebens wert des Lebens) an exhibition on handicapped people, especially children. The very real efforts of the Austrian government to care for and promote the needs of the handicapped. Tellingly the exhibition plots nineteenth- and twentieth-­century theories of eugenics, all based on the theory of evolution. 

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The theoretical basis for the elimination of those that didn’t measure up. This is on the upper floors. Downstairs, in the basement, is the second, ‘lebensunwertes Leben’ (Life not Worthy of Life), more a memorial than an exhibition, the telltale ‘not’ announcing a different and demonic world. For the cellar of Hartheim Castle was one of the major euthanasia centres for the T4 programme (named after the address of its HQ in Berlin: 4, Tiergarten Straße) initiated secretly by Hitler in 1939 and officially terminated in August 1941, after public outcry. The name of Bishop von Galen of Münster here honourable. Approximately 20,000 handicapped people – men, women, children – were bussed to Hartheim Castle and gassed. And to other centres. All the usual deceptions were practised: victims undressed as for a bath, then shepherded into hermetically sealed chambers with locks on the outside – now painted an immaculate innocent white. Gas piped in. Then cremation. Belongings and other remains buried in the garden. Ashes dumped in the Danube. Parents of handicapped children – often snatched from homes run by Catholic nuns or Lutheran deaconesses – sent lying letters alleging that their loved one had died of an unfortunate accident or some illness. I buy a collection of these unforgivable letters in the bookshop. And the anguished replies from parents.

Gas chamber for handicapped children, cellar, Hartheim Castle, Austria

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Later people/prisoners trucked from Dachau – where the gas chamber was not yet in operation – and elsewhere to be gassed, their remains disposed of. About 3,166 from Dachau alone. Such facilities could not be left idle. In this one place, as in others, Nazism shows itself as the pro-­active death cult that it was. Driven by virulent, rampant racism larded with eugenics: against Jews (‘vermin’), then Russians/Bolsheviks (Slavic Untermenschen), gypsies, homosexuals (‘social undesirables’); the handicapped, here mostly children (Leben unwert des Lebens); then, with strong admixture of power, against all other threats to Nazi expansionism (‘Lebensraum’): Poles, Czechs, intellectuals, religious leaders … The faces of Christian Wirth, known as ‘the beast’, and Fritz Stangl stare out at me from photographs in the exhibition. I had already ‘met’ them two years earlier at Belźec and Sobibór/Treblinka respectively. They learned their trade here at Hartheim Castle. The whole place horrific, as disturbing as horrific. The architecture and first exhibition full of beauty and human bona fides. The best in human life. The killing-­centre basement, the worst: ugliness for beauty; evil for goodness; lies for truth, I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life that you and your descendents may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19)

All this took two hours. After which I set out for Flossenbürg.

Friday/ Saturday, 8th/9th August Flossenbürg. Arrived Thursday after more harrowing autobahn driving. Fled the autobahn before Degensburg. Then along back roads through the peasanty beauty of the Oberpfalz taking in Cham and Weiden. Eventually find accommodation in Floss, a few kilometres from Flossenbürg. Traditional Gasthaus-­Pension with bar and restaurant. Weißes Rossl – The White Charger? The owner had been a cross-­country ski champion in his youth. Cabinets full of trophies. His wife, obliging and helpful, an excellent cook. Flossebürg, like Mauthausen, is a granite quarry and just as shattering. Hard as granite. Hidden away close to the Czech border. Very few people 

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here (unlike Mauthausen). No buses. Definitely off the tourist route. Like Belźec. I was drawn here by Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, with six co-­conspirators from the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler – Wilhelm Canaris, Hans Oster, Karl Sack, Ludwig Gehre, Theodor Strünk, Freiderich von Rabinau – was hanged in the early dawn of 9 April, 1945, two weeks before Flossenbürg was liberated by units of the US Army.

Yiskor/Remember Jewish Centre for Reflection, Flossenbürg

I recall how Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer, told me over lunch at the AAR Conference in Boston in 1986 that it was only when Bonhoeffer got certain information about what was happening to the Jews ‘in the East’ – this must have been 1942/3 – that he joined the plot to assassinate Hitler. For Bonhoeffer the Jews were, ‘the least [i.e. the most vulnerable] of the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ’ (Ethics); and this discernment in response to his question, ‘Who is Jesus Christ for us Today?’; this not theory but a calling to put one’s life and reputation at risk. So this is where it all ended! The execution site is bounded on two sides by walls and on the third by what remains of the ‘death row’ cells, some of which have been converted into a small museum. Inscribed on

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a plaque on the end wall bounding the execution site, a biblical text, 2 Timothy I:7: For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-­control.

I am deeply moved. Summed up here is the manner of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s living and dying, this ‘beaut guy’, this deep-­thinking theologian, and one willing to put his life at risk to resist Nazi tyranny. I kneel down awestruck at the courage and integrity of this man in whose person-­in-God this most unholy place somehow becomes holy, sacred – like a spring that’s had a rock lifted off it and is now gushing water in all directions. I bend forward, touch my head on the ground. Like Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is not just ‘dead’, but was deliberately executed. The manner of his death, the measure of his solidarity with victims everywhere. A real solidarity, not a factitious one. In this way his vulnerability is his power. I appreciate remarks by David Ford, whose book I’m reading. [The face] signifies a dangerous memory. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the face is remembered not just as dead, but as violently and judicially executed. Cain lures his brother far from witnesses and kills him – a constant in the annals of murder, rape and etc?30

30



David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed. Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp.208, 194.

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Execution site of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others, Flossenbürg

As I kneel, I hang onto the little wooden cross I wear over my T-­shirt. No greater power can be imagined; justice-­seeking in all the vulnerability of love; the heart and centre of my ‘pilgrim’ solidarity with Bonhoeffer and all those like him. KL Flossenbürg is quite small. Not much remains. But it took me two days to walk round it – slowly! – and take it all in. A kind of ‘Bonhoeffer’ stream of consciousness went through my mind. Here’s how he spoke to me. • Discipleship expressed as ‘civil courage’ requires action. Not only reflection and prayer, although these also. • In sustained action we Christians can finally be upheld by Christ, the crucified risen one: to bless and be blessed by him. Living by faith is like walking on water: we can’t do it ourselves. For me like driving on autobahns in a small car. • If we are thus called, that means to be as ‘powerless’ and ‘worldly’ as the incarnate Christ. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas of ‘Ohnmacht’ and ‘Mündigkeit’. • In the encounter – with Christ, with martyrs, with reality – we are made aware of our sinfulness: our cowardice and impurity. We need to be em-

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powered and purified if we are to become effective disciples. Freedom to act requires at least courage, purity – another name for love? • Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s dictum that we should deal thankfully and fully with the penultimate – ordinary living with its demands, stresses, rewards – before concerning ourselves with ultimate questions – which may be God’s business anyway! – comes to me strongly. Real holiness, to live a life. The message for me here: grab hold of life thankfully and joyfully. Don’t be a repressed misery, a ‘creeping Jesus’ in self-­imposed isolation. But ready to be alone when it’s good and right. I’ve known a lot about death, loss, disappointment. Is God calling me in old age to ‘bud again’, to life, resurrection, celebration, joy? Paradox of ‘pilgrimage to unholy places’: to affirm life evermore strongly. To entrust myself to others, to life, in faith. ‘A life in which a sense of death and resurrection is always present’. Dietrich Bonhoeffer again. An exodus journey through a wilderness. Like an autobahn journey. At Flossenbürg there are two religious buildings. An ecumenical church: a sincere attempt at an adequate Christian memorial. Now somewhat dated. Lesson to be learned from Maori people, Dachau sisters: memorials without praying, living people will always be rather dead. Or limited. Remembering or listening to warnings doesn’t happen in objects, only in human hearts and minds and actions. The Jewish memorial, by contrast, is more successful because it doesn’t attempt an overall solution – e.g. ‘the redemption of the world through the crucified Christ’ – but only a method. On the illuminated far wall of the bare interior just the one word in Hebrew ‘Yiskor’. Think or remember. Think about it. What I’m doing now in this very place as I write my reflections, my notebook on my knee. I’m learning, then. Life calls for hard work: praying, informing oneself, pilgrimage, thinking, acting, creating – all with integrity. And being a theologian: being open to grace – be it gift or judgement – via the heart – from people, places – to be touched and to touch – to hold and be upheld.



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Sunday, 10th August I’d meant to be back in Dachau by Saturday for the Memorial of Edith Stein. Some things, though, can’t be rushed. To beat my autobahn phobia, I get up early and at 0600 a.m. I’m on the road before the trucks and the traffic. Good ploy. Breeze on down through Regensburg to Dachau/München. In time for 10:00 a.m. Mass. Irmengard and Elija, still on guest house duty, relieved to see me as I’d been expected the day before. Had I been involved in an autobahn accident? Spend the rest of the day recovering. Doing laundry.

Monday, 11th August Last day at Heilig Blut. Sr. Elija points out two other local sites (off the tourist route) that I might visit. The shooting range for the SS guards near Dachau. Where they also put Russian POW’s against a wall and shot them. The bullet holes still visible. And a mass grave close to a nearby village that in the event I fail to find. That done I return my Renault Twingo to the hire firm. Discover to my dismay that I have to pay for a new windscreen, the old one damaged by a granite chip that flew off a truck near Linz. That afternoon, a kind of miracle. I’m resting in my room, the weather still in heatwave mode. Suddenly a knock on my door. It’s Sr. Irmengard. ‘Max Mannheimer is here.’ ‘Who’s Max Mannheimer?’ ‘A survivor of Auschwitz’, she replies. Tea and a few biscuits are quickly arranged and I find myself sitting at the refectory table with Srs. Elija and Irmengard and Max. Jewish, wonderfully lively old man of 83. As full of spirit as of grief. He relates some of his story in a rich mixture of German and English. On one occasion there took place what he calls ‘the greatest act of worship ever’. He and some other prisoners were on one of the death marches as the camps were evacuated towards the end of the war. They were exhausted and dying of thirst. They rested on some damp ground. One of them said, ‘There must be water here.’ So they began to dig with spoons, forks, knives. Soon a shallow pool of muddy water 96 

appeared. Which they drank. Then together spontaneously they chanted the Shema, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’(Deuteronomy 6:4–5). As he related this, Max burst into tears, a high-­pitched, keening, wailing, grief-­stricken cry as the weight and horror of his memories – like demons out of hell – overwhelmed him. The sisters and I – two women and a pilgrim/ theologian from New Zealand – moved to him and did our best to hold him until the horror passed. I prayed for healing in our action. I had been a pre-­schooler when what he related had happened. Now we meet. Some irony or providence of history? In his present life Max was married to an American woman, Grace Franzen (d. 2010), and lives nearby. The convent for him is a place of hospitality and reconciliation. He is an occasional guide at Dachau, and he lectures, broadcasts (and much else) frequently in Germany and overseas. Under the name of Ben Jacob he is a very considerable painter – not unlike Jackson Pollack in miniature – but the dark colours are always there. Before he left he signed for me a copy of his Late Diary.31 I treasure it, my meeting with Max a gift and a privilege. Evening. Irmengard, Elija and I decide to have a conversation. We sit outside near a pine tree that Elija had assiduously watered that afternoon. Again mostly in German. Elija – who supplied me with heaps of photocopied material relevant to my trip – doesn’t speak English. Taking our cue from Edith Stein (Sr. Benedicta a Croce OCD) we wonder whether empathy is the originating impulse of a Christian pilgrim spirituality. Reinhard Körner OCD, whom I was to meet later in Birkenwerder, had written, ‘Einfühlung – ein Grundakt der (christlichen) Spiritualität’. From that tonic first-­principle many things follow: that empathy in Christian/ pilgrim mode is inherently kenotic or self-­emptying and open-­hearted on the model of Jesus; that places of prayer are where gifts – of encounter, healing, reconciliation, revelation even – can be given and received – as by Max Mannheimer; that being present in pilgrim/empathy to the Holocaust can be a metaphor/insight for/into God’s presence or involvement in the Shoah; that pilgrimage is a total way of knowing ‘from the ground up’ involving feet, heart, head, spirit – the whole body-­self; that faith is a language that alone makes sense of places of no hope and uncanny 31 Max Mannheimer, Spätes Tagesbuch, Theresianstadt–­Auschwitz–Warschau–­Dachau. Pendo, Zürich, 5, Auflage, 2002. 

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evil – the architectural motif of Engführung – a no-­exit road narrowing to vanishing point – in the new Jewish Museum in Berlin; some people holding onto their humanity, caring no matter what; my own agenda of reconnecting with what happened in my own lifetime (born 1938) in unholy places like this. And more. As we sat and talked in the dark, the current of empathy between us was great. Almost as though we glimpsed flashes of the divine beauty. Amidst all the horror.

Tuesday, 12th August In the morning I take my leave. After I’d taken photos of Irmengard and Elija, to my amazement they ask me to bless them. Deeply shaken and moved – why should I bless people who had given me so much, been such a blessing to me? – I do my best to comply. Impromptu. As they kneel I lay hands on them and pray. Then it was time to go. The visit to Heilig Blut, Dachau, ended as it had begun: with big hugs and tears of joy! I shoulder my backpack and set forth. The rest of the day is taken with a train ride München–­Fulda-Eisenach– Weimar. On Eisenach station – now I’m in the old East Germany – a placard reads, ‘Geburtsort Johann Sebastian Bachs’. The birthplace of the greatest musician who ever lived. This and the statues of Goethe and Schiller in Weimar remind me of the German high culture native to this place. The train stops with a jolt. The super-­modern swift ‘ICE’/Eis train has just run somebody down on a level crossing. We wait for an hour while they clean up the mess and police check details. Everybody visibly shaken. As we finally near Weimar the lady next to me points out the Buchenwald memorial on the hillside opposite. Once again I’m pitched into a day of shattering contrasts: a blessing and a death; Bach, Goethe, Schiller cheek by jowl with the gutter bestiality of the Nazis, the Death’s Head SS in particular. And a person run down by a silver-­grey high-­speed train. The words of Psalm 16:10–11 come to me: ‘You will not leave my soul among the dead. You show me the path of life.’ At such times – all times? – prayer a matter of survival.

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Wednesday, Thursday, 13th/ 14th August Buchenwald. A vast sprawling place on a hill called the Ettersberg a short bus-­ride from Weimar. The solid well-­maintained buildings along the camp side of the car park devoted to study of the Nazizeit. They make the place look almost benign. In operation, though, Buchenwald was devoted to dehumanisation, degradation, cruelty, starvation, murder, overcrowding, disease, unethical medicine, squalor and systematic attempts to kill people through over-­burdening them with slave labour. Also used by the Russians 1945–50 as the centrepiece of their de-­Nazification programme in East Germany. So: 1937–1950, thirteen years of horror. Its sheer size as it slopes down the hill as shaking as it is shocking. My point of entry: the pine forest off to one side. The mass graves for thousands of Russian POW’s who, in deliberate defiance of the Geneva Convention, were summarily shot and without trial. Their memorial, steel rods placed standing in the ground amongst the trees where the victims lie buried. Each rod has a number on it and the word ‘Unbekannte’/unknown. Hundreds of them. They caught the sun as it shone through gaps in the forest cover. A clearing of sorts.

Steel rods marking forest execution site, Buchenwald



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Again, I hang onto my cross. It seems to be my ‘way into’ these places, my solidarity and point of knowing. Not a ‘solution’ or an evasion, but the ‘whence’ from which I come, the way into and the facing of reality. My ‘mind’ or companion on the journey. Must think more about this. The pilgrim’s way of knowing? I’m reminded of Augustine’s dictum, ‘non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem/no access to truth except through love’.32 Is pilgrimage to unholy places a kind of knowing that at root is a deep and utterly realistic kind of love? As in Flossenbürg, so here at Buchenwald: I seem to be following Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or he me. After leaving the Tegel Prison in Berlin, Bonhoeffer (and others) was brought here to the SS prison. Smaller than the kennels that housed the guard dogs that patrolled the camp. His good spirits and ability to reach out to others never cracked, however. From thence to Dachau; and then on to Flossenbürg (via Regensburg). I’m following him backwards; but no less real for that. One of the strange gifts of pilgrimage: unholy places where gifts can be given; where surprises that couldn’t have been imagined in advance happen.

Dog kennels, Buchenwald

32 Saint Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book 32, Chapter 18.

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Second day at Buchenwald. Same impression of overwhelming size. Lots of memorials. Do they mitigate or intensify the horrors of the place? Goethe’s Oak – symbolising the impotence of culture faced with naked evil? The museum is dark and over-­detailed. Not in the same class as Dachau. An art gallery has a bronze statue of a prisoner with a gaping hole through the chest. As though the heart was ripped out of prisoners by heartless people. The crematorium and disinfection unit especially awful. First they humiliated and depersonalised people. Then they worked them to death (Vernichtung durch Arbeit/extermination by work), then one in five went to the gas chambers or died in some other way. Over a thousand were strangled in its cellar; 250,000 men, women and children went through Buchenwald; at least 50,000 died. The whole place left me feeling sick and numb and as though I’d been kicked in the guts, knocking all the breath out of me. I felt emotionally and physically drained, exhausted. Desperate to get out, look away. I can see the impulse behind texts like Deuteronomy 31:17–18; 32:19–25. In anger and disgust God turns his face/countenance away from human wickedness. In Hebrew, ‘hester panim’. In Buchenwald this evil ruthlessly proactive in its craven idolatry of Hitler. My anger will be kindled against them in that day. I will forsake them and hide my face from them; they will become an easy prey, and many terrible troubles will come upon them. In that day they will say, ‘Have not these troubles come upon us because our God is not in our midst?’ On that day I will surely hide my face on account of all the evil they have done by turning to other gods.

The ‘hiding’ of the divine face – contrast Numbers 6:25–26 – sums it up: God turning away – like an eclipse of the sun – to leave humankind to its own evil devices. Wrongdoers of every kind flourish. The good, the just, the vulnerable become the prime targets and feel abandoned. Yet in their faithfulness – and unbeknownst to them – a profound synergy with God is set up that contains within itself God’s future for humankind. I get this from Zvi Kolitz’s short story, ‘Yossel Rahover’s Appeal to God’. It fits Buchenwald exactly. An essential part of a theology of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries? All that’s left to see on the way back to Weimar is the DDR memorial to the victims: huge, crass, crude, vulgar. But in situ commanding respect even though communism didn’t prove to be the lasting salvation from Nazism.



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Back in my hotel in the Schondorf suburb of Weimar – the small Carmelite convent unfortunately full – I have a strange experience of synchronicity. In my room I watch a TV documentary by Nord Deutsche Rundfunk on the making of wartime V2 rockets at Peenemünde in the latter years of the war. Werner von Braun et al. After Peenemünde had been severely bombed by the Allies, the whole manufacturing effort to construct rockets was transferred to a cavernous underground facility at Mittelbau Dora (also known as Dora Europa) fifty miles north of Weimar/Buchenwald. The original slave-­worker prisoners brought there from Buchenwald. At MD, thousands of these men were held below ground, worked round the clock. Many of them died. The synchronicity? In London, target for these rockets constructed by Nazi slave labour, there lived a little boy (b.1938) called Raymond Pelly! On walks with my nanny, I remember seeing fighter aircraft trying to down or divert rockets before they descended towards the city. One demolished two houses at the end of our street – Chester Square – with a terrible earthshaking bang. These memories never leave one. Just a month earlier I had shown my son Tom, aged 10, this street where I was born and the rebuilt houses on the site of the originals that the V2 rocket had destroyed. I didn’t know then that these rockets had been manufactured in Mittelbau Dora by slaves. I know now; and in knowing I’m beginning to get a truer picture of what happened in my own lifetime. Is a sense of history one of the last fruits of a lifetime as of a civilisation or culture?

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Berlin, 2003

Friday, 15th – Tuesday, 19th August, Berlin Karmel Regina Martyrum. Took a while to find the convent on Heckerdamm. Once there, I immediately sense the love-­yielding silent peace of a place of sustained prayer. So much to visit in Berlin, so little time. Yes, but I need today for rest/recovery/re-­creation/reflection. I’m good at just letting go when I need to. Now is one of those times. Eventually some ‘pilgrim’ reflections surface. 1. More on the notion of vulnerability/kenosis. Some of its constituents are: • Pilgrimage to unholy places is a way of seeing things from the standpoint of the victims and victim-­survivors. This does not mean that I am a victim. It may, however, remind one of events in one’s life where one genuinely was the victim of events or other people’s evil: in my case the loss of two children, Cathy and Gail; general failure of marriage; breakdown of career; loss of motherland and mother church… Bonhoeffer’s remarks on seeing things ‘from below’ relevant here. And I’m hoping to visit the Tegel Prison where he wrote Letters and Papers. • Being open-­hearted and vulnerable to both past and present is a way of kenosis/self-­emptying: both being emptied and emptying oneself of false self-­images and illusions about life generally. Historically this means losing or giving up notions of progress, historical inevitability, human perfectibility, or any complacent rationalism, communitarianism, individualism and etc. – all the means whereby humanity has confidently asserted it can deal with its own problems sine Deo, alone and unaided – and failed, and failing. Personally it means living without personal illusions or idols, but rather in complete trust in God in all circumstances of life, good and bad: living, therefore, according to an ‘economy’ of freedom from anxiety, as always regarding people and places as in some way gift or grace. As in the Lord’s Prayer, this revolves around



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the question of ‘who’s in charge’, whose rule or kingship life really needs: a truly provident God or scheming, insecure ‘me’? It raises, too, questions of ‘power or means’, i.e. can I really cope with the depths of evil evident in ‘unholy places’ in my own strength? No, for if I do, I just cope by blocking stuff out – living with illusions again! Rather a strategy of waiting on God; to say ‘yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory’ – yours, not mine. At the very least not using pilgrimage as a way of boosting my own ego, but as a way of ‘putting my own life and reputation at risk’ (Bonhoeffer). Hence: ‘open-­hearted’ in the double sense of (a) being prepared in body, mind, heart to be open in/with/through Christ to the horror/evil of unholy places; to look into the abyss; to descend into hell – this is vulnerability – to entrust oneself to the crucified Christ in this sense; (b) to be exposed to – and willingly to participate in – the process of kenosis/self-­emptying through loss of illusions, living without idols, generally following the way of Christ. Gradually I’m building up my picture of the pilgrim as ‘The open-­ hearted one, kenotic in vulnerability’. This has obvious resonances with the Passion narratives and of course with key texts in Paul, especially Philippians 2:5–11, 2 Corinthians 12:8–10 (cp. 11:21, 29). Paul’s ‘weakness’ – ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’; ‘power is made perfect in weakness’ – is perhaps the equivalent of my ‘vulnerability’. Must work this through exegetically. 2. Consequent reflections on my theological model (or method). My notion of pilgrimage is a way of recovering true humanity in responsiveness to God and others now in the present and in history generally. Some of its features are: being willing to take responsibility for the real world, but with joyfulness and freedom. Simplicity and peace are other words that come to mind. This full/integral/true humanity achieved through: • learning to cry out to God – to intercede – with and for the victims de profundis and in extremis; • rediscovering the gift of being human through reaching out in care, love, solicitude to others spontaneously, heroically, deliberately or in lots of small ways in ordinary life, ways which most people won’t even notice; • in this responsiveness to God and human need, the otherness and difference of both (God & the human other) – in this empathetic co-­ 104 

passionate taking responsibility for others – in willingness to reciprocate and be cared for by others – to find true – i.e. ‘other-­given’ whether by people or by God – peace, joy, serenity. ‘In your will is our peace.’ More of what I mean by an ‘economy of gift or grace’. That kind of freedom; • all this in the context of the Eucharistic remembering/anamnesis – the sacrificial making present – of Jesus and all other victims; that sees the Christ-­centred remembrance of the human, the vulnerable, the kenotic, the suffering – in oneself and others – as integral or essential to any present or future human flourishing. Many will find this linkage of flourishing with awareness of suffering unduly paradoxical. Surely, though, it is the authentic paradox of grace – as in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Sisters sing their Offices in the Crypt underneath the magnificent modern memorial Church. One of the Sisters has a beautiful voice and perfect pitch. The memorials are to Fr. Alfred Delp SJ and other members of the Resistance to the Nazis. The magnificent work of modern art behind the freestanding altar is the gift of Jewish benefactors. Like Dachau, Karmel Regina Martyrum is a place of reconciliation, a place where gifts can be given – and graciously received.

Saturday, 16th August I venture out. A 45-minute walk to the Plötzensee Memorial Centre. Major Nazi execution site adjacent to Plötzensee Prison. 1938–1943 used the guillotine until Allied bombing put it out of action. Now (or until recently) a women’s and young people’s prison, with prison hospital. Approximately 2,500 executions. Post-1943, by hanging. All part of the Resistance to Hitler: Kreisauer Kreis, the 20 July 1944 plot; and Czechs, Army Officers, civilians, women, Communists, Christians and etc., brave and heroic people. Summary sentences with no real judicial process. Roland Freisler and others acted as judges. RF turned up at Flossenbürg to condemn Bonhoeffer et al. in April 1945.



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Execution chamber for opposition to Hitler, Plötzensee, Berlin

On the day of their execution, people were led from Block 3 to the execution building, a medium-­sized barn-­like space. In the near half would be a table behind which sat various officials, at the far end hidden by a large black curtain, the guillotine. The condemned were identified, their sentences read out. Then they were stripped to the waist, their hands tied behind their backs. The black curtain was then pulled aside to reveal the guillotine and the executioner. Macabre coup de théâtre. The condemned man or woman was then marched forward, their head laid on the block, forcibly if necessary. The weighted blade, Fallbeil, then released, fell, and the severed head dropped into a basin built into the apparatus to catch the head and the outrush of blood. No bloody mess; the dirty grey-­green basin the last thing the victim would have seen. The process of the unveiling of the guillotine to death timed. Often about seven seconds. Cadavers were transported to a University Medical School for use in anatomy classes. Family members billed for the costs of imprisonment and execution. The whole procedure had absolutely no redeeming features. At this point the ‘anti-­redemptory’ people are dead right. Law and power turned demonic. Amply illustrates the truth of Tommy Lott’s dictum, ‘If you have the power, you can do or say anything you want’. Hitler, greatly threatened by small but determined opposition, personified the demonic incarnation 106 

and use of total unrestrained power. I call to mind Lord Acton’s dictum, ‘All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Plötzensee is a reminder of the abyss of horror that thorough-­going corruption, legal and other, can open up. Unlike Auschwitz, it’s small enough to get one’s head around. Almost. Round the back there are bullet holes in the brickwork, relics of the 1945 battle for Berlin that rendered Plötzensee inoperative.

Sunday, 17th August Mass in the Memorial Church. Big rectangular box-­like shape with magnificent mural behind the altar. Based on Revelation 12:1–6, the pregnant woman/Pietà pitted against the dragon, the forces of evil. Gospel from John 6, and an excellent sermon by a Jesuit priest, the bread from heaven. At this stage in my pilgrimage I feel like an Israelite in the wilderness needing food: manna in the desert, bread from heaven. To be nourished thus by the very life of Christ is vital to the survival of the pilgrim as ‘open-­hearted, self-­emptying in vulnerability’. I need the heart and the life of Christ, the body and the blood. The deep themes of the Mass: real and true presence of Christ; being caught up in the endless resonances of his self-­giving, self-­offering. Throughout my time in Germany I’ve been welcomed without question into the Mass. I think I’m a catholic at heart. Clarification: on this pilgrimage to Berlin I’m not visiting Holocaust sites, but concentration camps, slave labour camps and execution sites with their repertoire of guillotining, hanging, gassing, shooting and etc. The accent is on incarceration and slave labour rather than murder per se. Jews were present in these places along with others, but they were not built – like Treblinka, Chełmno, Sobibór, Belźec, Auschwitz – specifically with the Final Solution in mind. My definition of ‘Unholy Places’ includes both, yet they are to be distinguished. Thus: Pilgrimage I: August, 1995: Auschwitz, Dachau. Pilgrimage II: August, 2001: Warsaw, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibór, Belźec.



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Pilgrimage III:  August, 2003: Dachau, Stadelheim, Mauthausen, Hartheim, Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, Plötzensee, Tegel, Wannsee, Sachsenhausen. Definition: an ‘Unholy Place’ – unheilig in German can mean ‘evil’ – is a place of death where, through an unrestrained use of power without mercy, people are deprived of their dignity, human rights, identity and ultimately their life through imprisonment, overwork, starvation, insanitary conditions, overcrowding, brutality, punishment and, in many, sometimes most, cases, death. These places are ‘uncanny’ – German, unheimlich, literally the opposite of ‘homely’ – uncannily evil – unheilig u. unheimlich – in the sense that in them one can intuit – by open-­heartedness, empathy and solidarity with the victims, by memory – their legacy of murder and cruelty from the sheer ‘what-­happened-here-­ness’ of each particular unholy place. The holiness or sacredness – the welling fecund life – of an authentic place of prayer is entirely missing. Instead its opposite: the unholy, the evil, the inhospitable, the desecrating, the inhuman, the sterile. We have here a non-­benign reading of the ‘secular’, a world turned in on its own evil ‘devices and desires’, without – or in the absence – of God. Some progressions or comparisons might go like this: God/home – meaning the holy, the sacred, heaven/haven, the fecund, presence → godless/homeless – signaling empty, sterile, lost, absence → unholy/uncannily evil, actively corrupting, hell, death. A major theme of Pilgrimage III is resistance: attempts to overthrow or outflank the Hitlerite régime. I’m reminded of the person who has accompanied me on the journey, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and, in another way, Edith Stein. With great profit I’m reading Hans Mommsen’s Alternatives to Hitler: German Resistance Under the Third Reich, Princeton, 2003. It shows how courageous the opposition was, yet how politically clueless. This is history, not hagiography. Later in the day I visit the new Jewish Museum, Daniel Liebeskind’s architectural masterpiece. It documents the history of Jewry in Germany since the Middle Ages. Takes hours to begin to do justice to it. One exhibit particularly gets to me: a 1931 oil portrait of Rabbi Leo Baeck by Ludwig Meidner. The face contorted with grief and foreboding, as Baeck became aware of what was in store for his people.

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Rabbi Leo Baeck. Portrait by Ludwig Meidner. With permission, Jewish Museum, Berlin

Liebeskind in his design conjures with the idea of ‘the uncanny’. He conveys this with architectural use of the Engführung, the no-­exit space that narrows down to nothing. Trapped, no way out, the end. To stand in these spaces with empathy for the victims is near overwhelming. I reflect: faith must be a language that makes sense in places of no hope. Also: empathy as originating impulse of Christian spirituality (Fr. Reinhard Körner, OCD) – especially here in a quintessentially Jewish space that memorializes suffering but in a space that celebrates Jewish life. Yet in a way that preserves the integrity, the standing of the empathiser as of the other. Without that, no real Christian–­Jewish dialogue is possible. ‘Empathy’, in German, Einfühlung, literally means ‘feeling (a way) into’ another’s world. Edith Stein put me onto this. Lots of facts, of course; but these the means for insight, empathy, sympathy. Like Augustine: ‘you don’t access truth except through love/ non intratur in veritatem, nisi per caritatem’ – love and self-­opening as foundational to dialogue as to the pilgrim way.



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Monday, 18th August I begin the day with a flow-­on reflection from yesterday. Contemplative prayer is the prayer of love and silence where one is nakedly ‘there’ with God not seeking or expecting any emotional or intellectual reward. If gifts are given, then they are truly given. Not solicited. Whether they be of darkness or love. Like being a pilgrim in an unholy place. Then I ask myself: why did I get into Holocaust/Unholy Places research, exploration, pilgrimage? Some of the motivations were: • Cambridge University Library, 1970s: chanced on two grey volumes: the procès verbal of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, 1963–7. Read them. Deeply shocked, especially by what was done to children: kids being thrown alive into fires/furnaces/pits … • Wanting to know what happened in my own lifetime, much of it unknown to me hitherto. What are my personal intersections with history? • Globalisation  – its good side!  – meaning greater mutual awareness and human solidarity. Thus: crimes against one are crimes against all. St Paul: ‘If one member suffers, all suffer… Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant?’ (1 Corinthians 12:26; 2 Corinthians 11:29). • Christian theology can’t be done without Jewish–­Christian dialogue. • Christianity derived from Judaism, not the other way round; Judaism a continuing living tradition. ‘The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable’ (Romans 11:29). The parent-­child picture now giving way to a potentially fruitful sibling mutuality. • Jewish theology is a theology of history. Some close knowledge of Shoah history therefore essential to dialogue. • Pilgrimage as a way of doing theology with the whole body-­self. Thinking with one’s feet, heart, mind, spirit. • Staying in Carmelite convents: ‘pilgrimage to unholy places’ only sustainable in and through prayer – in, with, through Christ. Entering into the prayer of Christ to God is eternal life, the ‘holy place’ that redeems the unholy. • Christ has authority as fellow victim of political, religious murder. With him we see things ‘from below’, from the perspective of the victims.

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• This is closely allied to being inspired by saints like Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and countless Jewish people of transcendent moral greatness like Mrs Zucker at Auschwitz or Janusz Korczak at Treblinka or Rabbi Berek Kofman in Paris and Auschwitz. • Wanting to know why/how people under extreme pressure or threat of death (in extremis) manage to pray (de profundis), care, generally manage to stay human/humane. Are these the foundational impulses and values that make any society viable? ‘The blood of the martyrs the seed of the church’, but this thought through in terms of whole societies or, indeed, the whole human family. Life, not death, the ultimate value. • Needing to find starting points for theology. If Auschwitz was the breakdown of a whole tradition of theology and ethics, in what will its resurrection consist? The rest of the day taken up with a visit to the site of the Wannsee Conference, 20 January 1942, where the Holocaust began to be planned in bureaucratic detail. Large country house/villa on the shores of the Wannsee, one of the many lakes that surround Berlin. Address: Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58. 114 Bus from Wannsee station. Built and owned by rich industrialist in 1914–15, it has a heavy formal beauty. Not my cup of tea. In 1910, I read, twenty of the richest hundred people in Prussia were Jews and lived in places like this in Berlin and its environs. Bought in 1940 by the SS as an up-market guesthouse for out of town SS officers on business in Berlin. It now contains a comprehensive exhibition on Hitler’s Germany and the Holocaust in particular. Also an extensive library and seminar rooms upstairs. One room, the dining room and the largest, is devoted to a display on the Wannsee Conference. Formally furnished, large vulgar tapestry, big bay window.



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Boundary fence of a ghetto, Wannsee Museum

The conference was convened by Reinhard Heydrich, SS General and key figure in the planning and execution of the Holocaust. He had officially been charged with the task by Göring and he by Hitler. It brought together the fifteen heads of the main administrative departments of the Nazi state. They included Roland Freisler, the hanging judge, a certain Martin Luther, and Adolf Eichmann who, more than any other, put bureaucratic ‘wheels’ on the grand design. The conference worked with the fact that there were an estimated 11 million Jews in Europe to be exterminated. The whole thing shocks one by its grandiosity and, at the same time, its cold hard rational efficiency. The Nazis knew how to get things done and quickly. Evidently the early success of Operation Barbarossa (1941) – the invasion of Russia – on the eastern front proved two things to Heydrich and co.:

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• that in conquered territories to the east, especially Poland, the SS, the Army, Police Battalions were free to do whatever they wanted without legal or moral restraint – conquered territories were a ‘free zone’ in this sense; • the work of the Task Forces/Einsatzgruppen had been/was being effective; however, it was labour intensive: death by shooting, burial by digging mass graves (and tank ditches) by the victims. New methods were therefore called for which were quicker, more efficient, and able to deal with the very large numbers of Jews in Poland, the Ukraine, the Baltic, Russia and Europe generally. The initial result of the Wannsee Conference was Operation Reinhard (named after Heydrich?), i.e. Belźec, Sobibór, Treblinka, the death camps, and Majdanek, the omnium gatherum KZ Lager. Chełmno was already in operation. These early camps, from 1943, were deadly in their efficiency, but crude in their technology. Bodies had to be put into mass graves or burned. All three camps, Belźec, Sobibór, Treblinka, were in or near forests. Plenty of wood and well hidden. All situated on or near main trunk railway lines. Only later in Auschwitz-­Birkenau did things get more efficient with Zyklon B pellets (potassium cyanide) and big crematoria. Wannsee reminded me of the film The Wannsee Conference that I saw in Boston in the 1980s. As I walked round the formal garden by the lakeside, I remembered the SS sergeant in the film with his magnificent Alsatian/German Shepherd dog that he was feeding and exercising. ‘Great Jew sniffer’, he remarks. That evening, my last at Karmel Regina Martyrum, I’m invited to speak with the Prioress, Sr Maria-­Teresa OCD. A small woman of great depth and wisdom who, inter alia, visits Auschwitz-­Birkenau once a year and has regular contact with victim-­survivors. She is, I gather, the successor to Sr. Gemma Hinricher, the first prioress of KRM. Our long and searching conversation in one of the bare interview rooms revolves around three topics or shared insights: • We should not try to heal Holocaust memories. Rather, we should learn to live with them. The Holocaust is not an invitation to inflate one’s ego, but part of an authentic Christian kenosis. • Although there are no answers to the Holocaust, places of prayer are where ‘gifts can be given’, where reconciliation can take place. She tells me the story of the tapestry on the wall behind the altar in the Crypt Chapel. Entitled ‘Kreuzigung/crucifixion’, it was given by two New 

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York Jews, Herbert and Lotte Strauss in 1995 in memory of Sr. Gemma Hinricher. • I am not a Holocaust survivor nor a perpetrator. But I am ‘a pilgrim to unholy places’. Thus I cannot substitute for victims or perpetrators, let alone Jesus. I can, however, choose ‘where I’m coming from’ and act with empathy and compassion. As we say good-­bye and good night, Sr. Maria-­Teresa says that she thinks what I’m doing and saying is fresh, original and accurately focused. I feel deeply encouraged and blessed.

Tuesday, 19th August Travel across Berlin from Heckerdamm to Birkenwerder, North Berlin. By now I’ve mastered the Berlin transport system of Buses, U-­Bahn, S-­ Bahn and so on. Carmelite Retreat House manned by a small community of Carmelite brothers. Fr. Dr. Reinhard Körner OCD is the theologian and retreat giver. Of the two other brothers, one is the parish priest of the local Catholic parish and has a particular gift for working with children and youth; the other is the gardener/handyman on the property. There is also a staff of house-­keeper (Frau Müller), cooks, cleaners. The chapel is austere and quietly numinous. I attend the daily masses. I’m offered a small room with space for a bed, table, chair and small chest of drawers. Excellent simple meals. While I’m there a group of fifty people are on retreat. Across the street is the Edith Stein Centre, a place used for gatherings, music, sacred dance. The whole place is innovative and go-­ahead; the garden lovingly cared for and giving onto a forest/heath where one can go for walks. The day I leave I spot the sister from Karmel Regina Martyrum with the beautiful voice. She’s involved in some music-­based activity in the Edith Stein Centre. Today I don’t do anything but travel and get established in the new place.

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Wednesday, 20th August Sachsenhausen/Oranienberg. Two stops on the S-­Bahn north of Birkenwerder. Won’t go into detail. In many ways Sachsenhausen parallels Buchenwald: a very big area [1 sq. km?]; begun in 1937, closed April 1945; only to be re-­opened and operated by the Russians until 1950. Like Buchen­wald, Sachsenhausen was made into an icon of the communist anti-­Nazi struggle by the East Germans. Only after the re-­unification of Germany in 1998 has serious historical work on the camp and its history begun. Again, about one in five prisoners perished. Slave labour; daily/ nightly killing by gas, bullet, starvation, disease, filth – the whole Nazi repertoire of sheer pointless/inventive cruelty/brutality. People of many nations suffered, but especially Russian POWs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, Gypsies. There is an onsite museum dedicated to ‘Zigeuner’. Due to its proximity to Berlin and size, Sachsenhausen was the training-­ ground for Totenkopf (Death’s Head) SS Officers. One of the supreme distortions of the imago Dei in our time. It also housed the Inspectorate for all SS-­run concentration camps. It was the place that ‘called the shots’ in matters KZ. My personal reaction on this average Wednesday was one of weariness mixed with disgust. This was fuelled by the size of the place and the effort of getting around – the weather was still very warm – and by the over-­detailed nature of the many exhibitions. It was just too much to take in over one day. Which was all I had. I recall the large concrete roller that prisoners had to drag up and down the Appellplatz every day …



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Leichnamskellar/cellar for stacking corpses, Sachsenhausen

What did get to me, though, was the Leichnamskeller/corpse cellar underneath the Medical Centre. Here, in a white sterile pseudo-­medical setting, perfunctory autopsies were performed, gold teeth extracted and other atrocities done to bodies. Below is a large cellar with several rooms, a low ceiling and a series of arches. It is dimly lit, slightly damp, cold, grey-­green in colour and has the smell of death about it. It could, I would say, easily contain 1,000 corpses at any one time. The place epitomised the reign of death, often violent death, that characterised Sachsenhausen and all the places like it. This was a real ‘underworld’ or hell. An unholy place a greater than which cannot be imagined. The unholy of unholies? I recall words from Isaiah 28:15: We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement; […] for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter.

I pray the Lord’s Prayer, articulating each word like pushing a rock up hill. So much is at stake: the whole foundational idea of faith in God as able to cope with and take responsibility for the living and the dead. A ‘caring’ that goes deeper/further than anything we can imagine. Inclusive of underworlds and unholy places. [Months later I began to get a vision of a suffering yet victorious Christ with arms outstretched to embrace all.] 116 

Behind the side-­altar in the chapel at Birkenwerder is a blow-­up reproduction of St John of the Cross’s drawing of the Crucified Christ. Offensive and out of place in a suburban, bourgeois church, it speaks to me powerfully as I kneel to pray after the Leichnamskeller experience. Providentially I read Job 16 as part of my office this morning. St John of the Cross uses it to describe the truly radical nature of the purgative way. Job feels that God is ripping him apart, using him for target practice. Am I being purged of comfort and smart bits of theology? I feel that uncomfortable.

Sketch of Jesus on the Cross, St John of the Cross, Chapel, Birkenwerder

I was living at peace, until he made me totter, taking me by the neck to shatter me. He has set me up as his target; he shoots his arrows at me from all sides, pitilessly pierces my loins, and pours my gall out on the ground. Breach after breach he drives through me, charging me like a warrior.



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Edith Stein is also somehow present to me. She had this great desire for truth and to be in empathetic relationship with other people, especially those suffering. Was this substitutionary? ‘Come, Rosa, we’re going for our people’? Her fellow Carmelite Reinhard Körner has criticised her heavily on this point. You can’t suffer another person’s suffering. Only they can do that. Empathy, however, is one of her deeply felt convictions. So, according to Körner, we should speak of ‘solidarity with’ not ‘substitution for’. At any rate she sensed that in real terms – i.e. in terms of real suffering – it was the Jewish people, her people, who, albeit from no choice or culpability of their own, most nearly shared or recapitulated the passion or sufferings of Christ. Her desire to share the sufferings of her Lord was therefore at one and the same time a desire to go the way of Christ – as in baptism – and, deeply entailed in that, a desire to share the fate of her own people in their de facto christlikeness. Which she did. Sister Teresa Benedicta a Croce: Sister Teresa Blessed by the Cross. Perhaps she should have said, ‘Come, Rosa, we’re going with our people’. Is this the pilgrim way? In this she addressed the problem of undeserved suffering, starting with her own people.

Thursday, 21st August Visit the Tegel Gefängnis/prison where Bonhoeffer and other members of the Resistance were imprisoned. Highlight of the trip so far? There have been many low points. Like yesterday. Getting into Tegel was a bit of serendipity – another gift! At Karmel Regina Martyrum I met Brother Thaddeus, an Old Catholic Franciscan who works with ex-­prisoners and street people in Berlin. He put me in touch with the Evangelisch/protestant prison chaplain of Tegel. We speak on the phone and he agrees to show me round. Tegel is a nineteenth-­century prison still in full use. With 1,700 inmates, the biggest in Europe. Mostly in red brick, it’s huge, old-­fashioned, over-­crowded, smelly, echoing – sinful? Heavy security at the entrance. I was comprehensively searched and had to show my passport. No photos allowed. I couldn’t take anything into the prison. Not even – or especially

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not! – a mobile phone. Tight security and protection of the rights of prisoners – i.e., not to be photographed. The chaplain met me with a large bunch of keys in his hand, showed me round. During the War, the Wehrmacht took over an entire wing, the North Wing, for prisoners offering resistance to Hitler and his Nazi Régime. Bonhoeffer was in this Wing and evidently occupied two or three different cells during his 18 months in Tegel. The main one was on the top floor – not the best place to be during air raids (our children’s nursery was on the top floor of our London house at the same time) – and next to a drainpipe – to the right as you look up at it. The day I visited, the cell in question was occupied by a Turkish prisoner. So we couldn’t actually go in. Down below and in front is a little exercise garden where Bonhoeffer would have walked each day. The chaplain told me that one of the chaplains at the time, Pfarrer Dr. Harald Poelchau, was the one who couriered Bonhoeffer’s letters out of the prison to his friend and mentor Eberhard Bethge. Poelchau was himself part of the Resistance even though ex officio he had to attend executions of those with whom he was in sympathy. He died in 1956. Here, in situ, I feel moved and inspired by Poelchau, Bonhoeffer and many others who, in this place, had lived, died and given their witness. Today for me Tegel, a place of hope. As I and the chaplains talked over coffee out of paper cups after my look round, I grasped that places can be holy and unholy at the same time. Unholy because of all the pain and suffering that was inflicted, all the death and dying; yet holy because of the brave few who risked – and often lost – their lives in challenging corrupt and murderous power and, at the same time, embodied and witnessed – often in the name of Jesus – to God-­given life; who never gave up hope; who, in their persons, anticipated a humane future, flourishing, peaceful, free. It could be that what makes a place holy or unholy is what people do or have done there for good or ill. Their deeds persist in memory and somehow cling to the place. A space is created with potential for life or death. Thus, what people do now in the same place – good deeds, evil deeds, remembering, forgetting, praying, refusing to pray – determines the kind of space – albeit freighted with the past – that this place will become – or is in process of becoming. Is humankind like a family gathering in a house where murder has been committed? What to do? Each decision morally and spiritually crucial.



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It was good to meet the chaplains, Catholic and Protestant. They were interested in my idea of pilgrimage to unholy places. I got from them a sense of the living history of this place. One reason for the success and enriching nature of my Pilgerreise through Germany has been the fact that I have been able to talk with so many people. That has been wonderful and my German – which I need to improve! – has stood up well. I’ve also learned how to get around Munich, Weimar, Berlin pretty competently. Back at Birkenwerder – this is my last day – I approach the Housekeeper, Frau Müller, to pay my bill. She informs me that Fr. Richard Körner has told her that my stay here is to be free of charge. ‘Der Pater hat gesagt, dass Sie sind frei!’ A very great kindness. Another place where gifts are given!

Friday, 22nd August Fly Berlin–­Düsseldorf–Heathrow. Make my way to Darsham Halt, Suffolk. Met by my cousin Sal. Our families lived together during the war. Next couple of days, meet old friends. Went to two concerts at the Snape Maltings. The second, Angela Hewitt playing Bach. I remember Eisenach… and as I listened to the sublime music, some of the key models informing my pilgrimage come to me.

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Monument to a death march, street corner, Birkenwerder

• Christological 1: a crucifi ed man in extremis and praying de profundis and caring for all those around him. • Christological II: the vulnerable, open- hearted, self- emptying Christ of Philippians 2:5–11. • Pilgrim 1: the pilgrim as open- hearted, kenotic or self- emptying in vulnerability; • Pilgrim II: the pilgrim as empathetic; who ‘knows’ with his/her feet; head drawn down into heart/body in touch with/touched by unholy places. • Presence: Being present to – learning to live with – the Holocaust as a praying, caring person as metaphor or analogy for – inkling of – God’s presence/ involvement in the Shoah. • Prayer: springing from naked faith, i.e. learning to pray even in the Engführung of death and the uncannily evil. • Holy places: places of prayer where gifts can be given. Life given like water from springs or water wheels. Legacy of good actions and their afterlife. Beginnings of a reflection on the holy, the sacred. • Unholy places: the opposite: abysses of horror where everything is taken away, destroyed. 121

Pilgrimages I, II, III: I feel – for the time being – that my fieldwork is done; or sufficient to begin the theological/theoretical part of ‘Pilgrim to Unholy Places’.

Mittelbau Dora, Leitenberg, 2006

Saturday, 2nd December Now with the Sisters in Weimar. Set off early in a little hedgehopping train Weimar–­Erfurt–Nordhausen. Clear skies, frosty, light mist, crows on the ploughed fields. Passed through places with names like Hopfgarten (Hop Garden), Viesbach (Cattle Brook), in tune with the peasanty, agricultural landscape; now criss-­crossed by roads and dotted with small factories. I dip in and out of the Guardian Weekly, all about the Aids pandemic with 36 million cases worldwide, mostly in Africa, and climate change. Suddenly I see four wild deer, frightened by the train, leaping and running across a field of young green corn. Gradually the landscape unfolds. Overripe crab-­apples on wild trees, red, yellow, browning; and red berries, bare trees, all set off by the whitish grey of the morning mist. I’m enjoying this, enraptured by the quiet rolling beauty of the land, its woodlands and small, winding rivers. Pass Sonderhausen, a mining town. Perhaps a hint of the ‘Tunnel’ (Stollen) at the Mittlelbau Dora slave-­labour camp. Gluckauf, another train-­stop, great mounds of reddish mining spoil – further signs of digging, mining. More landscape: as well as corn, large spacious cabbage fields. A tractor with four giant wheels ploughs a big brown swathe across a field. Clouding up now; approaching Nordhausen. Very much part of the old DDR: few buildings of note, block on block of small, egalitarian apartments; general air of greyness and depression – perhaps just beginning to sputter into life after the Wiedervereinigung. A man from Hamburg tells me that part of his tax goes towards the re-­building of the old East Germany. Near the Station I take a picture of a group of waist-­truncated plastic models wearing the latest girls’ jeans, bum-­tight and flared, wide, metal-­studded belts. Next move: to get onto a little local train, four stops to Krimderode. By now it’s 11:30 am, and there’s still an 800 m walk to the Gedenkstätte itself. I step it out as I have to be back here by 3:00 pm to start the return journey Nordhausen–­Erfurt–Weimar. People stare at me as I walk past. Certain level of anxiety: what awaits me at Mittelbau Dora? Have I left myself enough time to do the place justice? 

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Entrance to Stollen/tunnel complex, Mittelbau Dora

Arrive on site and make straight for the big grey modern building housing the Museum, Library, Café and Information Centre. Establish that the next guided tour, which will be in German, leaves from the Centre at 1:00 pm. It’s now approaching midday. I spend the next half-­hour in the museum. Particularly telling: contemporary footage of Russian troops getting the better of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad; and the Nazi response: screaming, hysterical oratory by Goebbels (and Hitler) to a huge vociferous gathering of uniformed Nazi zombies: ‘Jetzt machen wir den totalen Krieg!’ (Now it’s total war). One consequence of this, the urgent need for more and more sophisticated weapons. With swift and brutal logic, a large slave-­labour camp, offshoot of Buchenwald, was established near the Kronstein mining works close to Nordhausen. Initially given the name Dora – D in the phonetic alphabet – it eventually came to be known as Mittelbau Dora, the accent being on the ‘Mittelbau’, implying weapons production. For here a vast underground weapons production factory was tunnelled out under the adjoining hill and accessible from the camp. A facility for Heinkel, manufacturers of aero-­engines, was installed here; but, more notably, one for the production of the V2 rockets that were fired at London. This latter had been necessitated by the Allied bombing of the original rocket research 124 

establishment at Peenemunde on the Baltic Coast. The initial 6,000-strong batch of workers, many from France, were at first housed in the tunnels: cold, damp, pitch-­dark at night; crowded, sleep-­denying wooden bunks; filthy toilet buckets; lice; thin, barely flavoured soup. Two thousand died in the tunnels; 2,000 survived; the rest were shot, imprisoned, executed, usually for attempted sabotage or escape. Or, if not executed, rendered permanently unfit for work by disease or sheer brutality. Later, barracks were built to house the workers. Conditions for the 12-hour shifts on the production lines, however, remained the same. In the museum I also had time to take in the stories of some of the victims as well as those of the SS Guards, the perpetrators. Most notably, there is a section devoted to Werner von Braun, the brains behind the rocket programme. There are pictures of him being presented to Hitler, receiving high honours and state awards. Particularly telling, a shot of him at a luncheon given in his honour by Nazi bigwigs. Von Braun is shown in a neat dinner jacket making an amusing acceptance speech to those gathered around the table. The sequel, well known, but graphically displayed here, is the American discovery of the German rocket programme at the liberation of Dora Mittelbau in April 1945. The whole caboodle was transported to America; and von Braun and his team hired to spearhead the new American rocket production – to carry men to the moon or nuclear warheads to Russia. Vorsprung durch Technik! Time for a quick comfort stop in the Gents, then join the guided tour. The young PhD-­type tour guide pours out a flood of detailed information. We learn, for instance, how the SS looked after themselves: a special bomb shelter in case of air-­attack; good accommodation; a brothel that was shared with other permanent staff members of the camp; a pub-­cumnight club where, after drunken parties, it was good sport to hunt down and shoot a prisoner; a practice of forcing prisoners to carry out hangings and executions so that SS personnel could not be held liable in any post-­war litigation – provoking the inevitable question: with a pistol pressed against the back of my neck, would I have hanged another prisoner, put the noose around his neck, kicked away the box? A particular bottleneck of pain was the daily roll call. Who was fit for work and who not? Often as many as 12,000 men stood for hours, often in minus-10-degree-­celsius cold, scantily clad, while this agonisingly slow process took place. Public executions were also done during this time. In general, a culture of the brutal exercise of absolute power, a culture of death in which Kant’s axiom – people should 

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be treated not as means to an end, but as ends in themselves – was comprehensively and deliberately flouted and reversed.

Execution site, Mittelbau Dora. The banality of evil

Finally, we enter the Stollen (tunnel complex). What could have prepared me for this? The whole network stretches for an unbelievable 22 km. Imagine the labour and appalling mortality involved in its forced-­labour, rapid construction. Most of it now, of course, has collapsed or is under water. The part we see stretches for about 500 m. In an exhibition space there is, suspended from the ceiling, a metal, scale model of the entire complex. Our guide explains in detail what was done and where. Information plaques on the walls explain further. We move on to see cavernous alcoves where prisoners lived and died; toilets, built eventually for the technically adept, those vital to the rocket production; rusting remains of V2 rockets – about 6,000 were built, only around 3,000 ever in a fit state to be fired. The effect of this dark, terrible, claustrophobic place is overwhelming. I feel myself going into a state of shock and wanting out. This is compounded by the time factor. I have to be back at Krimerode by 3:00 p.m. to catch the train back into Nordhausen to get the connection to Erfurt and Weimar. The guided tour is running over time. German men in the group, shocked and angered

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by what they see, cope with their feelings by asking more and more detailed questions. The guide answers at length. In and amongst all of this, and as a Londoner by birth, I’m flooded by childhood memories of living at 22 Chester Square, two houses at the end of our street demolished one night by a V2 rocket in a horrendous, rending bang. Now I know where they came from. I remember, too, the sound of their motors overhead – until they cut out and the rockets began their destructive random plunge into the city. I remember the up-­and-down wail of air-­raid sirens; rushing into the shelter in the gardens of Chester Square at night; living with my brother, sister and a nanny on the top floor of the six-­storey house our family owned. Were not we the ones most exposed to bombs and rockets?

Rocket Symbols, Mittelbau Dora

No more time for this, though. What was I going to do about getting back to Weimar? Would I have to spend the night in Nordhausen and travel back the following day? Just at that moment, a businessman from Hamburg on his way back from Munich, member of the group, with whom I’d spoken earlier, offered me lift in his Mercedes to the Hauptbahnhof in Nordhausen. Huge relief; together we abandoned the group and walked rapidly back along the tunnel to the entrance. Gentle winter sun in the cold winter air.



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An O-­so-welcome sight, one denied to prisoners for months on end. I don’t get his name, but he is intrigued that I come from New Zealand and speak German. He tells me a bit of his family history. Both his parents were keen Nazis. Seeing Mittelbau Dora must have been extraordinarily painful for him. He explains to me some more local history: points out an internment camp for German POWs whose return from Russia was negotiated by Konrad Adenauer. My friend has a keen social conscience and makes a point of visiting horror sites whilst on business trips. I tell him I am making a pilgrimage to this and other ‘unholy places’; that I’m staying with the Carmelites Sisters in Weimar. But already we’re at the station. I thank him as warmly as I can and wish him a safe drive on to Hamburg. As I step out into the cold air I realise I need a WC urgently. The one in the station, I’m told, is ‘kaputt’. I find a bit of waste ground behind the station and relieve myself. Back in the station, I discover there is a train leaving in two minutes for Erfurt. I board the train just before it pulls out. I can begin to relax. I unwrap my picnic lunch, eat it, and then exhausted by the drama and revelations of the day, I take a nap. When I wake up, it’s already dark, the colours of the landscape no longer visible. Soon the train draws into Erfurt. There is a huge thronging crowd of football fans on the platforms. They’re noisy, boozy and wearing huge red broad-­ brimmed hats with white trim. I find the train to Weimar. More fans, one couple with a baby. Two girls texting and calling friends. The bus ride from Weimar station to Shondorff is easy, and just in time for Vespers at 6:00 pm, I arrive back at Karmel, St. Teresa whence, in the dark of the early morning, I had set forth on this my latest pilgrimage twelve hours previously.

Sunday, 10th December, Dachau/Leitenberg Back at Dachau. After lunch, set off on foot to visit a mass-­g rave site that Sr Elija (Bossler) told me about in 2003, which then I had failed to find. This time I’m determined to make no mistake. It’s a fine afternoon, wintery but not so cold as to need gloves. Turn left on the Alt Römerstraße outside the convent, the road that now runs the length of the modern 128 

Gedenkstätte. About 1/2 km later reach a main road Friesing–­Dachau; on under a railway bridge supporting a line that carries ICE and other trains in and out of Munich. Turn right immediately after the bridge, then left into some fields, some just ploughed, others newly sown with cabbages. Reach a crossroads, turn right and approach the village of Prittlbach. Can’t see the mass-­g rave site. Providentially I cross paths with a woman out for a walk. She immediately puts me right, walking part of the way with me. At the crossroads in the fields I should have turned left. We have a brief, intense conversation. Her name is Maria. Then she leaves me, heads back home to Prittlbach.

Calming down the dead? Mass grave, Leitenberg

So there it is, a line of trees on the skyline, a place consisting of a cemetery and sundry memorials, a large cross, a few plaques, a round building up the far end like a folly in a country estate. Otherwise the graves are unmarked. The name of the place is Leitenberg. It must be one of the least-­known, least-­well-documented Gedenkstätte in Germany. A mass grave estimated to contain about 3,400 bodies of people from KZ Dachau, mostly Italian. But the paths are unkempt, and there is an absence of the usual wealth of Gedenkstätte information. Of the 38,000 dead of Dachau, some 3,000 were people trucked to Hartheim Castle, near Linz,



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and gassed there; the rest died at Dachau itself (though some were shot on the nearby rifle-­range that doubled as an execution site). When the crematoria at Dachau couldn’t cope, corpses must have been taken to Leitenberg and dumped into pits there. Today the place is quiet, rarely visited, and peaceful. The winter sun shone through the trees casting a clear but gentle light on the whole scene. At one end, under the ‘folly’, was a winding path leading down to a little car park. On it, I discovered, a beautiful series of stone Stations of the Cross, all fourteen of them. I walk down the path carefully photographing each one with my new digital camera (Barbara’s birthday present to me). When I get to the bottom, I put my camera away and walk back up, Station by Station, praying and meditating as I went.

Face of Christ, Leitenberg

Applied to the wrongful incarceration, agonising lives and shameful deaths of the prisoners now resting in the mass grave, it is marvellously appropriate. Could there be any better commentary on Dachau than this, any better expression of divine compassion? I don’t think so. At the top I re-­enter the cemetery and, as it were in-­with-through Christ, find I can pray an Our Father, something I usually find difficult if not impossible on the site of other ‘unholy places’. Has Christ – in the very compatibility of his self-­emptying 130 

humility with the victims of this place – graced it by his presence and in this way made it holy? It feels like it to me. I make my way back slowly through the cemetery and, at the end, stand and wait for a train to go by on the mainline that runs below the length of Leitenberg. I’m not disappointed. Soon an ICE train flashes by; and then another. I try to get a photo of this silver and red thing snaking past at speed. Hope it comes out. I sense the pace of the modern world, frenetic, never still. And behind me, the peace and stillness of Leitenberg, largely unnoticed, and me, the pilgrim, on foot and going slowly. But time is getting on. Soon it will be dark. I head back to Karmel Heilige Blut.



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Esterwegen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, 2008

Monday, 20th October Arrive Groningen Airport to be met by Sr. Jacintha, SSF, and Herr Memmling, driver and Site Warden of KZ Esterwegen. A 90-minute drive over flat land relieved only by massive wind turbines and the huge shipbuilding sheds of J.P.Meyer near Pappenburg. No ocean in sight! Ship under construction looking like it’s floating on the marsh. Completed ships shunted down waterways to the sea. Arrive Esterwegen where four Franciscan Sisters – Srs. M Veronika, Angelinis, Annegreth, Jacintha – now live in what used to be the administration block of the post-­war German Army/ Bundeswehr facility. The place is modern, well appointed in a plain sort of way. We share a meal, and of course they want to know all about me …

Tuesday, 21st October Very strenuous day. After Lauds followed by breakfast, Sr.Veronika drives me to Papenburg where there is a Centre for Information and Documentation. We meet its director, Kurt Buck, his wife, and a student assistant. Nice, warm, friendly people. We chat over a cup of tea. Gradually I begin to get the picture. This extreme NW corner of Germany, Emsland, is basically a peat bog, flat and desolate. Used for farming, the soil is rich and black. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Emsland, because of its isolation and minimal population, was identified as the perfect place to incarcerate and punish opponents of Hitler’s régime – in addition, criminals as well as homosexuals and other misfits in the new racially pure German people/ Volksgemeinschaft. In its start date, 1933, and purpose, it was thus similar to Dachau.



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But then a shock, what I hadn’t realised: Esterwegen was only one of fifteen camps in Emsland. The first three were the triplit camps Börge­ moor, Esterwegen, and Neusustrum. In 1934 these were followed by the so-­called ‘new camps’, Oberlangen, Brual-­Rhede, Walchum and Aschendorfmoor. Others were to come. These camps were variously designated as concentration camps, punishment camps, prisoner of war camps and slave labour camps. In a history too complicated to rehearse here, they were administered either by the Prussian Ministry of Justice or the SS and/or the SA. What they all had in common was gross overcrowding, two very inadequate meals per day, one in the early morning, the other in the evening, killingly hard work – digging up turf in the peat bog with wooden shovels – unrestrained brutality by the guards, strict discipline, filthy insanitary living conditions and much else. The prisoners referred to it a ‘hell on earth’. The original aim of the camps was to cultivate 50,000 hectares of wasteland with picks and shovels so as to create holdings for pro-­Nazi farmers. This project was soon abandoned as impracticable. The work continued regardless. Around 80,000 prisoners were held in these camps during their existence. Many of them – no exact figures exist – died or were killed. Noteworthy amongst the prisoners were 1,700 ‘Nacht u. Nebel’ prisoners, so-­called because of their arrest at dead of night in December 1941. These were members of resistance groups came mainly from Northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway. After their arrest, their whereabouts was kept secret – the fog/Nebel. None survived. The camps were also used during the war as transit camps for prisoners of war from France, Poland, Russia. These numbered around 100,000, 70,000 of whom were held for longer periods of time, but not counted as part of the long stay population. The majority were Russian POWs. To the Nazis they were less than human – Untermenschen – and so were not accorded the protection of the Geneva Conventions on treatment of Prisoners of War. In practice, this meant reducing their meal rations to below survival level, allowing them to die of starvation, cold or disease. The graves of up to 26,000 of these Russian soldiers have now been identified and documented in six war cemeteries in the Emsland region. The six most northerly camps were, in addition, used to hold members of the German military who had been court-­martialled for desertion, mutiny, conscientious objection to war, disobedience or cowardice. 134 

Mention should also be made of Carl von Ossietzky (1889–1938) a left-­wing, pacifist journalist from Hamburg who, in his paper Weltbühne/ World Stage had warned of the dangers of fascism and pleaded for the rule of law as attempted in the Weimar Republic. Ossietzky was arrested as a traitor and subjected to sustained brutality. His views were directly opposed to the militarism and totalitarian lawlessness of the Nazis. In 1935 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but was prevented from receiving it in person. He died in 1938 of tuberculosis contracted in the camps. Anecdotally one can point to the vicious chicanery of the guards. Work columns trudging to and from work were often forced to run the gauntlet of whipping and clubbing as they passed through the narrow gate of the camps. If the guards wanted to eliminate a particular prisoner, they were ordered to leave their spade in the peat bog. On the march home this was held to be a crime on the part of the prisoner. As they turned to recover their shovel, they could be shot in the back. Similarly, as turf from the peat bogs was loaded onto barges, troublesome prisoners were ordered to retrieve lumps that fell into the water. No one moved to lift them out or if the barge crushed them against the loading quay. Or, there was the option of simply taking people into a nearby wood where they were shot.

Prisoners digging in peat bog, Esterwegen. Display, Centre for Documentation, Pappenburg



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The prisoners called themselves, ‘Bog Soldiers’ (Moorsoldaten). The bleakness and horror of their daily life is evoked in a song composed in by prisoners August 1933. The first two verses in English translation read: Far and wide as the eye can wander, Heath and bog are everywhere. Not a bird sings out to cheer us, Oaks are standing gaunt and bare. We are the peat bog soldiers, We’re marching with our spades to the moor. Up and down the guards are pacing, No one, no one can go through. Flight would mean sure death facing, Guns and barbed wire greet our view. We are the peat bog soldiers, We’re marching with our spades to the moor.

On the way back from Papenburg, Sr. Veronika and I visit the mass graves at the Brockhorst/Esterwegen and, after a late lunch, I’m shown over the actual site of the Esterwegen Camp by Sr. Jacintha. This was a chance to assimilate in situ what I learned during the morning. Of the original camp, nothing remains. After the war it was in the hands of the Russians who began to dismantle it. This was completed – for whatever reason – by the German Army who occupied the site from 1963–2001. Planted by the Bundeswehr, now thick belts of young trees occupy the places where the prisoner barracks once stood. To one side of the actual site are several barn-­like army store buildings, depots for clothing, food and supplies for military hospitals. Now empty, but far from derelict. One of these has been designated as the site for a future museum in relation to all the Emsland camps. It is scheduled to open in 2011 at an estimated cost of 5 million euro, all paid by local councils [opened 21 October 2011]. At this point the Papenburg centre will re-­locate. All this is symptomatic of a society that wants to commemorate and work through – albeit slowly, haphazardly, partially – the horrors that took place in its particular area. Would it be any different in other countries? To come back to the Sisters: they have got one hell of a job on their hands: to offer assistance to the growing number of visitors to the Emsland Camps, especially in summer; to offer hospitality to people like myself; but above all, by daily prayer, to embrace in the love of God all the horror 136 

of the past as well as the ongoing work of memory and grieving. And all this not at a safe distance, but on the very site where it took place and is now remembered. Their convent, the former Bundeswehr admin building, is sited where the SS football pitch used to be. Nearby was a swimming pool, dug by the prisoners, with a ten-­metre diving tower. Before the pool was filled with water, some prisoners were forced to jump from it. To assist them in their task, the sisters have three exceptionally well-­ designed rooms in addition to their accommodation. The first is a room of ‘speechlessness’. The full text of the ‘Bog Soldiers’ Song’ is on one wall. A few stubby concrete half-­pillars stand in beds of turf. Tea candles burn on them. As Paul Celan put it, referring to the Shoah, ‘there are no words for what happened’. Part of the salutary process of memory is to be struck dumb. The second is the chapel, small, with room for the sisters and their one guest. Here a monastic rhythm of daily prayer is maintained. The space is dominated by a cross. The centre of the wood it’s made from damaged/scorched by a grenade or shell-­burst; the outer arm wood with rings of new, healthy growth – death and resurrection? The aumbry for the reserved sacrament is set in a narrow opening in the wall where light also pours in from the outside – presence and infinity? The third room, in my opinion something of a masterpiece, combines an altar in the form of one of the trolleys used by the prisoners to move loads of peat and some of the railway track along which the trolleys were pushed. The tracks are set in the form of a cross. Around the walls, blocks of bog oak as seats. Here Mass is from time to time celebrated. It’s a wonderful commentary on how ‘wounds become worships’ (Julian of Norwich). On the Wednesday morning (22nd October) I sit for an hour in this third room before we have to say our good-­byes. Herr Memmling is there with the car to take me to the station at Leer, 45 minutes from Esterwegen, to catch the train to Hamburg. Late afternoon arrive Bergedorf, suburb to the southeast of the city. Tomorrow, KZ Neuengamme.

Thursday, 23rd October I spend the night in a cheap hotel run by some sympathique Italians. Excellent pizza. Room OK, small, reeking of cigarette smoke despite ‘no 

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smoking’ signs. Breakfast; then a 20-minute bus ride from Bergedorf to KZ Neuengamme. Cute little villages. Lots of dykes. The land clearly a drained marsh. Arrive. Two things immediately evident: the vast size of the place, and the way it has been sanitised into a park-­cum-museum. The path that connects the different buildings on site is 4.5 km long. It took me from 9:30 am when the Gedenkstätte opened to 4:00 pm shortly before it closed to traverse what’s on offer. The park-­like look of Neuengamme is maintained by a small army of gardeners and handymen. To complete first impressions: down one side of the camp – separated by a narrow road – maize is being cut by a combine harvester, the chopped result squirted through a spout into large tractor-­drawn trailers. Down the other – where the perimeter fence used to be – a collection of huge wind turbines chuntering round in a moderate breeze. Weather, fine, sunny, autumnal. To be fair to the City of Hamburg, responsible for the present-­day ‘look’ of Neuegamme, it’s clearly impossible to reproduce the original horror of the place. Instead, what is attempted in multiple exhibitions and assorted buildings is provision of hints or traces/Andeutungen of what once was. There is also a well-­appointed Study Centre for any who wish to research aspects of the original camp in greater depth. So I set out. Everywhere bricks. The site of the wartime prisoner barracks is now marked by brick rubble housed in wire cages that mirror the rectangular dimensions of the original foundations. On two sides of this large space, long two-­storey brick buildings, one housing the present-­day camp administration and the other the main exhibition, ‘Traces of History: Neuengamme Concentration Camp and its Post-­War History’. I try to take it all in; take notes by means of my digital camera. During the time of its operation, 1938–45, Neuengamme is reckoned to have housed 100,400 people. Nearly half of them died or were killed in this dreadful place. The largest contingent, 23,000, came from Russia; followed by 13,000 from Poland, 11,000 from France; 13,600 were women; 13,000 were Jewish, 500 gypsies. These figures are all approximate. Several other nations were represented. Just a few details from the exhibition: pictures of some Jewish children who were brought over from Auschwitz for medical experiments: to be infected with TB, observed as the disease went untreated, then disposed of/shot when of no further use. Another picture: some women – Trümmerfrauen – clearing rubble in wartime Bremen. Caption: ‘In 1944/5, 24 sat138 

ellite camps for women were under the administration of Neuengamme main camp. In these camps women had to work in armaments production […] and clear rubble and build provisional housing after Allied bombing raids on Hamburg and Bremen […] They had to sleep in overcrowded and dirty quarters under appalling conditions. Reports from survivors state that female SS guards were often more brutal that the non-­SS guards.’ To one schooled in 1970s feminism, this came as a shock. One more detail, an event dating from 1945. The text reads, ‘SS. Untersturmführer Totzauer, Adjutant to the Camp Commandant, ordered all records to be burned […] around 400 kilos of records were thus brought to the Crematorium. These included lists of names, death certificates and in part records of the Hamburg Gestapo.’ The game was up. Only deception and cover-­ups remained. I walk on. Bricks. Soon I come to a clay pit where prisoners (in all weathers) had to dig clay, load it onto trolleys – here reminiscent of Esterwegen – to be pushed at a run to the vast brickworks nearby – now three huge empty barn-­like buildings. It becomes clear why Neuengamme is a brick construction. But that absorbed only a fraction of the production. The rest was destined for grandiose Nazi-­type building programmes in the City of Hamburg. This was one of Hitler’s pet projects, his personal architect, Albert Speer, fully involved. None of this, of course, came to pass.

Brickworks interior, Neuengamme



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There was, however, the problem of how to get the bricks to Hamburg. The solution was barges on the Dove-­Elbe River reached by a canal that extended along one side of the camp. The on-­site placard reads, ‘The soil which was excavated in deepening the Dove-­Elbe river was loaded onto barges. At another spot the prisoners had to unload the barges; the dredged up silt […] shovelled into wheelbarrows which were pushed onto the bank over wooden planks and then transported in tipper wagons into the surrounding countryside.’ It continues, ‘Once the branch canal and the harbour basin had been completed, the barges were used as transport vessels to bring in deliveries of sand and coal and to transport bricks which were to be taken from the brickworks down the Dove-­Elbe river to Hamburg.’ It takes little imagination to visualise how prisoners, used as slave labour, were misused and brutalised in these tasks. Vernichtung durch Arbeit. The casualty rate from the rigours of this kind of work was kept deliberately high; the background (once again) minimal food and sleep, appalling/non-­existent sanitation, rampant disease and, in addition, random violence and endless humiliations. The Nazi excuse: discipline had to be maintained. But now an interlude. Beyond the brickworks stands Thomas Schütte’s House of Remembrance. This very considerable modern German artist has made a brave attempt to create a memorial for the inmates and victims of Neuengamme. He, I’m sure, would be the first to admit that, given the extent of the suffering and death perpetrated in the camp, any memorial will inevitably fall short. This is no exception. Yet it succeeds in what it sets out to do: to insure that the names of the victims are not lost. The walls inside are a deep red. They are hung with scrolls inscribed with all the known names of men and women who perished in Neuengamme. The last scroll is symbolically incomplete, thus acknowledging the existence of many whose names are unknown. In the middle of the space are two large display cabinets containing mock-­ups of the camp, one realistic, the other white and almost dreamlike. To one side, in an alcove built like a side-­chapel, are desks which, under black drapes, house the surviving original notebooks that record names and the cause of death of inmates, the latter, in Nazi practice, often deliberately falsified. A couple of examples, ‘general physical problems’, ‘tuberculosis’. Truths and half-­truths. ‘Who are you kidding Mr Hitler?’ The general atmosphere of the place, however, is one of peace. But because of its omnium gatherum secular parameters, it is cast in the key of memory. This is OK as far as it goes, 140 

but there is nothing about hope, nothing about the future. Yet somehow it has more than the maudlin atmosphere of a mausoleum.

Commandant’s House, Neuengamme

The next part of the tour around the camp was disappointing. It concerned the use of prisoners as slave labour in the German war industry. The main exhibition on this topic, ‘Mobilization for the Wartime Economy; Concentration Camp Prisoners as Slave Labourers in Armaments Production’, was unfortunately closed the day of my visit. The large building that houses the exhibition was formerly the site of the so-­called Walther-­ Werke. The plaque outside provides a brief description. ‘The Metallwerke Neuengamme, a foundry belonging to the Thuringia-­based armaments producer Carl Walther GmbH, was constructed on the premises of Neuengamme concentration camp between 1942 and 1944. Due to labour shortages in the armaments industry, the plan was to use camp prisoners to manufacture Pi38 revolvers and G43 rifles. Production began in provisional huts in January 1943. By 1944, up to 1,000 prisoners were working in the plant. Work here was much sought after because it offered shelter from all weathers and there were relatively fewer beatings’. Other firms were involved, including enterprises run by the Waffen SS and the Police. Or, in autumn 1944, 1,000 prisoners were employed digging anti-­



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tank ditches around Hamburg. This was all part of a larger picture: the total German war industry in which millions of men and women were employed as slave labour  – and discarded as soon as unfit for work. They were needed as the Armed Forces and Home Guard increasingly absorbed the available manpower in Hitler’s last desperate attempts to stave off defeat. By now I was running out of time. As I prepared to leave, I started noticing things that disclosed some of the true horror of Neuengamme. The beast began to show its claws. The site of a detention block; the remains of a firing range where people were lined up and shot; a plaque marking the place where the crematorium once stood; some of the original flagstones of the parade ground where prisoners spent hours every day scantily clad and in the foulest weather, often forced to witness hangings; a carefully preserved section of the open sewer that served the prisoners; a cutsy-­wootsy little garden with a willow tree and a cage for a couple of pet monkeys, in sight of the prisoners but out of bounds to them. All this – and of course much more – needs no further elaboration. These to me were more than hints of what Neuengamme was actually like when in operation. Feeling like someone who has been hit by a truck, I bus my way back to the Hotel Mediterran in Bergedorf.

Friday, Saturday, 24th and 25th October Travel day, on to Fürstenberg and KZ Ravensbrück, the notorious camp specifically for women. This time a cheap hotel and restaurant right by the river Havel. The owner tells me, ‘New Zealand is my dream country!’ In the morning a taxi takes me the 2/3 kilometres to the Gedenkstätte. I arrive before anyone is about. It’s misty, probably because of the Schwedtsee that lies between Fürstenberg and the KZ Lager. I somehow sense that going round Ravensbrück is going to be specially draining. I feel my own reluctance to write about it now. Was it a gut revulsion to savage violence against, and ruthless exploitation of, women? Or were three concentration camps in one week too much? I pass the modern box-­like Visitor Centre, not yet open. On to a big open space that gives onto the Camp itself. To my left, on some higher ground, 142 

various rather substantial and well-­appointed buildings. Among them, a youth hostel, a museum devoted to the female guards at Ravensbrück, and a building with seminar and other facilities. During the time of the camp’s operation, they were dwellings for the men and women who guarded and administered the camp: the SS commandant and his staff, and the female guards, the so-­called ‘matrons’. Dwellings were arranged in strict hierarchical order; and their generally high quality contrasted grotesquely with the filth and overcrowding of the prisoner blocks.

Women with soup bowls, Ravensbrück. Display, Ravensbrück

Next, the big imposing building the other side of the open space. This was by now unlocked. During the Camp’s operation, the ground floor 

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housed the Political (correctness?) Section, the Mail Censor, the Medical Centre; upstairs, the offices of the commandant, the adjutant, and the general administration. From 1945–77 it was used by the Russian Army. Since 1984 it has housed the main exhibition on the layout and history of the camp. Particularly striking is its policy of personalising the history of Ravensbrück around the stories of a limited selection of women. This brings the exhibition alive, gives life to the facts and figures. In the stairwell, for instance, are portraits of some women inmates, their faces etched with pain, yet redolent of deep wisdom and humanity. Two examples from the exhibition itself: Sr. Elizabeth Rivet, a Franciscan Sister from Lyon in France. In 1933 she had been elected Abbess of her Order and, in 1937, named ‘Officer of the Academy’ by the Minister of Education. She was arrested by the Gestapo in March, 1944, on suspicion of concealing weapons. On arrival in Ravensbrück, her Franciscan habit was ripped off her in a typically SS act of humiliation. During her time in Blocks 15 and 27 she devoted herself to the welfare of other prisoners. On Palm Sunday, 26 March 1945, Mother Elizabeth, with around 1,500 other prisoners, was taken to the Jugend-­KZ Uckermark, by then a death camp. On Good Friday, 30 March, she volunteered her life so that a mother of five might live. Then: Yvonne Baseden, a British WAAF Officer (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), who, because she had been brought up in Paris and spoke fluent French, was parachuted into Occupied France to work with the Resistance. She was betrayed by a teenager who, under torture, revealed her name and whereabouts. After horrific torture by the Gestapo in Dijon, in September 1944 she as taken to Ravensbrück where, in February 1945, she contracted tuberculosis. Released to the Swedish Red Cross in April, she needed nine months in a sanatorium to recover. After the war she was a witness for the prosecution in the Hamburg Trial of Ravensbrück guards. She married, and became the mother of a son, Simon. Yvonne was decorated in France with a ‘Croix de Guerre avec Palme’ and in Britain with an MBE. (Member of the British Empire). Among the preserved objects in the exhibition, a row of sewing machines with which women were forced to make SS and other military uniforms. And a trolley used in the on-­going work of expanding the site. Another nearby exhibition is devoted to Jewish women. The key slide in my photo essay on this exhibition has come out blurry. Were my hands trembling? Small in number relative to the rest of the camp, these women and children were mostly from Poland, brought here to work, eventually 144 

to be killed, or shipped back Auschwitz. In Ravensbrück, as in other KZ Lager, death was never far away. A few survived. On then to the main expanse of the camp behind these buildings. The size of it takes your breath away. Down one side an avenue of trees in fine autumn colours. Here, and in additional camps, the bulk of the prison population were ‘housed’: 132,000 women and children, 20,000 men, and 1,000 teenage women. No barracks remain, only their foundations. As I walked slowly past them, especially ones designated as Sick Bays or Isolation Wards for prisoners with TB, I was overwhelmed by a sense of the suffering the inmates must have undergone. Out of respect for them, one can only pause, stand in silence, and take in a minute fraction of what these places still exude. As I continue my slow progress, I come to the Industrial Area where women were used as workers. This included a tailor’s shop in eight large connected rooms; in addition, ancillary trades: furriers, weaving, zips and etc. All this was deemed ‘woman’s work’. As at Neuengamme, the exhibition devoted to slave labour was closed. As I walked back towards the main camp buildings, I saw a gap in the perimeter fence with signs warning that entrance to the area was ‘dangerous and at your own risk’. It was rough, unkempt and marshy. A little way off I could see an open space with a few low memorial slabs in the middle of it. I went over to have a look. Because of chronic overcrowding in the main camp, in August 1944 the SS erected a large tent 40 m x 15 m which at times housed up to 4,000 women and children. It became a transit station for women entering the camp. Often kept there for as long as two weeks, there was no bedding – just some straw on the ground – little food and, at night, not enough room for everyone to lie down. It was cold and damp. Sanitation: just a few buckets outside that were always full. Inevitably this situation of multiple deprivation pitted woman against woman in competition for space to sleep, toilet facilities, and in desperate need of food or drink. This on top of all the routine humiliations such as having all body hair shaved off. I feel like throwing up. The nearby memorial stone reads ‘In memory of thousands of women and children from many European countries who, in the winter of 1944/45, herded together in a big tent, had to suffer and die.’ Once again, there are no words. I have to walk on. My shock lifts (a little), the nausea remains. Around this wilderness are the remains of a 10–15 m wall. Scrawled on it in one corner are graffiti in Russian. Must this have been where barracks for Russian troops stood during their occupation? The tangled trees and bushes, the ruined condition of the 

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buildings, somehow mirror the state of Russo-­German relations after what happened between them in the twentieth century. My route now takes me on to the Punishment Block. This has been carefully preserved, the bulk of the cells now containing national memorials to their nationals who suffered here. Prisoners were kept in solitary confinement. The standard punishment was a beating as in other KZ Lagers. The only difference at Ravensbrück being that it was done woman on woman. The offender, a woman prisoner, was strapped down bent over a wooden frame. One of the woman guards, armed with an ox-­hide whip, administered the beating on bare buttocks. The victim had to count each stroke of the lash in a loud voice. Failure to do so meant that the count went back to zero. At the end of the beating, the prisoner had to thank the guard who had done the job. Just another refinement to this particular humiliation. As a boy I was beaten with a cane at both preparatory and public school in England. I have some inkling of how painful the savage SS beatings must have been, how long the wounds would have taken to heal. One cell in the block, at behest of the churches, is a place of reflection: bare, except for a table, a chair and a Pietà. I spend some time there in silent reflection. It feels like a place of sanity, life and compassion.

‘You Are Not Forgotten’, Ravensbrück

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What more? At the end of 1944 the SS had a gas chamber built. Between January and April 1945 between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners were murdered. In this regard, the nearby ‘Youth Camp’, Uckermark, also became a killing centre in the last months before the end of the war. Mention should also be made of the Siemens and Halske industrial facility: in twenty large workrooms women were employed as slave labour in armaments production. It was better than working outside, but women whose work didn’t come up to scratch were quickly removed. One more thing in this catalogue of Nazi infamy. Prostitution. Himmler, SS chief, got it into his head that prisoners would be more productive if they were provided with sex. Ravensbrück, either by trickery or compulsion, was the major recruiting ground for these brothels throughout the concentration and death camp system. Scholarly work is proceeding on this aspect of camp life. Other classes of male persons in camp life, from the SS downwards, had access to this widespread service. Do we here see one of the worst and most inhuman features of the Nazi forced humiliation and exploitation of women? The last place I visit is the museum, devoted to the 3,500 women who worked in the camp during its existence as guards (‘matrons’) or dog-­ handlers. From Germany and Austria, they were mostly poor or uneducated. They had a reputation for exceptional brutality. Many aspects of their life is treated: where they came from, what they did, whether they were ever brought to justice, how post-­war some managed to conceal the nature of their wartime service. All this invites further study. One of the chief merits of Ravensbrück as a Memorial or Warning site – German: Mahn-­ und Gedenkstätte – is the high standard of research that has gone into its exhibitions. This will no doubt continue. By now it was three in the afternoon. My stomach was still churning. I’d had enough. I quit, walked swiftly to the station, bought a ticket from the automat, collected my pack from the hotel, and got on to the next train to Berlin. The prospect of a week’s peace and prayer with the Carmelite Sisters of Regina Martyrum on Heckerdamm could not have been more welcome. As an epilogue to these diary entries on Esterwegen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück I venture three brief reflections. First, what cowards the prison guards must have been! Like all bullies? Not only were they spared fighting on the real fronts of the war, their ‘enemy’, the prisoners, men, women, and children, were defenceless, unarmed. We know, too, that the SS were well paid. A note in the Neuengamme exhibition reads: like other Army personnel, they were paid ‘according to rank, seniority, and length of service. They benefited from 

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free accommodation, clothing, equipment and medicare. In addition, they received “Christmas bonuses”, and allowances for each of their children.’ With cowardice and good working conditions went corruption. Behind the public face of unrestrained – indeed officially sanctioned – cruelty and murder, lurked a practice of high alcohol consumption and availability of sex. One can imagine the ‘locker room’ talk, the boasting around fucking and cruelty to prisoners endlessly refined, the two closely related. One further weird feature of the life of an SS guard: in many camps there was a little nature garden for ‘time out’ and a smoke: a pond, some trees, a bench. Even mother nature was recruited in support of what they were doing, corrupted. God, of course, was completely out of the picture. Second, idolatry – and this merits further reflection. Once an idol, i.e. something less than God, is worshipped – for example, a wartime ideology of ‘victory at any price’ or ‘total war’ – then death spreads out from it in ever-­widening circles. Not only do many people lose their lives – who otherwise would have lived; it also results – witness Nazi Germany – in a sense of the expendability or even worthlessness of human life. In thus making life a means to the ends of the idol, a thoroughgoing inversion of death over life starts to pervade the human community. The biophile God of the Bible, the beating heart of the culture, is replaced with a nothingness that consumes people like a black hole. Third, in this way I wonder whether Nietzsche – with his nineteenth-­ century perception that God had died in the soul of the peoples of Europe – quite realised the implications of what he was saying. In the celebrations of many of his interpreters, this has been held up as the gateway to a modern, godless, secular wonderland. The history I have been tracing in the last dozen years might suggest otherwise. A recent essay on Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Heinz Eduard Tödt33 accurately diagnoses what is at issue. In a world ‘come of age’ in which humankind now takes responsibility for itself without recourse to God, certain problems remain unaddressed. Among them what Tödt calls the ‘fundamental questions of overall meaning’ – where trivial concepts like ‘fun’ hardly fill the vacuum – and the on-­going problem – connected with the foregoing – of how humankind can ‘shelter from the dangers of human organization’. He puts it like this: 33 Heinz Eduard Tödt, Authentic Faith: Bonhoeffer’s Theological Ethics in Context. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK, 2007, ‘Meaning and Promise: Considerations Regarding Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Late Theology’, pp.16–29.

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‘The human being come of age, while having learned to procure shelter from natural dangers, by means of technology and organization, nevertheless lacks shelter from the dangers of human organization.’ With this fact, so amply illustrated by recent and contemporary history, the meaning of collective hope becomes uncertain; or, as Bonhoeffer himself put it, the answer to what he regarded as the key ethical question, ‘how the coming generation is going to live’. To make this fully contemporary: after many natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and cyclones, we are no longer so cocksure about human mastery of nature. We are also faced with the question of how far climate change or global warming is due to a profligate, unsustainable lifestyle now taken for granted in rich societies. Hope, it seems, cannot be had without repentance. Will threat of economic collapse be a factor in bringing this about?



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Part II Reflections Theology / Ethics /  Spirituality

1. Hearing the Cries The Self-­emptying Pilgrim Christ Philippians 2:5–11 on Kenosis

First, the intuition that has driven my pilgrimages to unholy places from the start: ‘at this juncture in history we have to learn to hear the cries of the victims before we can hear the voice of God, see God’s face. In such a quest, the self-­emptying (or kenotic) Christ who is both victim and redeemer has a double function. He first heals our deafness, restores our sight, cures our speechlessness. Through the proxy of faith we learn the habits of his heart, make them our own. We thus get to hear what there is to hear, see what there is to see, speak of what we ought to speak. As Christ heals us, secondly, we may become aware of God’s holy presence in, or especially in, unholy places, the gravesites of the victims. New life begins here. This is the contemporary reference of the “habits of the heart” in question.’ Put simply: as we approximate to the kenotic, victim Christ, we learn to see with his eyes, speak with his mouth. To get the full import of this, some brief words of explanation. Kenosis is a Greek word that means ‘self-­emptying, relinquishment, or self-­ limitation’– each word conveying a nuance of the meaning-­rich original. Its importance for my reflections is that it encapsulates the vital link between Christ and the victims. This is the Christ who, in taking the ‘form’ of a victim, enables the pilgrim to hear the cries of the victims and, thus healed (from blindness & etc. as above), glimpse the face of God in all who bear human form, especially those who suffer – and, thus enlightened, catch sight of a humane and sustainable future. I thus use ‘to hear’ in a wide inclusive sense to mean, ‘to get in touch with and be touched by the victims’ in the site-­specific sense of pilgrimage to unholy places. ‘To hear’ also means ‘to act on’, for example, in the ‘loosing of the tongue’ involved in communicating to others what the pilgrim has seen or generally apprehended. The above-­stated can be put as a question. In becoming hospitable to the mystery of Christ, himself a victim, can the pilgrim become hospitable to the lamentable state of the victims, hear their



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cries, and, in the process, be made aware of the ever-­greater mystery of God as ground and guarantor of a future where there are no victims? To explore this question I focus on Philippians 2:5–11, the biblical text at the heart of my theology of pilgrimage. It illuminates, I believe, the vital connection I am trying to make between Christ, the victims and, to a far lesser degree, the pilgrim. This could to lead on to an exploration of Christ’s solidarity with humankind in general. It would be possible, for example, to quote Jürgen Habermas to the effect that the aim or goal of pilgrimage is to reach ‘a deeper level of solidarity with those bearing human form’ – the counterpoint to this being his statement: There [in Auschwitz] something happened that up to now nobody considered as even possible. There one touched on something which represents the deep layer of solidarity among all that wear a human face; notwithstanding the usual acts of beastliness of human history, the integrity of this common layer has been taken for granted […] Auschwitz has changed the continuity of the conditions of life within history.34

In other words, all our taken-for-granted human connections, our common humanity, have been systematically broken. The pilgrim vision pursued here is the possibility of repairing that breach. The challenge of pilgrimage, however, is to make this quest, which is both theological and ethical, also site-­specific, to root it in the very places where the victims lived and died. What is attempted, then, is ‘solidarity with [all] those bearing human form’, especially those who suffer, but starting with victims and never without them. To get this in perspective, here are some well-­known words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his Reckoning, dated New Year 1943, he wrote: There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short from the perspective of those who suffer. 34 The first quotation is from, Shierry Weber Nicholson (ed. and trans.), The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, pp.251, 254. The formulation here cited is my formulation of the essence of Habermas’ thinking. The second is from, Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992, p.3. With Habermas, compare Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the Nazi severance of human solidarities, their move from the pole of friendship between Germans and Jews to the opposite, an ideologically based, accepted, and routinised cruelty. Men in Dark Times. New York, 1968, p.23.

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Written primarily for fellow members of the resistance against Hitler, it referred by implication to all the victims of the Nazi regime, especially the Jewish people. These Bonhoeffer saw as ‘the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ’; and he added, ‘In Christ we see God in the form of the poorest of our brothers and sisters’.35 Here in a nutshell are themes that have inspired me throughout my pilgrimages.

I. With all this in mind, we now take a close look at Philippians 2:5–11. My purpose is to arrive at an understanding of the self-­emptying or kenotic Christ that will act as the theological heart of my reflections on being a pilgrim. The key verses, 5–8, begin with the words, ‘Let the same mind [= ‘mind-­set’, ‘outlook’] be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who’ – then in a modern translation: [Al]though [perhaps ‘because’] being in the form of God, he did not consider his equality with God as something to be exploited for his own advantage, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a slave, by being born in the likeness of human beings. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross.36

35 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, pp.139, 253. 36 Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross. William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001, pp.165–6. Gorman’s reflections on ‘Paul’s “Master Story” as a Story of Love’ in the pages that follow are basic to my approach. Gorman has recently taken his thinking further. See, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology. William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2009. 

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Paul uses a whole battery of words, translated by the English ‘form’ or ‘likeness’: en morphē, homoiōmati, skēmati. To understand the meaning of ‘form’ (or likeness) – of God, of a slave, or human – we should note that by the ‘form’ of the kenotic Christ, Paul means the whole pattern of self-­humbling obedience that led to the cross. It encompasses Jesus’ gut response to God, his obedience, his giving up of any sense of identity or entitlement connected with divine status. It also expresses the heart or ground of his solidarity with suffering humankind. To grasp the meaning of ‘form’ more fully, then, a good translation would be the German ‘Gestalt’, to connote the whole living configuration (or persona) of Christ, his mind-­set or outlook. We could, alternatively, call his form/Gestalt his true character or identity. From this there flowed the self-­humbling pattern of activity so characteristic of who he was, his whole way of being human. With this definition of ‘form’ in mind, we could say that Philippians 2:5–8 narrates a consistent pattern of downward mobility. Initiated by Jesus, the verses tell of how, though in the form (or Gestalt) of God, he divested himself of false – in the text, ‘grasped’, ‘snatched’ or ‘plundered’ – equality with God and, in so doing, renounced any possibility of exploiting God-­ like status for his own advantage. In this self-­emptying mode, he was born human. This in turn enabled him to take on the Gestalt or way of being of a slave. His characteristic self-­humbling way of being human let him to take one further step. He became obedient to – willing to face up to the possibility of – death on a cross. The density of Paul’s words makes them hard to paraphrase. They could, however, be summarised in two ways. First, we could discern a pattern of renunciation, not exploitation, of status; second, an equally consistent track-­record of self-­humbling and obedience – the two clearly related. The first, the one about status, consists in the renunciation of the self-­centred exploitation of Godlike status in favour of the kind of self-­ abasement that enabled Jesus to become the slave or servant of others. The second, more ethical in content, makes the link between his slave/ servant way of being human – his ‘form’ or Gestalt – and his consequent and utterly consistent pattern of self-­emptying and self-­humbling in relation to others. In this fusion of renunciation of status and self-­humbling service, we begin to see the slave-­like form/Gestalt of the kenotic, self-­ emptying Christ.

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We could see Christ in this mode as extraordinarily or astoundingly faithful in three interlocking ways: faithful to his own sense of calling from God – in this way the opening words might better be translated, ‘because he was in the form of God’; faithful to his own sense of calling to a life of service and self-­humbling; and faithful to his willingness to accept the consequences of both faith in God and faithfulness to others as adding up to a way of life that risked a slave’s death by crucifixion, the method of execution reserved for disobedient slaves and criminals – the paradox being that obedience to God involved disobedience to all worldly ways of exploiting status and influence. If this is the beginning of an adequate interpretation of Philippians 2:6–8, we get deeper insight by looking into the motivation that inspired all these interlocking dimensions of the kenotic Christ, his form/Gestalt or persona. We can do this by pressing the question, obedient or faithful to whom or to what? Part of this question is relatively easy to answer. Jesus’ actions were through and through motivated by love of others. The preceding passage, Philippians 2:1–4, makes this clear. To love (2:1) means to be driven or controlled by love of others (2:4). This kind of love, itself the gift of the Spirit, can be rendered by words like ‘sympathy’ or ‘compassion’. Love of this sort, moreover, sums up what Paul calls the ‘mind’ or outlook of Christ: ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.’ Given that we are talking about his whole way of being, we could say, furthermore, that the meaning of ‘mind’ (phronēsis) in verses 2 and 5 – what Aristotle renders as ‘practical wisdom’ – and ‘form’ (morphē, homoiōma, skēmatos) in verses 6 and 7 – my ‘pattern of activity’ – are closely related. They add up to ‘Gestalt’ as defined above: the total configuration or shape – the ‘form’ – of the person or personality of Christ and the characteristic pattern of activity that went with it. That self-­giving love was the lively, resonating centre of the Gestalt of the kenotic Christ is attested by other Pauline texts. In Galatians 2:20, for instance, Paul says that the crucified Christ who ‘lives in me’ is the one ‘who loved me and gave himself for me’. Or, in 2 Corinthians 5:14 we read, ‘For the love of Christ urges us on because we are convinced that one has died for all.’ The consequence of this is ‘so that those who live might no longer live for themselves’ (5:15).



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II. We can get at this from another angle if we reflect on the contrast Paul makes between ‘self-­emptying’ (kenosis) and ‘vain or empty glory’ (kenodoxia). On the one hand, we have the self-­emptying/ kenotic Christ whose life is ‘for others’. This is his ‘mind’, mind-­set, outlook, consistent pattern of activity – what we have called his Gestalt or form. That this is so comes out clearly in 2:6–8, which acts as the theological grounding of what is stated ethically in 2:3–5. With this we may compare how Paul describes the true person of faith in Romans 12:9–13, especially his statement ‘love one another with mutual affection’. On the other hand, we have the vain/empty glory (kenodoxia) of the self-­divinising contemporary emperors like Nero with their rampant and highly destructive egomania. Their way of being – their Gestalt – may have given the example that people in contemporary Graeco-­Roman culture were tempted to emulate. Paul sees such ‘empty glory’ (kenodoxia) – translated by the NRSV rather weakly as ‘conceit’ – as deadly, highly destructive of the new Christian communities. Why? Because these un-­Christlike values give rise to such things as ‘selfish ambition’, ‘disregard of others’, ‘competition’ and ‘envy’ – as described in Philippians 2:3 and Galatians 5:26. These are the sort of inflated or ‘puffed up’ egos, as Paul calls them in 1 Corinthians 4:18,19 (compare, 4:6, 5:2, 8:1,13:4) that breed such attitudes. Whether they are claimed to be of human or pseudo-­divine provenance, these attitudes are at root an ‘arrogance’ that is utterly destructive of others – and therefore of community. The word kenos (‘empty’) in kenodoxia thus hints at what happens once a person’s way of being human is detached from its ethical grounding or anchorage in the authentic, self-­emptying Christ. It produces the kind of ethical and spiritual vacuum in which everything is ‘up for grabs’, be it power, wealth, sex or whatever it may be – in stark contrast to the Christ who does not grab/ snatch/ exploit divine status for himself or anything at all, especially not people. If we now substitute Hitler for Nero or Auschwitz for Golgotha, we can see the contrast in contemporary terms: the moral and spiritual wasteland of parts of the twentieth century, be it of person or place, where every kind of evil became possible or routinised. The relevance of this in the present pilgrim context should be obvious. We’re talking about a non-­ethic in non-­ people in non-­places stretching all the way from the ‘power-­grab’ (Mach158 

tergreifung) of 1933 to the ‘Final Solution’ (Endlösung) of the War years. The full extent of the contrast that Paul is making in Philippians 2:6–8 is disclosed in the crucifixion. Here historical fact, theological discernment and a consequent ethic all come together. As Gordon Fee puts it, ‘In the cross God’s true character – his outlandish, lavish expression of love – was fully manifested’.37 The contrast with Auschwitz is stark. Building on that, we could say – in respect of our picture of the kenotic pilgrim Christ – that faith for the pilgrim must in some way recapitulate the faithfulness of Christ, take to heart what he took to heart; that just as he died in love for all, especially the victims of history – he ‘heard their cries’, we could say – so the pilgrim in his or her small, imperfect way, must learn to hear the cries of the victims of the Shoah in the places where they perished. More than that, the pilgrim is called to reflect the kenotic Christ of Philippians 2:5–8 in other ways. For example, the passage doesn’t present Christ’s way of being human in static or metaphysical categories, but rather in narrative or story form. In theological jargon, Paul gives us ‘a narrative (or story-­shaped) Christology’. We get this by noting that verbs are pivotal to the whole text, verbs that are both active and passive: verbs like ‘emptied’, ‘taking the form’, ‘being born’, ‘being found’, ‘humbled’, ‘became obedient’. In similar fashion, the practice of pilgrimage is best conveyed in narrative – or, in my case, diary – form. This will primarily consist in actions that will have some of the same mix of voluntary and involuntary about them as in the life of Christ as narrated in briefest summary in Philippians 2:6–8. Only then do we bring in theological reflections – i.e. once the story has been told – that, following the theological method of the Pauline text, are essentially reflection on actions. Equally, the fate of the victims – whose cries we seek to hear – was nothing if not site-­specific and real – just as the cross of Christ was site-­specific to Golgotha and real in the death it involved. A practice of pilgrimage to unholy places must respect this and in some way reflect it.38 37 Gordon D. Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical–­Theological Study, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Mass., 2007, p.384. A few pages later Fee writes, ‘In Christ Jesus, God has shown his true nature; this is what it means for Christ to be “equal with God”; to pour himself out for the sake of others, and to do this by taking the role of a slave. Hereby Christ not only reveals the character of God but […] also reveals what it means for us to be created in God’s image, to bear his likeness and to have his “mind-­set”’  (p.388). 38 In the technical language of theology we are talking about ‘an hermeneutics of action’ rather than one of rhetoric. Instead of reflecting on how a given rhetoric from the past 

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In this way Martin Gilbert’s Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past is exemplary both in the fervor of its Jewish participants as in its attention to detail.

III. Further light can be thrown on the role of Christ’s faithfulness in relation to God by looking briefly at God’s track record or story as presented in key revelatory First Covenant texts, texts that Jews and Christians have in common. Here we discover that if self-­giving love in solidarity with victims is central to the being of Jesus, it is primordially so of God. That such compassionate out-­going love is central to the way of being or character of God – God’s ‘form’ – emerges from Exodus 3:7–8 (compare 2:23–25; 3:16–17; 6:5 ff.) where the love of God expresses itself in ‘hearing the cry’ of a slave people and in coming down ‘to deliver them’. Consistent with this is the character of God as disclosed in Exodus 34:6, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’ – a text echoed in several other places.39 We might also consider texts like Psalms 22:24, 91:15; Isaiah 53:4–5, 7–9, 63:9; Jeremiah 8:21, which could be summarised as saying ‘in all their afflictions, he [God] was afflicted’ (Isaiah 63:9, alternative text). In the beautiful understatement of Psalm 22, ‘He did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.’ As theological reflection on these texts, we could say that in consistently being ‘the man for others’ (Bonhoeffer), Jesus reveals himself as fully at one with the deeper, primordial way of being of God, the God who is the ‘God for others’. His uncompromising living out of God’s way of being in his mortal life is what constitutes the irreducible mystery of Christ. The can be re-­formulated so that it becomes meaningful in the present, an hermeneutics of action seeks to discern ‘patterns of action’ – here in Christ and revelatory of the character or identity of God – which, once the difference of context between past and present is taken into account, can become transformative of people and communities today. 39 As a sample we might cite Numbers 14:18, Nehemiah 9:17, Psalms 86:15, 103:8, 145:8; Jeremiah 32:18; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; Nahum 1:3; Prayer of Manasseh 7.

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‘form’ of Christ thus springs from the form of God. The Gestalt or identity – their shared and characteristic pattern of activity – is one of ever-­greater love for others graciously exercised in ever-­greater humility. This took the ‘form’ of compassion for an obscure tribe of slaves in ancient Egypt. For Paul, in conscious imitation of Christ, this governed his interactions with the difficult congregation at Corinth. These he describes as ‘not many wise by human standards, not many […] powerful […] or of noble birth […] the foolish, the weak, the low and despised’ (1 Corinthians 1:26–31): people who bore a strong resemblance to the slave-­people, the Israelites, redeemed from Egypt. It was out of love for such as these, in solidarity with them, that Christ went to the cross. All of a piece with this, we could further note, is the Christ of the Gospels whose total solidarity in love with the sick, the poor, the oppressed was salient in leading him to the cross.

IV. It is time now to stand back from Philippians 2:5–8 and to draw some inferences from it for our pilgrim understanding of Christ. One is that Christ’s way of being human, his Gestalt/form as a lived-­out pattern of humility, obedience and self-­abasement out of love for others was the ethical structure, core or heart of his life. This is what made him a victim. It’s also what puts him in solidarity with the victims of history, including those of Auschwitz or the Shoah generally. As we shall see, there is much about the victims of the Holocaust – their innocence, suffering, ethical responses – that uncannily (and in varying degrees) resemble similar patterns in Jesus of Nazareth. To take this one step further, could we say that while the historical earthly Jesus was one victim among many others, as Christ, the anointed one of God, he is the stand-­out or exemplary victim, ‘the first born among many brothers and sisters’ (Romans 8:29)? Why? Simply because the consistent pattern of activity manifested in his earthly life – and wherever his ‘name’ is proclaimed and acted out – was and is through and through motivated by a love that is pre-­eminent in relation to all other loves in that it acts out the very love of God. For the purposes of Jewish–­Christian dialogue we should note that this pre-­eminence is in servanthood and suffering, not in domination or violence. 

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For the pilgrim it brings searching questions as to his or her motivation and ethic. Am I motivated by love, prepared, that is, to put the needs of others above my own; not at any point to act out of selfishness, ambition or desire for higher status let alone any intention to use the sufferings of others for my own ends, be they theological or other? Love for others is thus the pilgrim’s ‘way’ – dimly reflecting the self-­humbling Christ in solidarity with the humiliation of the victims. The words of Hebrews 13:13 spell out more of what this means: ‘Let us then go forth to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured.’ This discloses a further dimension of the ethos or motivation of pilgrimage. It lies in a willingness to quit the complacency of the ‘camp’ of the pilgrim’s culture or worldview and to ‘go forth’ to camps of another sort where, in growing awareness of the suffering of the victims, he or she can be emptied or stripped of what stands between genuine solidarity with the victims or any possibility of vision of God. ‘Shakenness’ and ‘dialogue’ are words that sum up this way of being: being shaken into awareness of the full horror of what went on in the ‘non-­places’ of the death camps; and pitched into dialogue with people who are ‘other’ or different from the pilgrim, in this case, the Jewish people then and now.40

V. More of what I am trying to convey comes out if we look briefly at the rest of what Paul has to say in Philippians 2:1–11. Verses 9–11 (in the NRSV translation) read: Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, 40 ‘Shakenness’ is a word I get from Andrew Shanks. See his, ‘What is Truth?’, Towards a Theological Poetics. Routledge, London & New York, 2001. Also relevant is his study of Gillian Rose’s reflections on dialogue, on true and false innocence: Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith. SCM Press, London, 2008.

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in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that JESUS CHRIST IS LORD, to the glory of God the Father.

In the Greek text, the words JESUS CHRIST IS LORD (kurios iesous christos) are in capitals to emphasise their status as the credal statement that encapsulates the believer’s response to the paradox of Jesus’ self-­humbling obedience as disclosing the nature of his equality with God, their shared and true glory. A key word that may help our understanding of this passage is the word ‘recognition’, in the sense of the French ‘reconnaissance’, meaning both ‘recognition’ and ‘thanksgiving’ (as well, of course, in the sense of a recce to spy out enemy territory). The burden of the passage, then, is that the pattern of self-­emptying (kenosis) in the life of Jesus – fully achieved or summed up in his crucifixion – provokes a double recognition or disclosure: by God of who Jesus is – the LORD, the true identity and status of the one whose self-­emptying and self-­limiting fully corresponded to the being of the God, the true God who, as we have seen, is ‘the God for others’; and that, in virtue of his ‘deeper than deep’ humiliation, he is in solidarity with all ‘who bear human form’, especially the victims. They in their turn recognise him for who he is – in jubilation and thanksgiving! – the LORD whose ‘name is above every (other) name’; above, that is, all the so-­called lords or Führers who exalt themselves and oppress them, the victims. In this way he is recognised in joyful thanksgiving by both God and humankind. That this is the correct interpretation of the Philippians text comes out if we set it alongside 1 Corinthians 8:6. There Paul writes, ‘Indeed, even though there may be so-­called gods in heaven or on earth – as in fact there are many gods and many lords – yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and from whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.’ The resonances or meaning of Christ’s historic kenosis are cosmic, for all time and all places – even though, as Paul adds with suitable irony, ‘It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge’ (8:7). If, then, we can accept that ‘to recognise’ is a good equivalent of ‘to exalt’ in the text, we can go on to recall the complex interplay of active and passive in the preceding passage (vv. 6–8). Thus, on the active side of 

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the ledger, Jesus’ earthly self-­humbling was willingly and freely chosen and acted out. In this he was fully autonomous or self-­motivated – given, of course, that his sense of self, his ‘I am’, was always modelled on the ‘I am there for you’ of God (Exodus 3:14). The paradox of this active kenosis – because it was always ‘for others’ – was that it entailed ever-­greater willingness to suffer – a freely chosen passion for justice that showed itself in a servanthood to others in healing and life-­giving generally and, ultimately, in the passio or suffering of a slave-­death on the cross. This kind of ‘slavery’, the controlling metaphor of the whole passage, also discloses the way in which Jesus’ self-­humbling obedience also entailed progressive loss of control, a willingness, that is, to suffer at the hands of others. The echoes of 2nd Isaiah, especially 45:22–23 are thus more than just verbal. They are the depth dimension of the text, reminding us that Jesus’ royal lineage is with the righteousness of God acted out in the figure of the ‘suffering slave (or servant)’ (Isaiah 41:8–10, 42:1–4, 44:1–2). He is the one who, in the words of Isaiah 53:3, Was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; as one from whom others hide their faces.

Jesus, ‘the suffering slave’, thus acts out and personalizes the figure of ‘the suffering servant’ that in its original form may have referred to Israel collectively. Active and passive are thus woven together in vv. 6–8. This reflects their equal expression in the character of Jesus and the characteristic pattern of activity that defined who he was – what Paul calls his ‘form’ and what we have called his Gestalt, his true character or identity. How close, we should ask, does this come to describing victims of the Shoah either as individuals or as a people? In vv. 9–11 all this is transposed into a new, active key. Now God occupies the foreground, God as the one who acts. He is the one who ‘exalts’ ‘gives’ and ‘names’. And Jesus is the one who is ‘highly exalted’ and given ‘the name that is above every name’. His passage, that is, from slave-­death to exaltation and enthronement – here ‘recognition’ – rests on the fact that in consistently not exploiting to his own advantage his status of being fully at one with the identity/i am/being of God– i.e. in his way of being ‘for others’ and not for self-­glorification or in self-­exaltation – Jesus, knowingly or perhaps better, unknowingly, becomes in life as in death the object of God’s supreme affection, and is declared to be the ‘beloved (or 164 

favourite) Son’ of God the Father. That Jesus is the beloved child of God is also what we hear from the divine voice in the Gospel narratives of his baptism and transfiguration (Mark 1:11; 9:7). But here in Philippians 2, the master narrative of Pauline theology, it is on the basis of the active, self-­relinquishing ‘blood and guts’ reality of his whole life – with all the self-­giving and suffering it involved – that he is vindicated or recognised by God. Now he is named (passive voice) as LORD. Only the God who is ‘Lord of lords and King of kings’ (Revelation 19:16) can do this. And the implication is that his name, Jesus, is now deservedly associated with the name of God, the Father. His life story and thoroughly deserved reputation are truly comparable to what was acted out in the covenant faithfulness of God, the God of Israel. Thus, in the act of divine recognition, his exaltation, his true status is revealed as the one whose ‘name is above all other names’. His ‘name’ – here meaning ‘reputation’ or ‘renown’ – modulates from Jesus to Jesus Christ to Lord. Now he is held up as enjoying true equality with God – which, we could say, he enjoyed all along – because he has fully merited it in virtue of his complete renunciation of a self-­inflating or self-­aggrandising aura of divinity that would be at odds with true intimacy with the God of Israel, the very God who, as we have seen, is the God for others. We get, in other words, the force of the puzzling ambiguity between ‘although’ and ‘because’ in verse 6, words that are not there in the original Greek, but which have to be supplied by translators for the passage to make sense. Thus, ‘although’ points to his renunciation of false divine status, the sort claimed by Roman Emperors or Adolf Hitler; ‘because’ signals his intimacy with the true God who fuelled his self-­humbling obedience to this same God with a view to his being ‘there’ for others. The human side of this recognition, as already stated, is that, in virtue of his ‘deeper than deep’ humiliation, he is in solidarity or sympathy with all ‘who bear human form’, especially the victims of history. For he truly was one of them. They in their turn recognise him for who he is – in jubilation and thanksgiving! – the LORD whose ‘name is above every (other) name’. Their perspective and that of God at this point coincide. In this coincidence God is truly glorified, a glory that provokes the extraordinary outbursts of joy that run through vv. 9–11 – so characteristic of Philippians in general (see 1:18, 25; 2:2,17, 18, 19, 28, 29; 3:1; 4:1, 4, 10) – and which, at the same time, acknowledges the crucial role of Jesus for humankind in and out of time, at all times and in all places. He is no longer one individual tied to one time, one place with a street address in Nazareth or Capernaum. 

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Now he is in resurrection/exaltation/enthronement mode, from which standpoint – to borrow a phrase from Plato – he is, as Lord, equidistant to any given point in history. From the standpoint of the victims, we might therefore say, he is Emmanuel, God with us. For all their human abandonment, they are in fact the beloved of God. It is this recognition that grounds the joy, the thanksgiving.

VI. To close off this chapter, here are three key inferences for my ‘pilgrim theology’ that seem to me to flow from the Philippians passage as interpreted above. These are vital starting points for the reflections in the chapters that follow: recognition; co-­passion; Engführung/narrowing, impasse. • Recognition. If Jesus’ kenosis in self-­humbling service and suffering is what is recognised – exalted by God and confessed by believers – what would it mean to recognise the victims of the Shoah beyond simply noting that they are dead? What is it about their pre-­Holocaust lives that we can remember and celebrate with thanksgiving? What values can we discern (and learn from) in spontaneous and heroic acts of love in the death camps themselves? May they not challenge us to tell the full truth about them and their contemporary analogues; force us to think in terms of recognition and inclusion rather than exclusion and, in the extreme case, elimination? • Co-­passion. The pattern of humiliation and exaltation in Philippians 2:1–11 might embolden us to go beyond the standard notion of compassion. I have claimed that the self-­humbling obedience of Jesus, abutting in his crucifixion, is what licenses us to call him a victim. It is, further, the ground of his de facto solidarity – compounded by the fact that he was Jewish – with the victims of the Shoah and with victims at other times and places. This is part of his on-­going passio, his passionate and costly desire to be in solidarity with his own people as with all people who suffer. But that is just half the story. This passio is far exceeded by his equally passionate and continuing desire for the liberation of his people, for their accessing, whether as victims or victim-­survivors, the 166 

fullness of life. What this means will be explored in greater depth later in this book. For now, let us simply note that in picking up the theme of liberation and exodus, so central to both Judaism and Christianity, Jesus not only commiserates with the victims, but actively engages – and this with passion – in their longing for freedom, for deliverance. I have therefore coined the word co-­passion to do justice to both dimensions of his Gestalt or true character: his solidarity in suffering with the victims (in virtue of his being a victim himself) and his irrepressible desire – resurrecting in its power – to inspire or empower every aspiration to freedom on the part of the victims, their desire to access the fullness of life. • Engführung/narrowing, impasse. This too can be seen as corresponding to the humiliation–­exaltation pattern of the Christ of Philippians 2. Engführung, a German word that has no exact equivalent in English, means a no-­exit road (or cul-­de-sac, Sackgasse) which narrows down to nothing as it reaches its end, the place where there is no way out, no way forward. David Liebeskind’s architectural design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin is constructed around just this concept of Engführung, in that its angular structures time and again bring the visitor into ‘no-­exit’ spaces that narrow down to nothing and from which symbolically there is no escape. This concept, I suggest, vividly corresponds to the experience of a person being crucified as to that of persons in gas chambers. In both there is the same deadly narrowing down, the same ‘no way out’. For the Christian Holocaust interpreter trying, in the context of Jewish–­Christian dialogue, to make connections between, say, Golgotha and Auschwitz, what is so truly amazing about these shared yet historically differing situations of Engführung is that they gave rise to acts of spiritual and ethical heroism – perhaps to be crystallised around the notion of ‘care’ exercised in powerlessness – that are not only well-­ authenticated but which could form the root insight into an understanding of covenant (and ethics generally) that Judaism and Christianity might have in common in a possible shared sense of mission to the modern world. More on all of this anon. Suffice it to say that for me the concepts of Engführung and Recognition give a translation – in this-­worldly/lateral/solidarity terms – of what Paul was trying to convey in the up-­down language of kenosis and exaltation. Equally, the notion of co-­passion gives meaning,



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both ethical and theological, to the same Pauline pattern of humiliation–­ exaltation in Philippians 2: 5–11. With the picture of the self-­emptying, kenotic Christ outlined in this chapter in mind, we now move to the fourteen ‘raids on the unspeakable’ that make up the main body of this book. We begin with some reflections on what it means to be a pilgrim to unholy places.

Engführung, Architect, David Liebeskind. With permission, Jewish Museum, Berlin

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A.  On Being a Pilgrim 2. Pilgrim to Unholy Places A Definition

Pilgrimage is an age-­old practice. People, both Jew and Christian, and those of other faiths, have gone on pilgrimages throughout history. Today, for instance, a steady stream of Jews pray at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, site of the Holy of Holies of the former Temple, or travel to the Cave of Machpela in Hebron where the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Matriarchs Sara, Leah and Rebecca are buried. According to the Talmud prayers prayed at the grave of someone who was holy during their lifetime have a greater chance of being accepted. Similarly Christians visit Compostella in Spain or millions of Muslims make their way to Mecca, or Hindus pilgrim their way barefoot to the freezing headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas. The aim is to divest oneself of all that separates from God and, at the same time, to absorb the holiness of a place where saint or holy person lived a costly life of prayer or where a sacred river flows. Thus do pilgrims find a wellspring, a spiritual oasis in the wilderness of life, from which they may drink. All that continues; but in the 1920s and thirties something else started to emerge. This has been called ‘battlefield tourism’.41 People began to make what can only be called pilgrimages to First World War battle sites: the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele, Messines Ridge, Verdun, and, if they were from Australia or New Zealand, Gallipoli. These were hardly holy places because hundreds of thousands of men, mostly young men, had been slaughtered there. Even so, people made their pilgrimages partly to remember the fallen, but also in response to a sense that these events were somehow central to what was unfolding in the twentieth century. It opened

41



See, David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1919–1939. Berg, Oxford, New York, 1998, pp.13–48.

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up in a real way, for instance, the question many were asking: How could God, said to be omnipotent and loving, allow such things? Such terrible wounds on the corporate body of humankind thus deeply contradicted what they knew about God. With the coming of World War II, things got worse. A racially motivated, screaming homicidal maniac called Adolf Hitler got control of Germany, the most powerful nation in Europe, and this with the express purpose of eliminating the entire Jewish people, ‘the people of God’, starting with Europe. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec… are monuments to how far he got down that track. To visit such places – could this be understood as pilgrimage? The answer, I believe, is ‘yes’, but with the qualification that the pilgrimages in question are to unholy places, places, that is, forever scarred by the evil that was done there.

I. How, then, is the pilgrim in this mode defined? In Christian tradition, pilgrimage is essentially an affair of the heart, ‘the heart in pilgrimage’, an inner journey that, for all its emphasis on inwardness, needs the outer journey to maintain the integrity of the metaphor.42 Three core elements belonged to it: dispossession of or detachment from any superfluities that get in the way of an unfettered approach to God; longing and desire for God, the heavenly Jerusalem, heaven; and penance, the common denominator of the other two: recognition that vision of God involves purity of heart. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God’ (Matthew 5:8). This can serve to orient us for what follows. Building on the last chapter – that to be a pilgrim to unholy places means to recapitulate the way of the self-­emptying Christ – here now is my working definition of what it means to be a pilgrim: the pilgrim is open-hearted, self-emptying, vulnerable, receptive, communicative. This corresponds to what was said earlier about ‘recognition’: to be healed by the self-­emptying Christ is to become alert to the cries of the victims. 42

See, Benedicta Ward, Pilgrimage of the Heart. SLG Press, Convent of the Incarnation, Fairacres, Oxford, 2001.

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This, first of all, is about gaining a sense of reality. When the pilgrim stands on the site of a death camp where many hundreds of thousands of innocent people, mostly Jews, were murdered, what is at first striking is the silence.43 No human voice is audible. Just a big absence, an emptiness – absence of the hubbub of normal human life: people shouting, talking, praying, singing, generally going about their daily business: loving and hating; being born and dying; and all the rest. We can read about this silence in books, see it on film. But to be there is qualitatively different. It’s like the moment described in Genesis 4:10 when, after Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, God says to Cain, ‘Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.’ So there is a listening and a grieving to be done. The pilgrim is faced with that task. More prosaically, to be ‘open-­hearted’ also means to be able to communicate with or witness to all those involved in the total event we call the Shoah: above all, present day Jews, survivors (now increasingly rare) or descendents of victims or victim-­survivors; but also with Germans (and others), whose grandparents may have been perpetrators or passive bystanders – a recent acquaintance has found (through the Federal Archives in Berlin) that his grandfather was an SS Officer active in one of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front charged with the wholesale murder of Jews and partisans. ‘Communication’ has thus meant learning German to a level where I can converse with contemporary Germans whose family history is one side of the history the pilgrim seeks to access. While details of what happened can be gathered from books and other media, there is in my experience no substitute for the immediacy of person-­to-person contact. Here the medium of communication, language, becomes crucial. For although many Germans speak English, they, like anybody else, when it comes to speaking from the depths of the heart, need to speak their own language, their Muttersprache. Open-­heartedness is therefore reciprocal: between the hearing pilgrim and the speaking witness. ‘Heart speaks to heart’. I have to confess, though, that I don’t speak or read Hebrew or Yiddish.

43 Innocent, that is, not necessarily in their daily dealings with one another – they were, after all, normal people formerly living ordinary lives – but innocent as the wholly undeserving victims of a racially motivated genocidal ‘final solution’. 

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II. The pilgrim is kenotic or self-­emptying in vulnerability. This is the intensification and Christological grounding of the ‘open-­heartedness’ sketched in the definition above. It goes like this. The pilgrim, open-­hearted, self-­ emptying in vulnerability, and communicative, is the person who, hand in hand with the self-­emptying, open-­hearted Christ, the Christ whose power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:19), is willing to be overwhelmed, shocked into life, transformed by the unholy places that he or she visits. This corresponds to the notion of Engführung in the previous chapter. As Hans Urs von Balthasar has said, we are talking about ‘the death of the Son of God’, a descent into death and hell, a kenosis or self-­emptying in love so deep, so total, that it extends the divine–­human solidarity of Christ from being inclusive of the living to the embracing of the dead. The deeper the kenosis, the stronger, the more inclusive the love – this is the way of Christ the pilgrim seeks to follow. This, then is the Christ, the Christ of Golgotha, who is the pilgrim’s companion to unholy places. For who else has the wisdom, knowledge and endurance to be a true and faithful friend and brother in such places? This also picks up the notes of dispossession, detachment and repentance in the traditional practice of pilgrimage. We are talking, in other words, about a vulnerability – what Paul calls ‘weakness’ (2 Corinthians 12:9,10) – which is caught up into the self-­emptying vulnerability of Christ. In this way the two parts of our definition are brought together. Thus: in visiting unholy places in an open-­hearted, vulnerable way, the pilgrim is inevitably emptied or divested of most of what he or she takes for granted: things like language, culture, worldview, wealth, property, privilege, work, education – all the things that make us who we normally are. None of this, however, is adequate to deal with what the pilgrim experiences, rather as no words are adequate to describe God. As this emptying process makes its devastating way through our being, we begin to discover – or be found out by – the authentic, self-­emptying Christ of the Gospels and Paul, brought into sharp focus by Philippians 2:5–8 – not to speak of the Passion Narratives of the Gospels themselves. The pilgrim is divested reluctantly – and inevitably, incompletely – of power and privilege; just as the self-­emptying, self-­limiting Christ divested himself voluntarily, proactively and completely of all that might separate him from the true being of God – and, at the same time, from the victims. 172 

But that isn’t all. Not only did Christ himself become a victim amongst all other victims – including, of course, his fellow Jews in the Holocaust – he also acted out and thus modelled what it means, and what it costs, to be the caring, healing, redeeming presence of God amidst all that horror. Key here, as I will later show, is the concept of Engführung/Narrowing whereby the victim’s possibility of choice narrows down to zero – for Christ on the cross as for the Jewish person in the grip of the Nazis. What kind of a figure – form or Gestalt – do they cut then? The humility of the pilgrim at this point is the teachability of the learner, the prolonged listening of the disciple to the cry of the powerless. Is there a sense in which their hemmed in suffering can disclose values that are central to our being human? I’m thinking of respect for human dignity and worth no matter what the circumstances; a love so strong that it cannot be broken; a hope that can never die.

III. Building on this we could say: the pilgrim is intent on ‘reaching a deeper level of solidarity with those bearing human form’, especially those who suffer, starting with the victims – in this Holocaust context, the Jewish people. But here, lest we fall into the trap of stereotyping Jews as the eternal victim, we shift the focus from recognition to another of my central interpretive categories: co-­passion. Graphically, the passionate love of the pilgrim – always modelled on that of Christ – moves as much in an upward as a downward direction. With the exception of the martyr cult in the Early Church, few believers courted suffering for its own sake, least of all the victims themselves. For all the legitimate impulse of the pilgrim to understand and empathise with the victims in their appalling fate, there must be an even stronger desire to stand with them in what was closest to their hearts: their longing for freedom and the fullness of life. This above all is what they would have wanted to hand on to posterity. This too mirrors the authentic Christ of Philippians 2:5–11: the ‘fellow-­sufferer who understands’,44 the 44 Alfred North Whitehead. See his book, Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. 

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victim among the victims; but also the victim-­survivor, the one whose heart’s desire is that ‘they might have life, and have it abundantly’ (John 10:10) whether in whatever small ways in the Holocaust itself or in its aftermath in the life of survivors and their descendants. The liberation model in play here is thus one that both plumbs the depths of suffering and, more importantly, scales the heights of life. Pilgrimage is done, therefore, hand in hand with the Christ who freely or voluntarily ‘humbled himself […] to the point of death’ but who was also ‘highly exalted’ and given ‘the name that is above every name’ in recognition of the depth of his solidarity with humankind and the truth of his being as related to God. Now we’re talking receptivity and gift. His voluntary sharing of suffering earns him the title of ‘good shepherd’, the one who ‘lays down his life for the sheep’ (John 10:11, 15, 17, 18); but his reception of life, the very life of God (John 5:26), empowers him to be the One who gives life even to those most brutally murdered. All this is packed into our ‘pilgrim’ notion of co-­passionate solidarity and radiates out from it. Recalling therefore our earlier definition of ‘form’ as Gestalt – meaning the true character of a person and the pattern of activity associated with this core moral and spiritual identity of that person – we could say, with appropriate qualifications, that there is a series of connections as between the form of the self-­emptying Christ, the form of the victims and what they suffered, and the form of the foot-­slogging, self-­limiting figure of the pilgrim. This is the Christ who enables the pilgrim to see and hear; who stands in solidarity with the victims; and, let us dare to hope, brings redemption as one victim-­in-process-­of-liberation to another. We are talking, in other words, about the person who ‘knows’ at the point of breaking apart; who, like an ancient desert solitary, is able to weep, feel real grief, be shocked to the core at the sheer alienation of the perpetrators from God that Holocaust sites, those abysses of horror, disclose. The only adequate word to describe this kind of pilgrim ‘knowing’ is ‘repentance’, an attitude that is truly radical inasmuch as it also acknowledges its own potential for complicity with these very perpetrators, but in so doing lays itself open to incursions of grace. Spiritual writers call this humility, a word with a double reference to ‘humus’, the earth as the most basic source of life, and to God, the most basic human need of all. We are the one and cry out for the other. In this way pilgrimage can require soul-­searching of the most radical kind. The upside of this is the invitation to be touched by the living heart of what it is to be human: to have a spiritual heart-­beat in tune with the co-­ 174 

passionate, Christic heart-­beat of God, one that says ‘I care’; and a breathing in and out that becomes ‘in-­spiration’ (literally, ‘in-­breathing’), that says, in effect, ‘as I breathe, I pray’. All this belongs to the ‘form’ (or Gestalt) of the self-­emptying pilgrim; the one who is painfully aware that we live in a world where genocidal murder has been committed; but, perhaps more importantly, the hopeful awareness – on the model of the resurrection itself – that the empty space of the unholy place, like the empty tomb of Christ, may – in God’s good time – become the very place where new visions of the future arise. In this sense – where memory gives onto prophecy – we may dare to speak of holy places. We shall return to this when we consider what ‘holy’ and ‘unholy’ can mean in relation to the sites in question.

IV. A few biblical images can, in conclusion, fill out this picture of the pilgrim. He or she, like Abraham and Sarah, is called to the unknowns of an open-­ ended journey. Equally the drama of the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22) can be a reminder of decisions some Holocaust victims were forced to make. What here might constitute the angelic voice? Or, we might think of Jacob crossing the ford of the Jabbok exclaiming as he wrestles with his unknown adversary, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me’ (Genesis 32). Or, finally, Mary Magdalene, afflicted in every way by the absence of Jesus, the emptiness of the empty tomb, who, in the act of ‘turning around’ (John 20:14, 16), is in a position to see that he is the one who remains ‘standing’ and who addresses her by name – ‘Mary!’. The quest in other words is not hopeless. Rightly has Johann-­Baptist Metz said that the memory of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is a dangerous memory – dangerous because it is so charged with explosive, world-­changing potential. Or, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, the pilgrim is one in whose life ‘a sense of death and resurrection is always present’. Open-­hearted and vulnerable, self-­emptying in solidarity, communicative – with this threefold definition in mind, we can now go on to look at the pilgrim from two further angles: as the one who ‘knows’ from the standpoint of having their feet on the ground of unholy places; and as he or she who kneels in the presence of God as one seeking healing and maybe vision. 

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3. Thinking with Your Feet The Pilgrim’s Way of Knowing

Feet – we don’t normally think much about them even though we depend on them in so many ways. They can, however, become symbolic of a way of life. A quotation from Ivan Illich illustrates what I mean. He’s reflecting on ‘the habitual passenger’ who becomes the unwitting ‘product of the transportation industry’. He cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social and psychic power that reside in feet […] To ‘gather’ for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one’s claim on propulsion. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it.45

‘The power that resides in feet’ is something we can become aware of – our whole body, for example, is connected by nerve-­endings to the feet, which is why foot massages are so beneficial or a bastinado so painful. By good instinct, then, pilgrimage begins and ends with feet. The authentic pilgrim travels – wherever feasible – on foot. She has her feet on the ground. She stands on holy or unholy places. Everything is slowed down to a human pace. We become aware of atmosphere as well as a range of facts only accessible in this way. The pilgrim’s awareness of the earthiness of this or that place, of ‘space’ as the meaning of place, as of self, thus expands beyond what is accessible in a vehicle. She regains control of her life as purely human, bounded and mortal, but also human in the sense of open to transcendence as physical place is open to cultural ‘space’. We see this in the way the simplicity of the pilgrim’s garb – say shorts, sandals, t-­shirt – effects an exodus from the dress codes of conventional life; and, at a deeper

45 Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2003, p.15. 

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level, from the ready-­made constructs of language and culture. Possessions shrink to the dimensions of a backpack. In brief, the simplicity, the detachment, the down-­to-earthness of the pilgrim open her to incursions of grace. In the language of the mystics – the pilgrim may experience the kind of nakedness – shake-­up, shakenness – that exposes her to the facts and proximity of horror, or, alternatively, to the embrace of a greater love that is ‘beyond’ or ‘more’ than anything she has known hitherto. All this resonates strongly with our definition of a pilgrim as open-­hearted, self-­emptying in vulnerability, communicative, and intent on ‘reaching a deeper level of solidarity with those bearing a human form’, starting with the victims.

I. So much by way of preamble. The basic model for the pilgrim’s way of knowing that I propose is one that goes feet > heart > head. This reverses the normal sequence whereby we assume that perceptions enter the mind or brain silently via the five senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell) whence, as coded information, they are then translated into many currencies: language, pictures, sound patterns, feelings, bodily movements – to name just a few. This top-­down model, however, notoriously suffers from breakdowns and limitations. Sometimes, for example, the emotions revolt and the mind is dethroned or neutralised. Sometimes the body doesn’t get the message or can’t respond for whatever reason. This model therefore can be seen as hierarchical and potentially repressive, sometimes ineffectual, and often unstable. To counter the top-­down model, the good sense of prayer has been to bring the head down into the heart, thereby connecting it to the body and, at the same time, making it morally and spiritually accountable. ‘Heart’ here means the moral and spiritual core of the person symbolised by the heart qua geographical centre of the body. The heart is ‘spirited’ or graced in so far as it is turned to God. Biblically this corresponds to what Paul meant by ‘the inner man’ (or person) when he says, ‘I delight in the law of God in my inmost self ’(Romans 7:22).46 Historically, we see this in the 46 See also 2 Corinthians 4:16; cp. Ephesians 3:16; Romans 5:5, ‘the heart’.

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body-­posture recommended for ‘the prayer of quiet’ (hesychasm) whereby the chin is rested on the chest and prayer done in rhythm with breathing – thus symbolising the descent of the head into the heart and its integration into the living, breathing body. At the centre of this is the ‘heart’, the place where good and evil contend, where at its deepest level we find the holy, the sacred, the very presence and dwelling place of God. Building on this, the pilgrim’s way of knowing goes one step further. Besides centring the act of knowing in the heart, it begins the act of knowing with the feet. ‘Feet’, integral to the whole body, are, for the pilgrim, the point of entry, the part singularly ‘in touch’ with the outside world – in this case, ‘unholy places’. To make this concrete: the very ground on which we stand in unholy places is often mixed with the ashes and bone fragments, the blood and the tears of the victims. Feet are thus emblematic of the whole body-­self, the heart in so far as it is broken open or touched by the place where it stands; and, in this state, able to inform and energise the mind. Yet there is more. In any empirically based way of knowing – as in Aquinas, for example – mind and heart indeed collect and process impressions garnered from the body or the senses. In our ‘pilgrim context’, however, ‘feet’ means ‘feet’ in a further sense. Now we are in motion, not sitting or standing still. We’re talking about live people, ourselves, walking; walking in such a way that, as our personal story, our pilgrimage, unfolds, it is confronted with some greater story – in this case, the Holocaust. This doesn’t make the classic disciplines of prayer – solitude, silence, stillness, simplicity, stability – irrelevant. Rather it adds another dimension to them: that of narrative or story. Once again, not narrative or story in the abstract, but histories, personal or otherwise, that are site-­specific and therefore real and, for the pilgrim, taken at a walking pace. Thus: to walk, you have to be in a particular place at a specific time; and then move from a to b. While in imagination we can go anywhere without moving, to walk means to be in particular places at a specific times. Whether we like it or not we are earthed or grounded. It matters, then, where this ‘somewhere’ is and where we are heading. These are choices the pilgrim has to make. It matters too who walks with us on the journey. Who is our companion? This too can be chosen, although it can come as a surprise – as happened with the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35). Or we can decide to be solitaries, to walk alone – so long as we realise that to be alone means to be with God, to be companioned by Christ. Even when totally alone Jesus could still say, ‘Yet I am not alone because 

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the Father is with me’ (John 16:32). In pilgrimage we learn this the hard way; breakthrough into new truth often occurring at points of breakdown, when, for example, it all becomes too much for us and we acknowledge our need for the healing, companioning grace of Christ. In sum: in the pilgrim’s way of knowing, instead of the static generality of head > heart > body (or some other ‘head start’ model), we have the narrative precision and ‘ground up’ particularity of feet > heart > head. We could say that what is first encountered directly in the body – feet, hands, the five senses – is then felt and evaluated in the heart – and only then processed or verbalised in the mind. In this ‘ground up’ way of knowing, there is an ascending directionality to the flow of energy – or we might say, to the ‘incursions of grace’. For the pilgrim these can be revelatory as much of horror as of the sacred, the holy. Or both.

II. So far so good. But what has just been said in a ‘cool’ way, now needs to be re-­expressed in the more exposed pilgrim context of the ‘unholy places’ themselves. This can be done in three ways. The first is about story as experienced by the pilgrim, the second about the knowledge gained by the pilgrim’s way of knowing, and the third about how we can talk about hope in unholy places. We begin with personal story, ‘the way I have trod’. Theoretically we could say that in an unholy place there is for the pilgrim a double or intersecting set of memories. The first set of memories is the narrative of the pilgrim’s own life journey. We could call this Story (i). The second, and larger story, is that of the history native to the particular place over which the pilgrim walks or on which he or she stands. This narrative, let us call Story (ii), will encompass the life and death of many people. However much or little of this the pilgrim can take in, the peculiar combustion of the pilgrim’s way of knowing occurs when the two stories, Story (i), the little story, and Story (ii), the big and overwhelming story, are brought into a communicative relationship. There is, thus, the appalling shock of being appraised of horrors that are unimaginable, yet site-­specific and real. The very ground on which the pilgrim stands is, as we have seen, mixed with the 180 

remains of the victims; the buildings, ruined or intact, and the surrounding spaces, are where it all took place. Except for the spiritually and morally deaf, blind and dumb – the living dead, the heartless – holocaust-­denial is here impossible. An entirely separate set of realities rips the dreamy unfocused ego out of its comfort zone, and administers huge shocks that, initially numbing, can yank us out of our cultural or religious complacency. But can we take it all in? Or, more modestly, how much of it can we take in? There’s no way of answering that question in the abstract. As the pilgrim continues on his or her way, knowledge deepens, the quality and sheer reality of it more important than the quantity. We shall come to the problem of factual knowledge, its meaning and interpretation in a moment. For now, another issue demands our attention. Who is this person, the pilgrim, who is doing the knowing, the perceiving? Who am ‘I’? Or, better, how would I tell my story, Story (i), at this particular conjuncture of Story (i) and Story (ii)? For this will be the lens or window through which the pilgrim will experience his or her surrounds and, on the rebound, look again at himself or herself. In my case I’m talking about an empathy born of losing two children, beloved and precious, one by cot death, the other by drowning as a teenager. At a lesser level, I could cite – site and citation somehow in touch – a painful divorce, a permanent re-­location out of one familiar country and culture, England, to another, distant and strange, New Zealand, all backgrounded by a stuttering or non-­existent career. While none of this, I fully realise, even approaches the suffering of a person facing imminent death in an Auschwitz or a Treblinka, it does, I would claim, give a degree of insight into the lived (and died) reality of an ‘unholy (or evil) place’. In the pilgrim’s way of knowing, I would argue, this is reinforced by the actual, foot-­based act of standing, walking – perhaps kneeling, prostrating – in all the immediacy of perception this engenders: seeing, listening, hearing, touching, smelling – the peculiar, horrible, lingering proximity of death. As the pilgrim walks on, themes like ‘emptiness/wilderness’, ‘hiddenness/concealment/deception’, ‘banality/routine’, ‘bland/uncaring/forgetting’ and many others surface in consciousness both as ways of seeing more of what’s there, Story (ii), and as painful insight into the ups and downs of one’s own story, Story (i). To use explicitly religious language: the pilgrim’s openness to transcendence, to grace or salvation, occurs in so far as he or she succeeds in overcoming a double repression: that of personal memory – the realities of my actual life – and that of the 

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brute facts of the history of the place where I am standing/walking now. The challenge is for ‘my’ story and ‘their’ story to become radically open to one another, at one and the same time to break through into reality and grace, grace born of insight, the truth of the one never without the synergy of the other.

III. This brings us, secondly, to the question of factual knowledge and its interpretation – closely related to the above question of how, and by whom it is perceived. Here ‘space’ as the meaning of ‘place’ – however hard to establish – is as indispensable as the accumulation of detailed factual knowledge. Paul Ricoeur’s magisterial Memory, History, Forgetting can help us get at the issues involved.47 Citing Michel de Certeau, Ricoeur sets out how the historian goes about the writing of history. It consists, briefly, of three phases: a documentary or archaeological stage where archival material and witness testimony are key; giving onto a second phase in which the historian tries to assemble and make sense of the evidence, asking, for example, questions like ‘why?’, ‘because of what?’, ‘by whom?’ and so forth – searching, in other words, for explanations, evaluations; and culminating in a final literary, written or ‘scriptural’ phase whereby the earlier labours of the historian are given literary form and narrative emplotment.48 Applied to the pilgrim, this, the historian’s way of knowing is, in one way, recapitulated, and, in another, radicalised. Historians, in other words, are useful and important people. Like the owl of Minerva flying silently in the dusk over the scene of a battle, the historian tries to establish the facts of 47 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago University Press, 2004, pp.136, 250. 48 This, inter alia, throws light on the vexed question of the difference between the writing of history and the production of fiction. In the one, questions of truth (in the sense of fact) are uppermost; questions of meaning only credible in so far as stages one and two have been done with integrity. In the other, fiction, the novelist may have done much background research to give verisimilitude to his or her narrative, but the objective is to create characters and plot that are ‘true to life’ – meaningful in that sense – and whose appreciation depends on the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ on the part of the reader.

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what happened, who survived, who died, who did what to whom, and why. This has to be recorded; protected from forgetting – negligent, deliberate or enforced. All this is vital, part of what we mean by ‘remembering’. In this way, integral to any responsible practice of pilgrimage is the reading of books about the sites to be visited and, of course, about the history that gave rise to them.49 There is, further, the immense amount of material, documentary, pictorial, in sound, that is available in the often excellent museums at the Gedenkstätte (Memorial Sites), especially in Germany. Outstanding in this regard, I would say, is the museum at Dachau, taking in, as it does, not just KZ Dachau itself, but the whole history of the 10,000 and more camps – ranging from extermination to slave labour – that were set up in Hitler’s Reich. Indispensable as this kind of information is – its on-­going accumulation as new archives open up – it doesn’t do justice to the pilgrim’s way of knowing. For him or her, there is no substitute for the immediacy of walking around an Auschwitz, to linger long enough to take it in, to recapitulate in memory – how ‘living’ is always the question – and in a certain sense, ‘walking with’ – say, the arrival of the victims by the trainload, their selection for immediate killing or for slave labour; their appalling living conditions and the deliberate erasure of their human dignity – Terence des Pres’ ‘excremental assault’;50 the ghoulish revelling in killing by SS guards: from the brutal killing of children to the final walk into showers that turned out to be gas chambers. And much else. Words like ‘solidarity’ and ‘memory’ are useful guides to what we might experience, yet they can never do justice to the utter immediacy and sheer horror – presence – of living memory. If the pilgrim’s grounded way of knowing can be compared to being as fully present as is humanly possible to what is ‘there’ – to the facts native to a particular place in living memory – then we have the ‘real presence’ of place interacting with the real presence of the pilgrim. In the language 49 Examples would be the works of Michael Birnbaum, Deborah Dwork, Robert van der Pelt, Laurence Rees on Auschwitz; Yitzhak Arad on the Operation Reinhard Camps, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek; in general, Richard J. Evans’ three-­volume History of the Third Reich. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 2004, 2005, 2009; Saul Friedländer’s two volumes on Nazi Germany and the Jews. Harper Perennial, London, 1997, 2008. This, too, would be the place to mention videotaped interviews with survivors stored, for example, in the Yale University Library. 50 Terence des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Oxford University Press, 1976. 

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of eucharistic theology, the ‘real presence’ of Christ in all the reality of his self-­offering can only become interactively present to the believer if he or she is reciprocally present in surrender and self-­offering. To take this one step further: following the logic of particularity or concreteness, it will often be a detail – in synecdoche or knowing the whole by a part – that brings home to the pilgrim the reality of what he or she is seeing. Again the eucharistic analogy can be helpful: the mention of specific detail – ‘on the same night in which he was betrayed’, bread, wine – or the reading of one small extract from the Gospels – is the way the ‘whole Christ’ is made present, the whole known in highly charged fragments. In a similar way it is the detail that strikes or gets through to us – like the calculated minimal cost of killing children by burning them alive, rather than in some less cost-­effective way. Under the impact of details like this, the human meaning of what took place comes home to us, ascends from the heart to the head – becomes overwhelming. This is in line with what contemporary geographers exploring the notion of ‘space’ in relation to ‘place’ have pointed out: namely, that there is no such thing as the ‘cyclopean eye’, the owlish ‘eye of Minerva’, that can pose as detached, extra-­terrestrial and all-­knowing.51 The stabbing reality of fact as this touches the pilgrim’s heart will time and again expose the limitation of a history writing that strives to be objective or ‘above the fray’. We might ask: was a limitation of the Enlightenment the idea that all knowledge could be reduced to, and understood from, the disconnected, aloof standpoint of reason alone? Do we see in Auschwitz the outcome of an instrumental rationality starved of the heart-­stopping knowledge of faith and any deeply rooted sense of right and wrong? Suppose, to go further, that ethics are just expressions of subjective feelings – as has been argued – and our particular feeling is the fun or buzz of killing, what then? Nevertheless meaning must always be hard-­wired to fact, space never prised apart from place. For the pilgrim, ‘The devil is in the details.’ Only these, not any distant overview, can bring home to us the full horror of giant abstractions like ‘the Holocaust’ or ‘the Shoah’. As further examples, we could mention the subversion of language. Close to the gas chambers at Birkenau, Auschwitz II, is a pretty little copse, the Birkenwald, meaning the Birchwood. Here, when the Gas Chambers got overloaded and backed-­up, 51 On the question of ‘space’ and the Cyclopean eye’, see Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space. Routledge, London, 2000, pp.2 f.; also, Phil Hubbard et al. (eds), Key Thinkers on Space and Place. Sage Publications, London, 2004.

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people were encouraged to sit down in groups and enjoy a picnic. Picnic??!! Or we might be talking about the filthy dark inside of the former gas chamber at Auschwitz I, the Stammlager, the dirty walls, the dark colours, the feeling of terrifying claustrophobia; or the Todesansteige at Mauthausen, the notorious staircase from the granite quarry where day after day men were crushed by carrying heavy blocks of granite from bottom to top. Or the sheer vicious callousness of the treatment of prisoners in the Stollen (or tunnel complex) at Mittelbau Dora, near Nordhausen. Some things have to be seen to be believed. And so on. This way of knowing is without doubt a ‘descent into hell’. On his or her own, the chances are that the pilgrim, sooner or later, will crack, crack up, cry off. Part of the humility of the pilgrim is to know one’s limitations. But once again, the question is posed: Who is our companion on this hellish journey? Or are we unavoidably alone? – perhaps one of the reasons why so few attempt the journey. But for the Christian, the question persists: can the pilgrim accompanied by the self-­emptying Christ, linger long enough to hear the cries of the victims; stay with the silence, become aware of the absence of so many people? Like the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, we are faced with the question, ‘Aren’t you strong enough to stay awake for one hour?’ (Mark 14:17).

IV. The third, and final, step is the most difficult and, inevitably, the most controversial. Is there anything, we need to ask, in the pilgrim’s repertoire of knowing that is generative of hope? In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur repeatedly warns against confusing genuine mourning with melancholia (tearfulness, sadness for its own sake), remembrance in living memory with the pomposity and externality of commemorations, the hard work of ‘working through’ with the knowing accumulation of information. While the components of the first set – mourning, remembering, working through – are active and costly, those of the second – melancholia, commemoration, ‘knowing about’ from a distance – can be cheap, easy or even meretricious. It is in this spirit of ‘mourning,



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remembering, working through’, that I venture one strategy that might be generative of hope. I am referring to the disciplined – i.e. in full knowledge of the facts – use of the imagination – here, better, heart-­knowledge – and its linguistic mode of expression, metaphor. Metaphor is thus not a way of escape from reality, but a way of going more deeply into it. Or, put another way, we are moving from the facts – of death, for instance – to something equally important, the meaning of these facts not only at the time of their occurrence, but also now and in the future. What do these facts mean to us in our heart of hearts now? Are they just a dead weight in the psyche like rocks in the belly of a dog in the habit of eating gravel? Or are they precious, treasured memories that inspire us to struggles for life in solidarity with contemporary victims? What might be the valency or import of the brutish facts we have taken to heart on pilgrimage as we remember the past, stand in the present and move into the future? Do we, in the roots of our knowing, we could ask, operate with life- or death-­based metaphors? And this in the knowledge that metaphor can be innovative, exploratory and participatory?52

V. If we want to pursue this strategy of metaphor as potentially hope generating – albeit in a spirit of mourning, remembering, working through – we have immediately to face the basic problem. Namely, that for all our desire to deploy the semantic fields of life or hope, there is another, that of Auschwitz itself, which is strictly meaningless; or that is so laden with the multiple weight of the semantic field of death that any other, be it of hope or life, is overwhelmed, neutralised, rendered derisory or sterile. Is using metaphor around Auschwitz futile, like dropping pebbles into a bottomless pit or shining a weak torch into the infinite blackness of space? Pilgrim-­style, however, we can refuse to be paralysed. Our companioning Christ, crucified and raised, might speak to us as he did to the man at the Pool of Bethsaida, a man who had lain thirty-­eight years in his 52 For more in detail on metaphor, see Appendix, ‘On De- and Reconstructing Root Metaphors: The Analogy of the Sun’.

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weakness/paralysis (Greek: asthenia). Jesus commands him to ‘Stand up, take up your mat and walk’ (John 5:8). Could this admonition apply to the bundle of metaphors we habitually apply to Auschwitz? For the pilgrim it could mean ‘keep walking’ in the sense of responding to the challenge to experiment with new metaphors – innovative, exploratory, participatory – as part of the evolving meaning of Auschwitz in our culture. As an example of what we’re up against, we could mention the metaphor that ‘Auschwitz is an abyss of horror’. Armed with this root metaphor, anything to do with the Shoah will tend to consist of unearthing more and more facts that confirm or extend that view. Unless, that is, we venture what has been called ‘a paradigm shift’, a change in the root metaphors that govern our perceptions. Otherwise Auschwitz will sit enthroned as the chief reference point for all that is negative in our worldview, posturing as some kind of anti-­god corrosive of all belief, ethics, or anything to do with a life or a hope that can be trusted. With this we may compare the scenario in 2 Thessalonians 2:3–4 where, in the deep confusion of ‘the end times’, Satan would occupy the throne of God – masquerading as God – from whence he can ‘declare himself to be God’. This can be deceptive to the nth degree. So: can a root metaphor like ‘Auschwitz is an abyss of horror’ be modified? Surely it can. If, for example, we take into account all the acts of caring, goodness, heroism that took place in and around the Shoah, could we say that Auschwitz is like a dark sky broken by a few points of light? Armed with this metaphor as the lens through which we view the facts, we can no longer give an account of them that is all ‘black’. The modification, however, is slight. The dominant metaphor (or perspective) through which we view the facts is still largely negative. Accordingly, what I believe is called for is not yet more metaphors that have to do with endlessly accumulating facts, negative or positive, but rather some overriding metaphor that is not only a perspective within which we can view the facts but also a metaphor of hope and life that is dominant in the sense of being hospitable to the more negative metaphors, yet not reducible to them. For example, instead of saying ‘Auschwitz is an abyss of horror’, why not say, ‘God is an/the Abyss of Love’? – not of course to be confused with the absurd statement, ‘Auschwitz is an abyss of love’. In the same vein we might say, ‘God is the Victim-­Survivor of Auschwitz’ – gesturing, that is, in the direction of full participation and, at the same time, evocative of indestructible life.



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These metaphors, I contend, not only give us new perspectives in which to view the facts, they also bring to the surface questions that should be asked. For instance, if people in defiance of God, create a hell for themselves, is this the deepest kind of ‘abyss’ that there is? Might there not be another abyss, that of the love of God, which is deeper than the ‘abyss of horror’, that outrides or survives it, that is present to it, or even – in a certain sense – in the midst of it? If we return a tentative ‘yes’ to that question, then other things might come into view. Not only might we be more willing to highlight the many acts of human kindness and heroism in Auschwitz; the fact, further, that some people escaped or survived; or, furthermore, that people prayed even in the gas chambers; we might also be more disposed to consider that, while Auschwitz may constitute the ‘bad conscience of humankind’, the horror of horrors, it need not deliver us into the kind of human hopelessness that is irredeemably pessimistic about the future. Must we believe that Auschwitz is the bitter truth about life, the very thing that humankind is fated to repeat or, if that were possible, exceed? This can look all too real if we contemplate such things as future predictions around climate change; conflict over ‘goods’ such as land, water, oil; the burgeoning world population and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. To introduce ‘God’ into the semantic field of ‘Auschwitz’ could – at this culturally crucial point – become the breeding ground of hope. I’m thinking of worldviews and actions generative of a fully inclusive and ever-­greater potentiality for life.

VI. Auschwitz is thus not permitted to be the last word about history. It doesn’t anticipate the inevitable fate of humankind nor is it the definitive breakdown of any meaningful talk about God, belief or ethics. On the contrary, God is the guarantor that history remain open, full of potential. God, however, understood as Abyss of Love or Victim-­Survivor, is not the omnipotent God of traditional theism. Were God that kind of god, God could be held responsible for Auschwitz as some kind of repellent, cosmic ogre. We are, rather, talking about God as ground of being – or as being itself – for whom the cosmos in its evolution is an experiment in radical freedom. God is present 188 

to this evolving world, we could say, in all the powerlessness of genuine love. Of this the cross and passion of Jesus are the central paradigm. Alternatively, we might express it by saying that God is pre-­eminent – rather than omnipotent – in goodness, truthfulness, beauty – rather like a very loving person in the community with ‘all the wisdom in the world’, who though essentially powerless, nevertheless possesses an infinite capacity to guide, heal, empathise, inspire, share vision – and, of course, suffer. This is the God who is always ‘there for us’, who can show us the way, and who, like a mother, stays with us when things go wrong. The pilgrimage both of God and humankind continues – and that is the point, the ground for hope. Whether this includes the dead is a question this pilgrim prefers (at this stage) to leave open – and this in the knowledge that, as in my case, the work of grieving the loss of even two beloved daughters can take a lifetime. In the time-­scale of eternity, maybe. Here, as always, the pilgrim keeps his feet on the ground, retains his sense of reality. Perhaps this is as far as we can get. Like the Israelites at Moab about to enter the Promised Land, we have set before us the two ways, of life and death, of blessing and curse (Deuteronomy 30). Shall we choose life? Without doubt we have to keep faith with the dead – Auschwitz as place of horror, of death – not forget them or leave them behind. Part of this ‘keeping faith’, however, is surely to ask: would the dead themselves have wanted us to allow our language about Auschwitz to be solely that of death, horror, absence and the like, to the exclusion of life in the extended sense of God? Might that not come perilously close to saying that, although Hitler lost the war as a military contest, he remains victorious in the realm of meanings? I, for one, don’t want to say that. The question then is, does the world have a heart? And if so, is this ‘heart’ God? What is meant by ‘God’ remains to be considered. But this pilgrim will retain the insight that it has to do with love.



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4. Kneeling and Surviving The Pilgrim and Prayer

We go now from feet to knees, from standing or walking to kneeling. It is no accident that key sections of this book were written in Carmelite convents or monasteries.53 Why? Simply because just as the pilgrim encounters ‘unholy places’ on foot, so if he or she wishes to survive, retain or deepen his or her hold on life, this, following the theme of kenosis (self-­emptying, humility) of this book, has to be done on one’s knees – or some equivalent posture. Pilgrimage to unholy places is for real; that is, the pilgrim in his or her exposure to what’s there, can find themselves drawn down into the vortex of evil that these places represent, with all the attendant dangers of cynicism, craziness, obsession and, ultimately, let it be said, suicide. We’re talking about the still powerful after-­shocks of places of death, what for millions were living hells. From the point of view of Jewish–Christian dialogue, this chapter is written from an avowedly Christian standpoint: first, how I personally survived spiritually in my pilgrimage to ‘unholy places’; and, second, the sketch of an atonement theology that is specific to victims and victim-­survivors of the Holocaust. My personal journey may have resonances for any Jewish pilgrims to the same places. This is without prejudice to the spiritual strategies they deploy in similar circumstances. These will be no less valid; but not my purpose here to describe them. The atonement theology, similarly, is an invitation to Jewish thinkers to elaborate an atonement theology with the same end in view, the Shoah. But let it be clearly said that in focusing in this way on those particular victims and victim-­survivors, there is no intention to stereotype Jews in general as victims or victim-­survivors. That clearly would be absurd, not to say offensive. I should add that the atonement theology in 53 Starting in 1995 and over the years, I have been privileged to enjoy the hospitality of the Carmels at Auschwitz (the one re-­built away from the site of Auschwitz I), Dachau, Berlin, Berkenwerder, Weimar. Also the Franciscan Community in Esterwegen. I should also acknowledge an association with the Sisters of the Love of God, Oxford, England, which began c. 1970. 

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question, historically focused as it may be, has an end in view: how the life of God and that of the human community – in this case, Judaism in so far as it was (and perhaps still is) afflicted by the Holocaust – can break through, for all the horror, into a new fullness of life, both human and God-­given.

I. ‘Kneeling and surviving’, what does this mean? At its simplest it reflects the fact that wherever possible I have visited ‘unholy places’ from the home-­ base of houses of prayer, in my case Carmelite convents of women or monasteries of men. The deep silence of a contemplative order, ever respectful of the mystery of the silence of God, somehow counters the terrible silence that shrouds the unholy places of the Shoah. The latter silence is about absence: absence of people, absence prima facie of God. If there is a notion of presence that corresponds to this kind of silence, it lies in a hearing of the cries of the victims allied to a questioning of the silence of God. But for the pilgrim this questioning is done, as the kneeling posture powerfully symbolises, in the context of the first kind of silence, that of prayer, an activity that, by its very nature is shot through with a sense of presence, of mystery, of the holy, the sacred. The silence of prayer can be misused to sentimentalise, trivialise or obfuscate the hard issues of evil, death and absence. Authentic prayer, however, can be the very place where sustained remembrance of the victims brings to the surface the very questions that have to be faced; and this in the heart of the pilgrim in face of God. To stay with the questions – this belongs to the essence of contemplative prayer, the pre-­condition of insight into the mystery of God and any growth in humility, loss of illusions, or growth of empathy in the heart of the praying person. Also to be acknowledged – and a large part of what is meant by survival – is the need to process, in prolonged periods of silence, the multitude of devastating impressions borne in upon us by unholy places. Carmelite convents make generous provision on a daily basis for this kind of silence. But that is not all. If we include in our practice of prayer acts of worship such as Eucharists and Daily Offices, central to the life of a contemplative community, we are talking about activities that are supportive through simply being there for us to share in. We don’t have 192 

to manufacture them for ourselves; they are ‘givens’ or gifts, things that are done or experienced before reflected on. These Offices, moreover, are sung. This way of praying is inclusive of the emotions in an unforced way; and are designed to be stepping stones on the way to teaching the heart to sing – silently – even when it is burdened with the awful silences of unholy places. Yet there is more. Part of what is meant by the grace of a routine of Offices is that in Bible readings, the recitation of Psalms and in prayers we find some of the language we need for effective reflection. For how can we think without language? The worship offered in Office and Eucharist, to go one step further, is Christ-­centred. Christ, living and present, provides the context and the prime model for the presence-­in-absence in living memory of the victims. The remembrance in question is that of the living memory (or anamnesis) that ‘re-­presents’ or makes present the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Its opposite is amnesia, the blankness or forgetting either of the victims or of Christ. This, in preliminary way, is some of what is meant by ‘kneeling and surviving’.

II. To fill out this picture, what kind of ‘spaces’ are these communities? The short answer is that they are places where particular people and events are remembered in context of sustained remembrance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and where, as a consequence, life-­changing things can happen in the hearts of people. To get the full import of this, let’s look at some history.54 The first of the Carmels in question, Karmel Heilig Blut (Of the Precious Blood), Dachau, owes its existence to the vision and initiative of its first Prioress, Sr. Maria-­Theresia of the Crucified Love. As Berta Vorbach, she had been a secondary school teacher in Munich. A strong Christian by conviction, she was in touch with members of the resistance against Hitler’s Nazi regime, notably Fr. Alfred Delp SJ whose church in Borgenhausen, a suburb of Munich, she used to attend. Deeply affected both by the cruelty inflicted (since 1933) on people in the Dachau 54 For what follows, I am indebted to the article, ‘Life in Places of Nazi Terror’ by Sr Maria-­Theresia Smith OCD. The Way, Supplement 89, Summer 1997, pp.115–25. 

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concentration camp, located just north of Munich, and, more generally, by ‘the devastation and destruction, both visible and invisible’ wrought by Hitler’s war-­mongering Reich, she entered the Carmelite Community in Pütchen, near Bonn in 1946, almost immediately after the death of her mother whom she had cared for until then. Some years later, on New Year’s Day 1961, she had a sudden and strong inspiration to found a Carmel on or near the site of the former Dachau concentration camp. A letter to the Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Julius Döpfner, set out what she had in mind. It’s based on the gut feeling that what was done at Dachau (and its near contemporary, Esterwegen), and although Jewish prisoners were in the minority in this particular camp, yet as forerunner of what was to come, had profoundly besmirched the moral and spiritual atmosphere not only of that place, but also its downstream effects and multiple interconnections. Somebody, therefore, had to undertake the task of cleaning up the mess at this it’s fons et origo. Throughout the world, Dachau epitomizes the reality that was the concentration camps. Its name will always be connected with the most dreadful cruelties committed by humanity. A place where such sin was committed, where so many people suffered unspeakable things, must not become a bland memorial, still less a place for tourists. Representative atonement [stellvertretende Sühne] must be made through the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, and through the associated sacrifice and atonement of human beings joining themselves to this suffering Lord in reparation and obedience. The Carmelite order is called in a special way to the prayer of sacrifice and atonement.55

Dated though the language may sound, two things shine through it. In the sense of ‘space’ defined above, Dachau, the first of the 10,000 and more concentration, slave-­labour and extermination camps, culminating with Auschwitz, and set in place by Hitler’s minions, was arguably the prototype for all the other places where barbaric cruelties were perpetrated on innocent and defenceless people. Far from being trivial or easily forgotten, the memory of what was done persists – and needs to persist – as living memory for posterity; an unforgettable memory, one, that is, far exceeding that of the generation contemporaneous with the events themselves. It was therefore Mother Maria-­Theresia’s vision that at the very place of the confluence of multiple atrocity and living memory of what was done, there should be some strong and countervailing movement of prayer. In the place of living memory of death, there needed to be living remembrance of life. This, she 55 Ibid., pp.116–7.

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felt, could only be done effectively in/with/through the perfect and infinitely costly offering and abundant life of Jesus. Here was the context, the new space, corresponding to the physical place, Dachau, which had potential for reconciliation, healing and peace for any of the million or so visitors to the site annually who wished to avail themselves of the resources of a community of prayer. We could add: given that Jesus suffered as a victim, he is able to empathise fully with the victims of Dachau as of other places. Equally, in virtue of his resurrection (so Christians believe) he is the source of an ‘excess’ of life ‘there’ for any wishing to tap into it, beginning with the victim-­survivors. And, we might dare to add, in the mercy of God, the victims themselves. In a letter of 24 August 1963, Mother Maria-­Theresia filled out what she had in mind. ‘Dachau’ was the sign of how the order of values set in place by God was overthrown, as a matter of ideological principle. The state was made an idol, humanity was robbed of its dignity, and hatred became the basic motivating force. Our greatest concern now is to make this place ‘Dachau’ a place of sacrifice and prayer, and to do this by making it over to the Redeemer who gave his blood for us. A particular means will be the renewal of the sacrifice of the Cross through daily Mass – the only appropriate atonement. Thus we see it as our task to call down the power of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, the only salvific power, on ‘Dachau’, on all concentration camps throughout the world, and thus on the systems of violence which they embody. Our purpose in so doing is to overcome hatred through the love of Jesus Christ, and to bring about for the world reconciliation with God, our true peace.56

III. If that was the original vision that informed the Carmels of Dachau, Berlin and other places, how is that now experienced by the pilgrim in the same places over forty years later? Most obviously his or her project is put in perspective in a salutary way. Whereas his pilgrimage is ‘to’ unholy places, the prayer of the Carmelites is ‘in’ or ‘at’ unholy places. If theirs is based on a vow of stability, to stay in one place, the pilgrim, by comparison, is a wandering solitary. Theirs is a ‘living with’, as Sister Gemma Hinricher, founder of the Berlin Convent Maria Regina Martyrum, would insist. By 56 Ibid., p.117. 

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this she meant a sustained engagement in situ with the reality of the sufferings of the Shoah and in KZ camps generally and, as I soon found out, in full knowledge of the facts. And lest there be misunderstandings, ‘in situ’ here means ‘close to’ or ‘at a respectful distance from’ the actual KZ sites themselves. These, as is proper, are necessarily places of silence, sacred to the memory of the victims.57 This ‘respectful distance’ also symbolises just how far humankind, religious or non-­religious, still has to go in this matter of the Shoah. In these communities the pilgrim is at once humbled and, very graciously, supported and encouraged. Once again the note of humility is fundamental. To pray in community is to know that yours is only a small contribution, a bit part in a much larger drama. You don’t have to take the entire burden of care and ‘working through’ – of remembering and interceding – on yourself. At the most basic level, as stated above, the pilgrim is a disciple of Christ. He, in total self-­ emptying and self-­giving, is the ‘lamb of God’; he the One, not you, who takes upon himself the sins of the world, up to and including Auschwitz. While the pilgrim, in virtue of his or her visitations to sites of unholy horror, of sheer evil, may be in possession of some fraction of the raw data, any attitude of ‘spiritual titanism’, of the illusion of taking the sins of the world upon oneself, can only be pathological, psychologically sick and self-­destructive. For all the perduring reality in ‘happenedness’ and ‘living memory’ of the Shoah, these qualifications are ones the pilgrim constantly keeps in mind and takes to heart as he or she sings Daily Offices, partakes of the Eucharist or spends hours in silent prayer. Authentic Christian prayer is always an entering into the prayer of the living Christ, never a substitute for it (as per Romans 8:34, 27; Hebrews 7:24; 9:24). Silence – perhaps this is what initially strikes one on entering a Carmel. To arrive in Berlin at Tegel Airport, get the 109 Bus to Weltlingsbrücke, cross the noisy motorway, find one’s way to Karmel Maria Regina Martyrum on Heckerdamm, is suddenly to be plunged into deep silence, initially bewildering, but gradually more and more fruitful. Soon one is emboldened to spend 57

The whole débâcle of the Auschwitz Carmel, abutting (as it did) the site of Auschwitz 1 and with a wooden cross in its garden visible over the wall from within the site, is related and gone over in the context of Jewish–­Christian dialogue in Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy. Praeger Publications, New York, 1991. The authentic Carmelite vision, it seems, was clouded by Polish nationalism. The old convent was abandoned in 1989, the new one built at a respectful distance down the road.

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one or two hours each day with the Sisters in silent or ‘still’ (German ‘stille’) prayer. To begin with, this is simply refreshing. But soon one discovers the ground-­rule of silent prayer: ‘silence surfaces reality’, whether this be of life or of God. Here, in other words, is the God-­context in which the pilgrim can begin, in his or her heart of hearts, to process the accumulation of horror he or she has seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled… at unholy places. This Christ-­ centred, God-­grounded ‘place’, this silence, can become the very ‘space’ in which the pilgrim ‘gets to hear what there is to hear’, in this case, the cries of the victims and how to respond to them. And of course much more. Allied to silence is slowness. From the pace of an aircraft or a bus, life slows to a walking pace, before coming to a dead stop – the word ‘dead’ being a misnomer, for this is where all the real life is! Suddenly, it seems, instead of being in the accelerated rush of modern life – so many tasks, so much communication, so many people, so much information, so much noise – one finds quasi-­miraculously that one has time and space. One thinks of Paul’s word about ‘redeeming the time, because the days are evil’ (Ephesians 5:16). One is gifted with time: time to be in the presence of God, time to rest, time to write, time to think, time to be creative. Slowing down, coming to a halt, being still – this is what brings one into the new space, into the presence of the sacred, into awareness of the victims and a wrestling with God. Here, also, one can read books with full attention; here, as this book testifies, one has the ideal context in which to write and reflect. Lest this should sound introverted or merely subjective, the inner, heart-­ centred, process of dealing with the impressions of memory is complemented by the objectivity of Daily Office and Eucharist. We have already touched on the meaning of worship for the pilgrim. Yet there is more. Here, uncensored, is displayed – read, recited, celebrated – the whole fullness of the biblical revelation much of which Jews and Christians have in common (meaning the First Testament, without prejudice to the different ways its texts have been interpreted by Jews and Christians). It is above all in the scriptures that God allows God-­self to be found. Time and again the pilgrim will be given the language to grapple with what he or she has encountered in each ‘unholy place’. This applies especially to the Psalms, central to the saying or singing of the Daily Office, morning, noon and evening. The very concreteness and wide range of human emotion expressed by the Psalter in face of God can be the language the pilgrim makes his or her own. For the words themselves, as rough and raw as our own heart language, are, in another way, the truly human speech of the Christ who is both fully at one with human suffering 

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and fully at one with God’s ‘excessive’, overflowing life. Somewhere, in the mystery of this confluence of the human and the divine, can the gift of peace be given, the peace that ‘passes human understanding’. But again, lest this should sound fanciful, it is always qualified. If the pilgrim has no answers to the questions posed by the Shoah, at least he or she has some language with which to explore and interpret his or her experience and, at the same time, to enter into the mystery of the silence of God – ever mindful, of course, that in the end no language is adequate either to the Shoah or to the mystery of God. The unspeakable corresponds inversely to the inexpressible. The language in question is primarily heart language. To give just one example, Psalm 31:11–13 (in part) reads: I am the scorn of all my adversaries […] I have passed out of mind like one who is dead […] For I hear the whispering of many – terror all around! – as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.

This is the heart language of the Jewish victim as of Christ. Via worship and contemplation, it can become the very language that breeds insight into the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany; or, in another way, it may yield insight into the passion of Jesus as providing the standpoint for ‘reading’ the terrible sufferings of his fellow Jews in Hitler’s Reich. Outside the specific context of worship, Carmels are places, as I can testify, ‘where gifts can be given and received’. Now we touch the human end of what I call a ‘grace-­filled’ space. Many examples come to mind. Hospitality: not only is one cared for materially, sparsely but well, little acts of kindness – a card of welcome, a candle as a parting gift, even a bottle of beer! – surprises! – can delight or move one to tears. The culture of death practised in the KZ camps contrasts like another world with the culture of life present in a community of faith. Conversations: these can be informal at mealtimes in the Guest House or intentional in one of the parlours (Sprech­ zimmern) with a Sister. The latter especially can put one in touch with great wisdom and vibrant human sympathy; the former with endless stories from ordinary Germans of ‘Nazizeit’ memories so searing that even now it is still hard to talk about them. The presence of an outsider, especially one from a far-­off country like New Zealand, can be the occasion for people to unburden themselves of stuff that they rarely express in other contexts. The fact that I am a priest could play a role here. Reconciliation: Carmels have become German contexts in which victim-­survivors and descendants of victims who suffered or died in the camps can recover faith or seek healing of memories 198 

and reconciliation. However partial this may be in the total picture, it is nonetheless real – and for that reason precious. Two examples must suffice. In the article by Sr. Maria-­Theresia Smith already quoted, she writes: The sisters did not often directly meet with survivors of Dachau or with relatives of the victims, but there were signs that the Carmel had somehow touched them. Unforgettable for me is the little note from a Frenchman that we found one evening in a little box where people could put their prayer intentions: ‘My father was murdered in this camp. Because you are here, I was able to say an “Our Father” in this place.’58

The second example also concerns Dachau. To recall my Diary entry for 11 August 2003: That afternoon, a kind of miracle. I’m resting in my room, the weather still in heatwave mode. Suddenly a knock on my door. It’s Sr. Irmengard. ‘Max Mannheimer is here.’ ‘Who’s Max Mannheimer?’ ‘A survivor of Auschwitz’, she replies. Tea and a few biscuits are quickly arranged and I find myself sitting at the refectory table with Srs. Elijah and Irmengard and Max. Jewish, wonderfully lively old man of 83. As full of spirit as of grief. He relates some of his story in a rich mixture of German and English. On one occasion there took place what he calls ‘the greatest act of worship ever’. He and some other prisoners were on one of the death marches as the camps were evacuated towards the end of the war. They were exhausted and dying of thirst. They rested on some damp ground. One of them said, ‘There must be water here.’ So they began to dig with spoons, forks, knives. Soon a shallow pool of muddy water appeared. Which they drank. Then together spontaneously they chanted the Shema, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’ (Deuteronomy 6:4–5). As he related this, Max burst into tears, a high-­pitched, keening, wailing, grief-­stricken cry as the weight and horror of his memories – like demons out of hell – overwhelmed him. The sisters and I – two women and a pilgrim/theologian from New Zealand – moved to him and did our best to hold him until the horror passed.59

IV. ‘Places where gifts can be given and received.’ One way of understanding this is by referring back to the prophet Elijah, founding prophet of 58 Smith, ‘Life in Places of Nazi Terror’, pp.120–1. 59 Mannheimer, Spätes Tagesbuch, Theresianstadt–­Auschwitz–Warschau–­Dachau. 

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the Carmelite Order.60 The characteristic greeting embedded in the biblical material is, ‘As God lives, and as you yourself live’ (2 Kings 2:4,6; cp. 1 Kings 17:1). This conveys that to be amongst ‘the bundle of the living’ is to be ‘bundled up’ with the life of God: that we live because God lives – however much this has been lost sight of in our modern, secular, de-­sacralised world with its roots, inter alia, in Auschwitz. The fact nevertheless remains that ‘as God lives’ so ‘you yourself live’. The Carmelite Order stands as witness to this fact. The vision crystallises around a few key images. At a time of power struggles and cheap death, the potentates of the time (Ahab, Jehu, Athaliah) were locked into a Baal worship, which, while nature-­based, was also locked into a system that was hierarchical, and socially oppressive, the ‘Blut und Boden’ ideology of the time. Elijah and his disciple Elisha, by contrast, took up a costly stance in favour of the true God, the one with power to act justly and give life. This comes out, for example, in the telling stories of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21) or the starving widow’s oil or the Shunemite woman and her son (2 Kings 4). ‘As God lives, and as you yourself live.’ Elijah’s vision of God, moreover, amidst all the dangerous uproar of the times, comes to him in ‘the sound of sheer silence’ and in the very place, Horeb or Mt Sinai, where the original Covenant with Moses had been given and received (1 Kings 19:9–18). From henceforth Elijah and his disciple Elisha – and all subsequent disciples – plunge their lives into this great stream of God-­given life. This, in biblical and Carmelite spirituality, is symbolised by the brook (or ‘torrent in the ravine’) Cherith (1 Kings 17:2–3). It is from this that the prophet drinks. ‘As God lives, and as you yourself live.’ Furthermore, there is the powerful image of ‘ravens’ bread’: the prophet miraculously fed by ravens as the Israelites had been by mana in the desert; as though at a time of starvation, chaos and general wilderness, social and other, the prophet is fed by ‘bread’, physical or spiritual, given, often in surprising and gracious ways, by the Other, God, or by others, meaning people or one of God’s creatures. To me this says that in places of death, there are available to us ‘spaces’ or cultures of life. These places do not yield answers. Perhaps they’re aren’t any. They do, however, bring easement, healing, care to the knotted, grieving, broken heart. ‘As God lives, and as you yourself live.’ All this is part of what is meant by ‘open-­heartedness’: openness to 60 The ‘Elijah Cycle’ is to be found in 1 Kings 17:1; 2 Kings 2:12; followed by that of Elisha, 2 Kings 2:13; 13:21.

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extremes of horror; but without neglecting a corresponding openness to wellsprings of prayer and of life. My instincts tell me that these are vital growing-­points for the future.

V. ‘Solidarity’ and ‘hospitality’ are the words that best sum up the life of a Carmelite community. Its members live in solidarity with the victims, but also offer hospitality to people who wish to find life in themselves through prayer. In this, they share in a real way in the solidarity of Christ with the victims, but also in his inclusive hospitality to all seeking life in the midst of so much death. In what, then, does this consist? Take solidarity: Christ’s solidarity with the victims, especially with those who had no choice, stems from the fact that he was himself a victim, his victimhood both chosen and imposed (see Romans 4:25). More than that, in virtue of his full connectedness with God as with the victims, he could be considered ‘the victim of victims’. At one with them as with God, Christ extends our understanding of what it means to be a victim as well as our grasp of the truth of God: the sheer tragedy of the one and the co-­passion of the Other. For example: his words from the cross – ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ and others – are the cry of a victim, a passionate questioning of God arising out of a sense of abandonment. Can other victims, we ask, make any or all of these words their own? If yes, Christ has potential to enlarge our understanding of what it means to be a victim, to take on board its sheer horror, but without loss of hope. Otherwise expressed: in his person he offers a fully inclusive hospitality to those who suffered and died in unholy places. The paradox of Christ, however, is that to be hospitable to the victims also means to be open to God; and vice-­versa. With God in the picture we are talking ‘life’, the perspective in which solidarity and hospitality become the vehicles through which Christ – and all who are drawn to him – invites the victims into the ever-­greater life and love of God. I write this because my pilgrim experience of hospitality and solidarity in Carmelite communities has lead on quasi-­inevitably to its source: the living person of Christ. The best way of understanding what this zeroing in on Christ means is to look, finally, at the theology of the atonement 

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involved. Relevant at this point is the traditional notion of ‘exchange’. According to this, for all that Christ was subjected to qua victim in the form of hatred, violence, injustice, he gives in exchange, and in ever-­greater measure, life, caring, innocence, vision, justice. And of course much more. In this way the invocation of the name Christ – meaning his track record and all this continues to represent ‘in God’ – is like releasing a spring in a desert, exchanging life for death. We could add, the Cross and Resurrection of Christ accomplish by anticipation the full restoration of the Imago Dei in humankind. It also initiates the long, drawn-­out process of moral and spiritual transformation, sometimes called theosis or becoming like God.61 In my practice this is done as much in solitary pilgrimage as in the embrace of Carmelite community. The convents I have been describing are called to be mediators of this exchange, places where it can come about in a real way. This exchange, however, is not extrinsic to the life of the Sisters, but rather, in the mystery of Christ, intrinsic to it. To be a religious is not a canonical fiction, but a total and sacrificial self-­offering. This is what connects it in a real way with the Passion of Christ and through him with the victims. Yet that is not all. It is also a sharing in the resurrected and resurrecting life of Christ. The vowed life of a contemplative religious can therefore also be characterised as joyful. ‘With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation’ (Isaiah 12:3). The deeper resonances of this arise, as we have seen, from a solidarity that is ‘a completing what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ’ (Colossians 1:24); and, at the same time, a hospitality that can be seen as a completing (or overflow) of the resurrection joy of Christ (John 17:13). Paul’s words in Philippians 3:10–11 sum up what is going on. ‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.’ In this way convents as places of sustained and fervent prayer have the Christ-­given potential to empathise with the horrors of the past, be faithful to their memory, yet do so in a way that can be fruitful or productive of life. In all of this there are no shortcuts. If, further, we are drawn to use the word ‘substitution’, a venerable part of traditional thinking about atonement, this should not be taken to mean either that Christ suffered instead 61 For a pioneering exploration of theosis in Paul’s theology, see Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God. Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology. Wm.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids/Cambridge, 2009.

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or in place of the authentic victims, even less that the sisters somehow do so now. This is the qualification with which we should read Sr. Maria-­ Theresia’s stellvertretende Sühne as meaning representative or substitutionary atonement. The suffering of the actual victims was historic, horrific and, for those without any comparable experience, unimaginable. This should never be theologised away. What is being said, however, is that in a life of solidarity and hospitality, grounded in prayer and costly dedication, the vowed life of women and men can enter ever more deeply into the prayer of Christ, a prayer fully in sympathy with the suffering of the victims, yet also in a real way a participation in the very life of God, the place where alone such things as Auschwitz have hope of final redemption or healing. In this way, the word ‘substitutionary/stellvertretende’ used of Christ means ‘unique’ because grounded to a unique degree in God – and in this way ‘unsubstitutable’ or irreplaceable. This is the statement of faith from which the life of a Carmelite – or shall we simply say, ‘Christian’? – community flows. In blunt language: without God we shall never get to the bottom of the problem posed by Auschwitz, let alone explore valid ways through it. To complement this approach, the chapters that follow look in a site-­ specific way at why Auschwitz was set up the way it was: the consequences this had for the sense of the absence or silence of God that it engendered: what it means to talk of ‘holy’ and ‘unholy’ places.



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B.  Holy / Unholy 5. Unholy Places Site-­specific Reckoning with Evil

We now move from method to substance, from defining pilgrimage to the evil that was enacted in the places – Holocaust and Holocaust-­related – that I visited. Immediately we need to become aware that exploring the factual evidence of evil is like digging out a rat’s nest. Creatures run in all directions; and cornered rats can be dangerous. The pilgrim, open in all the vulnerability of heart-­knowledge, must make doubly sure that his or her heart is grounded in the love of God before attempting such a task. Issues laid out in ‘The Pilgrim and Prayer’ now become of life-­and-death importance. In what follows, that is pre-­supposed. The aim of the next three chapters on holy/unholy places is to explore what kind of ‘space’ the places described in my Diary entries actually are. ‘Place’, the reader will recall, refers to physical location; ‘space’ to the meaning of place in respect of the ideology acted out there and the legacy of this as unforgettable in living memory. In the present chapter I invite the reader into a descensus ad infernos: what it means for these places qua ‘space’ to be unholy, evil places. In the next two chapters I tentatively explore whether these same places – viewed from the angles of grief and memory – can also be seen or experienced as holy. ‘Holy’ here means open to the presence of God, the living God, who is also ‘God of the living’ (Mark 12:27). For all the absence of the dead at unholy places, is there a sense in which they are present to God and, equally, present to us as an enduring legacy for good? Two contrasting images may help to orient the reader. If the nature of a culture can be gauged from the garbage it excretes, the death camps in particular are like the hidden rubbish tips of the culture of death that was the Nazi state: crudely, the excreta of Adolf Hitler. Holy places, by contrast, are like the music of a great composer: worthy of endless rep-



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etition, the treasures of a culture of life. Both aspects, holy and unholy, are unforgettable, living memories, but in radically different ways. We turn now specifically to unholy places. But first a warning: the reader is not to expect a disquisition on evil in general, but rather reflections that are site- and person-­specific. We’re talking, in other words, about actual places – Auschwitz and Auschwitz-­related – and a particular person, Adolf Hitler, the presiding genius of the evil under investigation – not forgetting, as we shall see, that he only achieved what he did with the willing complicity of many Germans from all walks of life. And of course the victims on whom all this impacted. What, in this perspective, is the relation between place and space?

I. To begin with we should note that the unholy places under consideration exude, by common consent, an ‘aura’ or some kind of numen praesens, be it for good or ill. On the evil side of the ledger, Dachau, for instance, can (in German) look grau/grey, but also give the overwhelming impression – as one takes it all in – of Grausamkeit/ferocious cruelty. This corresponds to the kind of informed ‘heart- knowledge’ sketched in the preceding chapters on pilgrimage, knowledge, that is, of what is not immediately visible, but nonetheless palpable and real. One could talk, equally, of an historic ‘state of affairs’ and the ‘atmosphere’ it generates and leaves behind. One person who can help us grasp the meaning of this is Sigmund Freud. He has a twofold account of what he calls ‘the uncanny’ (Unheimlichkeit), a word that conveys ‘a disturbing strangeness’ or ‘otherness’, the word literally referring to that which is not ‘at home’ or ‘homely’. Here, then, are the two examples Freud gives of Unheimlichkeit. He compares it, first, to the painful feelings experienced in dreams involving pierced eyes, decapitation and castration. In Auschwitz what in Freud was embedded in dreams became reality; the ‘uncanny’ persisting in haunting nightmares, in culture, in memory and in other ways. Freud, in an even more telling example, defines Unheimlichkeit as ‘what should have remained hidden, but

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which has become manifest’.62 In context, this refers to repressed childhood memories, for instance of abuse, veridical or sometimes imagined, that surface unexpectedly often with devastating effect in later, adult life. Transferred to death-­camp context, this second notion of the ‘uncanny’ can evoke the way in which, at Sobibor and Treblinka corpses that had been hastily buried in mass graves, grew putrid and bloated in spells of hot weather and started to re-­appear above ground.63 Here ‘the uncanny’ can stand for the seemingly endless fund of evil that ‘unholy places’ retain and can re-­surface at any time. We could call it a kind of ‘anti’ or demonic ‘resurrection’, one of death, not life; and this not just meant psychologically – as in Freud’s account – but also palpably or physically – not a ‘false memory syndrome’, but a devastating and irrefutable truth. Or, to venture an image of my own, pilgrimage to ‘unholy places’ can be like waking up in a house in which, during the night, murder has been committed – leaving for the living the question of ‘what happens next?’ This issue of the future of unholy places will occupy us in the two sections that follow on ‘holy’ places.

II. We now move to ask specifically how the places in question became the evil spaces they were and, in a real sense, remain. The explanations will range from the psychological to the ideological and from the historical to the theological. The first explanation, then, is ideological. Earlier I used the expression ‘abyss of horror’ to describe the Shoah as manifested in Auschwitz.64 This dark abyss, let us remind ourselves, became visible in cruel and painful punishments such as beatings, incarcerations, suspension from hooks by wrists tied behind the back; slave-­labour that regarded life as expendable (Vernichtung durch Arbeit); starvation, exposure to winter 62 Freud’s essay on the uncanny can be found in, Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny. Trans., David McLintock with an Introduction by Hugh Houghton, Penguin Books, Harmonds­ worth, 2003, especially pp.121–62. 63 For this and the attendant circumstances, see, Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chapter 23, ‘The Erasure of the Crimes’, especially pp.171, 177. 64 An expression I use in a preliminary way in an earlier chapter, Thinking With Your Feet, The Pilgrim’s Way of Knowing. 

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cold or summer heat, filth, disease, sadistic medical experiments; random deaths as well as mass, planned extermination. All of this, and more, was motivated, and made acceptable to its perpetrators, by ideology. What ideology? In the person of Heinrich Himmler as head of the SS, or a Reinhard Heydrich or an Adolf Eichmann, men who initiated or administered the above-­mentioned horrors, the ideology in question included, amongst its salient features, the so-­called ‘old German’ concept of ‘blood’. According to this, ‘good’ blood was that of the German ‘master race’; and ‘bad’ blood, inherently destructive and threatening, that of other, lesser breeds, in particular Jews and Bolsheviks, the two often lumped together; but also including Negroes, Asiatics, and such people as homosexuals, social deviants, the mentally ill or physically deformed. These latter, as the secretive T4 programme attests, were defined as ‘Life not Worthy of Life’ (lebensunwertes Leben), a variety of eugenics that became a demonic institutionalised euthanasia programme; that in turn was re-­enforced by a social Darwinism that took the idea of the survival of the fittest to its logical conclusions.65 In Himmler-­lead SS practice, this resulted in such things as gassing mental health patients, children or adult; snatching racially pure children from racially impure parents; shamelessly using people of ‘bad blood’ as slave labour to further German war-­aims of achieving Lebensraum/living space; the practice of Sippenstraf, the incarceration or punishment of families of members of the resistance against Hitler; and, ultimately, the ‘blood for blood’ vendetta against Jews that found expression in the so-­called Final Solution (Endlösung) of the Shoah. Lest all this should strike the modern reader as unbelievable in its crudity, here are two bits of vintage Himmler: A principle which must be strictly adhered to by every SS man is: to be honest, decent, loyal and helpful to everyone of our own blood but to no one else. The fate of a Russian or a Czech is of no interest to me whatsoever. We shall take from these people all the good blood of our kind which is to be found, where necessary we shall steal their children and bring them up ourselves. Whether these people live in prosperity or perish from hunger, interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture. I have otherwise no interest in them. Whether or not 10,000 Russian woman collapse from exhaustion while digging anti-­tank ditches only interests me in so far as the ditch must be finished for Germany.

65 Some indications on the T4 programme and ‘Life Unworthy of Life’ can be found in Volume 2 of Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, Hitler: A Biography. W.W. Norton, New York, London, 2000, pp.252–61; see also my Dairy entry for Hartheim Castle.

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When they [the Old Germans] placed a family under the ban […] they were utterly consistent […] This man has committed treason: his blood is bad; there is a traitor’s blood in him; that must be wiped out […] So too will Count Stauffenberg’s family be wiped out down to the last member.66

This is the mind-­set that ‘steeled’ the SS in the performance of the murderous agenda that was pioneered by Theodore Eicke, first commandant of Dachau, and dinned into SS personnel at their training camp, Oranienberg, on the northern edge of Berlin.67

III. Because this ‘blood’ ideology – without, of course, any scientific foundation – was inherently anti-­Semitic, it was, in the judgement of many, informed by another agenda: that of once and for all eliminating the religion and ethics of the biblical covenantal tradition, of which Judaism was regarded as the source and enduring expression. George Steiner, for example, is an exponent of this view. Melissa Raphael summarises: In early twentieth-­century Germany there was a fatal irruption of the desire to rid society of the claim, challenge, and burden of the eternal moral demand of biblical monotheism, and for men to appropriate that power themselves.68

To understand the import of this Promethean urge, the Nazi version of it can be seen as a deliberate policy to transgress each of the Ten Commandments, 66 The Sippenstraf quotation can be found in Joachim Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death: The German Resistance to Hitler 1933–45. Phoenix Paperback, London, 1997, pp.303–4; the 1943 Posen/Poznan speech is quoted in the Catalogue of the Dachau Museum, 16th Edition, 1978, p.125. Von Stauffenberg was the effective leader of the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. 67 In the same Posen/Posnam speech, Himmler went on to say, ‘Most of you will know what it means to be confronted with 100, 500 or 1000 corpses at one time. Having endured the experience without losing our decency – except for the occasional sign of human weakness – has hardened us. This is a glorious page of our history which never has and never will be written.’ Dachau Catalogue, p.197. 68 See her Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, p.76. Raphael is here citing George Steiner’s ‘A Season in Hell’ in, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards a Re-­ definition of Culture. Faber & Faber, London, 1971, pp.36–42. 

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the quintessence of Judaism. Secularisation Nazi-­style can be seen therefore as de-­sacralisation, the above-­stated ideology its virulent anti-­theology. To give a graphic illustration, the Bug River in East Poland, which runs past the Operation Reinhard Death Camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, in Polish means the ‘God River’. The Nazi objective was to make it run red with the blood of Jews, an urge replicated with the Dnieper and Dniester rivers in the Ukraine. So much for them and their God! If we therefore look at the Ten Commandments, seen as God’s covenant with his people involving duties/responsibilities as well as privileges/rights, more of what is at stake emerges.69 The first four of the Ten Commandments concern the ‘vertical’ relationship of God to his people (Exodus 20:1–11); the remaining six govern ‘lateral’ relationships, social and personal, between individuals, within families and in society (Exodus 20:12–17). The two categories are often referred to as the Two Tablets of the Law delivered to Moses. Thus, the first commandment identifies God as essentially liberative: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, where you lived as slaves.’ In that way the Ten Commandments, far from expressing repressive moralism, contain the ground rules for a free people who want to uphold their freedom by making the Commandments the foundation of their national, family and personal life. To study the totalitarian Nazi state, with its apparatus of state-­sponsored terror, the Gestapo, and its 10,000 and more camps, administered by the SS, is to see a society devoted to slavery of the worst kind. It was no accident that this state was godless, its effective ‘god’ Adolf Hitler, the initiator of endless violence, terror and repression. Now ultimate allegiance – witness the ‘personal’ oath of allegiance of the Wehrmacht to the Führer – is to a pseudo-­god, a divinised man whose agenda, often hidden, is conquest, enslavement, death. Symptomatic of this was the questionnaire SS recruits were required to fill out. In response to the question about the person’s religion, it was customary to write gottgläubig, literally ‘godbelieving’, but in context this was a code word either for ‘atheist’ or for nominal believers or those who, like the German Christians, were convinced that a synthesis could be make between Nazism and Christian faith. These were the hollow men, pliant and unresisting or just plain scared, that Hitler needed to do his will. To all intents he was now the deity requiring their absolute obedience. This they were willing to concede. 69 The biblical texts containing the Ten Commandments are to be found in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5.

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This brings us to the next three commandments, the ban on idolatry. All of this was openly flouted by the Nazis. Nobody can watch contemporary film of the Nuremberg Rallies, the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the ‘Totale Krieg’ gatherings in 1944, or just simply the Nazi ‘Heil Hitler’ salute – not ‘hail Hitler’, but ‘salvation from Hitler’ – without being struck how in the person of Hitler, in events, in insignia like the Swastika or ‘Hackenkreuz’, the ‘hooked’ cross a deliberate parody of Jesus’ cross, and in gesture, there are the makings of a new religion with Hitler its supreme ‘god’ or idol. Instead of a liberative God who is and remains the irreducible mystery of true freedom, we have the tangible ‘near at hand’ enslaving gods of blood and soil, their ‘high priests’ and devotees. The following six commandments – respect for parents, the outlawing of murder, adultery, stealing, giving false witness, covetousness – also go to the heart of what Nazism was about. Besides moving to have the Wehrmacht, with its own deep traditions of loyalty, personally devoted to himself, Hitler hastened to disarm the Judiciary as independent adjudicator of legality over against himself and his régime. Few saw the significance of this at the time, but the screaming, hectoring tactics of Roland Friesler and the People’s Court (Volksgericht) were the outcome of Hitler’s rejection in principle of the rule of law and its replacement by the whim of a dictator who ruled by arbitrary decree. In court there was no such thing as a sifting of witness testimony for truth-­value; false witness, distorting and ideologically motivated, was, by contrast, routine and expected. The Nazi state thenceforth was one in which there were no ethical norms, no rule of law, no checks or balances on the exercise of power. To make this site-­specific: the violation of these commandments was everywhere apparent in the KZ culture of death. Most obviously, the SS knew they had license to kill wantonly, cruelly, deliberately. Murder was stripped of any moral connotation or sanction: it was merely a means to a genocidal end. Nor was there any respect for families. In the camps, families were ripped apart, children snatched from their mothers, any other family relationship disregarded. Adultery, linked to the oppression of women, was rife. Brothels were set up in many camps, Auschwitz included, that were staffed by women forcibly brought in for the purpose from Ravensbrück, the camp for women north of Berlin. Or, to get the patriarchal flavour of Nazi attitudes to women, we might note a letter of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s Secretary and head of the Party Office, to his wife Gerda. In it he boasts how he, by sheer force of will power, had seduced an actress called Manja 

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Behrens. Was Gerda not proud of him? Subsequently the Bormanns became advocates for polygamy in the new Nazi state.70 As for stealing, the existence of the ‘Canada’ at Auschwitz – meaning a vast depot for stolen goods – witnesses to the way the Nazis shamelessly plundered people of their property, personal effects and sometimes body-­parts. Well-­known is the way in which hair was woven into blankets, gold teeth melted down and fed into the state treasury – where it was not pilfered by the local SS. More than that, the drive to appropriate Lebensraum by conquest in Eastern Europe and Russia is eloquent testimony to covetousness on the grand scale. In the post-­war future planned as early as 1942 by Himmler and the SS, a network of expanded camps was to be an indispensable instrument for the enslaving and, if need be, the elimination of unwanted, non-­Germanic peoples.71 Covetousness thus extended to mass murder: take away peoples’ land and livelihood and, consequentially, their lives. At the end of this brief review of the ideologically driven Nazi erasure of religion and ethics, most clearly visible in the camps, we see a nation in a state of deep corruption, a nation without God, without ethics or law. It was, rather, ruled by a wild, unstable and murderous ideology. Moreover, because 70 The letter is dated 21 January 1944. See H.R. Trevor-­Roper (ed.), The Bormann Letters: The Private Correspondence Between. Martin Bormann and His Wife from January 1943 to April 1945. Trans., R.H. Stevens, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1954. See also, Anna Maria Sigmund, Die Frauen der Nazis II. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, München, 2002, pp.7–60. 71 The historian R.J. Evans estimates that the strategies laid out in the ‘General Plan for the East’ would have engulfed 45 million people: see Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War. Penguin, New York, 2009, pp.173–4. Mark Mazower, in a review of Evans in The Guardian (25 October 2008), has a higher estimate. He writes, ‘Himmler was […] planning for a new racial order in the east that would have allowed the SS to expel or kill more than 50 million people by 1970.’ Timothy Snyder in an article, ‘Holocaust: The Ignored Reality’, writes, ‘The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people’. New York Review of Books, 16 July–12 August 2009, vol. LVI, Number 12, p.14.

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the Shoah specifically targeted Jews, it involved not only the elimination of their religion, but also all Jews regardless of whether they were believers or not. It was all part of the demonic undertow of what was perpetrated. Two quotations can throw light on the meaning of all this. In Ephesians 2:12, there is a description of people who belong neither to Israel nor to the new, Christ-­centred faith that grew out of Judaism. ‘You were […] separate from Christ and excluded from membership of Israel, aliens with no part in the covenants of the Promise, limited to this world, without hope and without God.’ In the case of the Nazis, this condition was recklessly and jubilantly self-­chosen – with results that in the camps were everywhere apparent. Here we might recall Thomas More’s admonition to his son-­in-law, Roper, to the effect that if we once disregard law, even if it be to our own disadvantage, we make the world into the devil’s playground.72

IV. To this devil, Adolf Hitler, and the ‘unholy places’, which were his playground, we now turn. Having given an ideological and religious explanation of the camps, we now focus on a personal one. Two bits of theory will put us in touch with what is involved. Since time immemorial, people possessed of exceptional gifts – be they of leadership, or as thinkers or artists – what in modern English would be called ‘genius’ – have been characterised as possessing, or being possessed by, a ‘daemon’. Not only does their daemon seem qualitatively to lift them above the general run of humans, but they can also seem to ‘come’ from a different order, a time or space of mysterious otherness. Goethe called it an Urphenomene, a primal ‘excess’ far beyond the ‘merely’ ethical. Another word for this would be ‘charisma’, the power or ‘spirit’ or gift that indwells people of this nature. Hitler was often described in these terms. This was the overwhelming impression he made. 72 See Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. Heinemann, London, 1960, p.39, and More’s words: ‘And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – Man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?’ 

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It was manifest, for instance, in his development from Munich beer-­hall orator to the spellbinding leader/prophet of the Nuremberg rallies. Hitler’s daemon, however, was not neutral or benign. It was demonic, the energy that suffused it one of sheer evil manifesting itself as virulent, murderous hatred. The question is, in what did this ‘evil’ consist? The second piece of theory is the venerable notion of gratia capitis, the ‘grace’ or energy of the ‘head’. The roots of this are in the Pauline writings of the New Testament. In Ephesians 4:16, we read: ‘If we live by truth and in love, we shall grow completely into Christ, who is the head by whom the whole Body is fitted and joined together, every joint adding its own strength, for each individual part to work according to its function. So the body grows until it has built itself up in love.’ The picture here is of Christ as the head, the centre of truth and love, an energy that flows down and communicates itself to the ‘members’ of the ‘body’, the Church. In 1 Corinthians 12, an earlier version of the same idea, Christ is not so much the ‘head’, as the one who inspires the whole body in all its functioning with the particular Christic energy named as ‘Spirit’. Hitler’s persona, and the downstream effects it had in the Nazi Party and Germany in general, can be seen, or so I am suggesting, as a demonic parody of the Pauline notion of gratia capitis. Like a role-­model or hero, Hitler gave the signals – and transmitted the energy – that were picked up and turned into corresponding actions by those ‘in tune’ with his message or under its spell. How this worked, we shall see presently. To gain insight into the psychological profile and character of this ‘head’ – in Hitler’s case ‘Führer’/leader – here is a quotation from Ian Kershaw’s classic two-­volume biography of Hitler. It dates from the time after the failed plot to blow up Hitler on 20 July 1944 in the Operations Room of the Wolf ’s Lair near Rastenburg. Because Colonel von Stauffenberg only managed to arm one of the bombs of the two he was carrying into the conference room where Hitler was present, Hitler survived the muted explosion. Soon all hell broke loose. Hitler went berserk and set in train a vicious manhunt that engulfed all the plotters, and many others besides. Roland Friesler’s People’s Court worked overtime, as did the hangman at Plötzensee, the execution site in Berlin. Not only this, the executions, often within hours after the conclusion of trials, were filmed and recorded for Hitler’s personal gratification. Kershaw tells the story. On Hitler’s instructions they were denied any last rites or pastoral care […] The normal mode of execution for capital offences […] was beheading. But Hitler […] ordered […] those behind the conspiracy […] ‘hanged, hung up like meat carcasses’.

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In the small, single-­storey execution room […] hooks, indeed like meat hooks, had been placed on a rail just below the ceiling. Usually, the only light in the room came from two windows, dimly revealing a frequently used guillotine. Now, however, […] the executions were to be filmed and photographed […] the macabre scene […] illuminated with bright lights, like a film studio. On a small table in a corner of the room stood a […] bottle of cognac – for the executioners, not to steady the nerves of the victims. The condemned men were led in, handcuffed and wearing prison trousers. There were no last words, no comfort from priest or pastor; nothing but the black humour of the hangman. Eyewitness accounts speak of the steadfastness and dignity of those executed. The hanging was carried out within twenty seconds of the prisoner entering the room [with piano wire, not rope]. Death was not, however, immediate. Sometimes it came quickly; in other cases the agony was slow – lasting more than twenty minutes. In an added gratuitous obscenity, some of the condemned men had their trousers pulled down by their executioners before they died. And all the time the cameras whirred. The photographs and grisly film were taken to Führer Headquarters.73

Here, I suggest, we see nakedly displayed the kind of person that Hitler was: suffused with racially motivated hatred, utterly consumed and driven by an insatiable lust for power, and, underneath all this, radically insecure. It would be no exaggeration to say that at this particular moment he stands revealed as a screaming homicidal maniac obsessed with the pornography of death.74 We see, further, a man no longer able to respect any limits or boundaries of human decency, justice or mercy. It is the undisguised face of a monster. In character, then, is Hitler’s fascination, as with many other high-­ranking Nazis, with the occult. If it is meaningful to talk of ‘the Devil’, Hitler was the Devil incarnate. And here we do well to remember that the 1939–45 War, initiated by him, cost an estimated 50 million lives as well as untold other devastation. Here, I believe, we glimpse – and perhaps gain insight into – the ‘abyss of horror’ that was Hitler’s Reich, the place par excellence where the darkness of the twentieth century became visible. The question then is, how did this demon-­possessed maniac – for all the fact that he was created like all people ‘in the image of God’ and therefore fully and ethically accountable for his actions – manage to be so influential, to bewitch so many? Or, to follow through with our image 73 Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography, p.693. A similar, though less graphic account, can be found in Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death, pp.302–3. 74 There is, of course, also the well-­attested fact of Hitler’s squeamishness about actually seeing battlefields; his sentimentality around his dog, Prinz; his sense of the cocooning niceties of bourgeois life. All this, in the post-20 July 1944 situation – as indeed in his ‘last days’ in the Führer Bunker in Berlin – was thrown to the winds. 

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of gratia capitis, how did Hitler as ‘head’ of the Nazi body – manage to communicate and operationalise his persona so widely? The best explanation, in my judgement, is that offered by Kershaw in his meticulously researched biography. There he pinpoints the notion of ‘working towards the Führer’ as key. Far from being the well-­oiled, rational machine of popular imagination, the Nazi state was, in fact, a rather chaotic jumble of competing and often ill-­defined bureaucracies, institutions and other interests. Hitler in this situation was not a ‘hands-­on’ leader taking a detailed interest in policy, decisions and how they were carried out. He was, rather, more of a detached, even indolent ruler, a roi fainéant. His effectiveness, rather, consisted in making known, explicitly or implicitly, sometimes by hints, sometimes by direct command, what his will or intentions were. Memoranda that picked this up for bureaucratic consumption (and subsequent action) would begin, ‘Es ist des Führers Wunsch, dass […]’ (It is the Führer’s wish that […]).75 Now comes the practice of ‘working towards the Führer’. People, usually members of Hitler’s inner circle or others with access to him, would pick up these messages, verbal or deducible from Hitler’s reactions generally. The drama then was how they, the barons and bureaucrats of Nazidom, could outdo each other in the doing of the Führer’s will where this was known, or, as often, anticipated. In this highly competitive environment there were, predictably, bureaucratic (and personal) agendas to do with the accruing of power, prestige, funding, influence, and, not least, the crucial approval of the Führer. That, then, was how it worked; how ‘one thing lead to another’; how Hitlerite policies spread like metastasising cancers through the body politic; how in this chaotic situation and in vaulting, leapfrogging, unrestrained fashion, things got done; how, as in Hitler’s personal character, things were done without respect for law, morality, or any human criteria or meanings. The key players in this demonic game, as regards the camps, were men like Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Theodore Eike (first commandant of Dachau), Rudolf Hoess (commandant of Auschwitz). And of course many others. These were the biddable hollow men, possessed by the racist ideology sketched above. They operated in lordly contempt of any religion, ethics or law. 75

See, Gerald Fleming, Hitler und die Endlösung, ‘Es ist des Führers Wunsch …’. Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden and München, 1982.

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V. With no checks and balances – as might come from religion, law, ethics – death spread like wildfire and in a way that corresponded to Hannah Arendt’s later concept of the banality or routine bureaucratisation of evil. Now death became a trivial, taken for granted, everyday occurrence. I recall pictures from Mittelbau Dora (Nordhausen) of men queuing up for execution as though they were standing outside a fish and chip shop or a hamburger joint waiting for a meal. Its virulence and implacability, however, consisted not only in its sheer quantity and deliberate cruelty, but also in the way the SS hanged and murdered people right up to the very last days of the war. Now deliberately constructed places became the demonic space where all the salient features of Hitler’s Reich became terrifyingly real. We’re talking, of course, about the vast KZ archipelago, the unholy places, where, in the belief they were doing the sacred will of Hitler, men – and sometimes women – assiduously ‘worked towards the Führer’. The ‘way stations’ en route for Auschwitz and the other camps were the T4 programme, the Einsatzgruppen in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, and Operation Reinhard, to name but a few. Not only was the prophecy of John 16:2 fulfilled – ‘indeed the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is doing a holy service to God’ – it was also clear that these ‘unholy’ practices and places were intended to have an ‘afterlife’ in the future victorious Nazi state. As noted above, in the achievement of Germanic Lebensraum, slave labour and the elimination of unwanted people were to be continuing features of Nazi practice. In Auschwitz, therefore, Hitler, the head, and the whole ghastly operation – its body, its members – were one.76 To complete this ‘look into the abyss’, we might note how John’s words on ‘your father, the devil’ accurately describe Hitler, a man who acted without any apparent moral conscience or scruples. ‘He was a murderer from the start; he was never grounded in the truth; there is no truth in him at all. When he lies he is speaking the truth of his nature, because he is a liar, and the father of lies’ (8:44; cp. 10:1,10a). In Hitler’s case, the ‘lies and murder’ were, as we have seen, compounded of blood ideology, murderous anti-­Semitism, deliberate erasure of biblical covenantal religion and ethics, abolition of the rule of law, the Führer-­principle whereby the 76 When people, mostly in the poorer, eastern part of Germany (the former DDR), are now setting up Neo-­Nazi political groups, one wonders if they are aware of the kind of ‘fire’ they are playing with. 

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military swore direct and personal oaths of allegiance to Hitler, a disjointed yet powerful set of institutions that acted like Hitler’s ‘body’, and, of course, a huge network of camps that were the logical outcome of all of the above. Our perspective has been from the latter, the ‘unholy places’. This can lead us to some further and concluding reflections. The consistent pattern of deception and lies, so characteristic of Nazi practice – created in the image and likeness of Adolf Hitler – goes some way to explain why the majority of the population were either ignorant of what was really going on or chose to ignore it. Deception and lies became the moral fabric of society as of individuals. Besides, for them a patriotic fervour that corresponded to such things as economic recovery after the Depression, restoration of national pride after the débâcle of the 1914–18 War, and effective government after the failure of ‘Weimar’ democracy and the threat of the Communism, was too precious to barter away in favour of resistance to a tyranny that did not scruple to imprison or kill opposition. Nevertheless it remains a shocking fact that the professions – church, law, medicine, academia – largely fell in with Hitler and the National Socialist Party. There were exceptions; but the undeniable fact was that the rot of Nazism went right through society, from top to bottom. A high culture of music in particular persisted, as did advanced skills in science, technology and research. But because all this lacked regulation, any ethics or surrounding ‘culture of life’, it was all too easily exploited, traduced and turned to evil ends. If barbarism can be defined as ‘the uncontrolled ascendency of personal will and the destruction of love’,77 then we begin to understand what went on in the camps. The ‘I am’ of naked power had no anchoring in the ‘Thou art’ of love and respect for the other; just as it had no regard for the ‘We are’ of community, the structured freedoms that support the endless variety of persons-­in-relation that go to make up a free society. Instead, we see the ruthless erasure of whole sections of the population. To be demonised and targeted by the totalitarian state was truly a sentence of death and this without any recourse or appeal to religion, law or ethics. With these out of the way, we descend into the abyss. Should there be anything positive we can take out of this chapter, it would be a more accurate way of listening out for the cries of the victims. Now we know what they were up against: this sickness of the body politic flowing from its head and horribly manifest in the excrescences, the gangrenous wounds of the camps. 77 Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, p.114.

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6. Holy Places I Paul Celan and Grief

An overwhelming sense of the holy or sacred can occur at any time or place – miraculously, even in the midst of our so-­called secular or de-­sacralised world. Terry Slater gives the example of the memorial to the terrorist bomb-­blast of 2nd August 1980 in the Waiting Room of Bologna Station in Italy in which 80 people were killed, including two of his students, Catherine Mitchell and John Kolpinski, engaged to be married. The memorial, blessed by Pope John Paul II, consists in a tablet with the names of the victims inscribed on it and a symbolic glass-­filled gash across the wall where the blast occurred. With his two former students in mind, Slater describes his reaction: As I stood and wondered, I found myself unexpectedly standing in the presence of the Motherhood of God, weeping for her children and I, too, wept amongst the unseeing crowd. The Spirit of God calls people to make pilgrimages to strange places, many of them not conventionally sacred or religious.78

In a nutshell we have key elements of what follows: that in the combustion of original event, memorial site and memory, a powerful sense of presence or of the sacred or holy can emerge. Particularly striking is Slater’s sense of ‘the Motherhood of God, weeping for her children’. This connects with motherhood as the master image of what follows. For what in our culture could be more authentically sacred than the birthing and mothering of children?

I. But first, how to account for the radical change of focus in this chapter from unholy to holy? Do Auschwitz and the other sites permit such a move? 78 Terry Slater, ‘Encountering God: Personal Reflections on “Geographer as Pilgrim”’ . Arena, 36 (3), 2004, pp.248–9. I owe this reference to my colleague, Dr Elinor Sanderson. 

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Many would think not. Three insights, then, to help the reader re-­orient herself or himself. The first has to do with the perspective or standpoint of the observer, i.e. here the reader. Whereas in the previous chapter we looked at Auschwitz et al. from the standpoint of the perpetrators – from that of Hitler, the planners, the on-­site executioners – and to a lesser extent, from that of the bystanders or general population – we now adopt the standpoint of the victims. The last chapter ended with a plea to listen with an educated ear for their cries. This chapter endeavours to respond to that challenge. Now a whole other range of dramatis personae come into view: overwhelmingly the dead; but also the survivors and those who showed moral or spiritual heroism in their actions as inmates of Auschwitz or other camps. Not only are we talking about a number far greater than that of the perpetrators, we are also in the presence of people whose moral claim on us far outweighs the visceral disgust evoked by the perpetrators. In any event, it is the moral and spiritual weight of individuals that counts, their quality rather than their quantity. And although, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer acknowledged, there are only ‘guilty martyrs’ in the twentieth century,79 the victims are innocent because of the utterly undeserved nature of what was done to them. The second piece of re-­orientation concerns how we can discriminate between the holy and the unholy in what so far we have called ‘unholy’ places. With his wisdom about the ‘discernment of spirits’, St Paul can again be of assistance at this point. In 1 Thessalonians 5:19–22 he is speaking about the Spirit and those who have the authentic gift of prophecy. To verify this Paul says ‘Test everything and hold on to what is good, and shun every form of evil.’ To grasp his meaning we have to realise that there were people in the Pauline churches who, on the one hand, exercised gifts (charismata or gifts of the Spirit) – of apostleship, prophecy, teaching and so forth – and who, in the very moment of their inspiration, could utter the confession of faith, ‘Jesus is Lord’ (1 Corinthians 12:3). On the other hand, there were those whose inspiration could only be described as pagan and idolatrous, in this sense demonic. The anti-­confession of such people was, ‘A curse on 79 ‘We should not be surprised to see times approaching when martyrs’ blood will be required. But this blood, should we really still have the courage and fidelity to spill it, will not be as innocent and glorious as that of the first witnesses. Our own great guilt would be part of our blood, the guilt of the unprofitable servant who is thrown into the darkness.’ Sermon for Fourth Sunday After Trinity, 19 June 1932: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. IV. Chr. Kaiser Verlag, München, 1975, p.71.

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Jesus’ (Greek: anathema Iesous). The relevance of this for us in the present context, that of Auschwitz, is that ‘spirits’ of both kinds, of good as well as evil, can be encountered on site. In the last chapter, we spoke of the ‘aura’ of KZ Lagers as exuding evil, a ‘disturbing strangeness’ (Unheimlichkeit) that was palpable, real and dangerous. Without in any way detracting from that, the re-­focusing of the present chapter invites the reader to see this ‘aura’ as ambiguous, as a ‘numen praesens’ that, as we listen for the cries of the victims, can also disclose the holy or the sacred. In Act One (Scene 3) of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the would-­be king, analogue of Hitler in his murderous hubris, declares, ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen.’ Which is it, we are left asking, ‘fair’ or ‘foul’? That is the question of this chapter. Thirdly, with our focus now on the victims (rather than the perpetrators), we have to ask ourselves: What would they have wanted from posterity? To be remembered, yes, of course. But also, surely, a plea that life go on, that it flourish, that people – their descendants if any, victim-­survivors, and others – live full and productive lives by drawing on their victim experience in whatever way is appropriate. To say otherwise, to allow Auschwitz to paralyse life and its celebration, is surely to accede to the abyss of horror, the nihilism, and the racially motivated delight in killing at the heart of Nazism. A balance therefore has to be struck between remembrance and celebration – like those in the gospel who are fasting and yet are enjoined by Jesus not to ‘look dismal’ but rather to ‘put oil on your head, and wash your face’ (Matthew 6:16–18). In this way we are accountable to the victims without confusing ourselves with them. But our final accountability is to the God of life. This life, as we shall explore, not only encompasses the past and the present, but can also open up the future. We see this in people whose deeds become beacon lights for future generations.

II. How then in a site-­specific way might we encounter or be seized by a sense of the sacred? What makes a physical place a holy space? Two bits of pilgrim-­knowledge put me on the track of the sense of the holy that I am trying to articulate. 

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The first came to me at Treblinka (as related in my Diaries). Treblinka is the effective gravesite of an estimated 900,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and the districts surrounding Treblinka itself. It stands ringed with pine-­forest, on stony, sandy ground. As my visit drew to a close – my taxi back to the station honking to be off – impulsively I picked up a stone as a souvenir and put it in my pack. Wouldn’t it go well, I reasoned, under the cross in the place where I pray at home? As time passed, however, it increasingly struck me that, in removing a stone from the site, I had somehow deeply transgressed the sacredness of the place itself marked by the Jewish practice of placing stones on grave-­sites out of respect for the dead. For despite the impressive memorial at Treblinka, the names of the victims of Treblinka are largely unknown, not recorded. All that is inscribed on the many memorial stones around the central monument are the names of the places where they came from. In that way, the natural under-­foot stones of the place, the very ground on which they were murdered, become their only visible memorial. The stones, we could say, are ‘sacred to the memory of […]’, as was inscribed on tombstones in the nineteenth century. The stone in my backpack was therefore sacred, holy. What should I do with it? There was no practical way back to Treblinka itself. Later, in Zamosc en route to Balzac, I sought out the former synagogue, now the Public Library, a suitably Jewish place, and laid the stone to rest on one of the ledges in the wall of that building – where I hope it remains. The awareness was thus borne in on me of how, when murder has been committed, the blood of the victims ‘is crying out to God from the ground’ (Genesis 4:10). Or, in the words of Jesus, ‘if these [people] remain silent, the very stones will cry out’ (Luke 19:40). For all the power of human memory, only the holiness of God brings out the full depth of the outrage that has been perpetrated. If memory is the ‘space’ in which we visit holy or unholy places, the very ground on which we are standing, the place, itself fundamentally God’s creation, also witnesses powerfully to whatever was done there for good or ill. The second came to me at Auschwitz itself or, more precisely, at Auschwitz II, Birkenau, where, behind the gas chambers, the crematoria and a belt of trees called the Birkenwald, there is a large open space where the ashes of the victims lie scattered. In it, there are now a number of large Stars of David and, as befitting, a few small crosses. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, the sheer fact of the absence of approximately 1.2 million people in this one place, hits home like hammer blows. Sudden222 

ly, though, something else struck me. Was there not in history a similar gravesite, a place of emptiness and absence? I mean the ‘empty tomb’ of Jesus, admittedly that of only one man, but in its very facticity, perhaps analogous to the empty spaces of Birkenau, it being the tomb of one who was not only ‘innocent’ in the sense defined above, but also righteous in his moral and spiritual core or heart. Might not this particular absence throw light on the absence of the victims of Auschwitz? Might not the presence–­ absence of Christ become central to the pilgrim’s way of knowing in relation to the victims? Might not this assist us in posing the right questions as we stand amidst the sheer emptiness of the Auschwitz memorial site? For example, what happens next in this space? Does the sacred, like nature, abhor a vacuum? That, of course, has immediately to be balanced by the fact that a vacuum, a silence, prolonged if need be, is necessary for the sheer extent and horror of what happened to sink in; and perhaps for the significance of what took place to become manifest.80 We, the human community, need that kind of respectful time. Only so, it must be said, will we ever learn from it. Yet in the dialectic I am proposing, the counter question arises: is this space, this silence, this absence, forever to remain simply a memorial to a mass absence? Might there be more to our memory of the victims than a mere recording of the fact that they were murdered and are dead?

III. At the beginning of this chapter we noted Terry Slater’s sense of the motherhood of God at the Bologna memorial site. One attempt to make sense of the motherhood of God in relation to the Shoah and the memories it evokes is a poem by Paul Celan. Celan was a Romanian Jew whose family spoke German. His poetry was therefore written in German, a fact that would forever anguish him. How could he write in the language of the murderers of his parents? And yet he had no option. Both parents died in 1942 in a slave labour camp in the Ukraine, his father of typhus, his moth80 On this understanding of ‘space’ and in relation to 9/11, New York, see Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust, After September 11. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2002, pp.59, 72. 

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er shot as unfit for work. Her death particularly affected him with lasting agony, ‘the scream that never falls silent’. Celan’s theological reflection about her loss can be seen in a poem written in 1967. It revolves around the biblical image of mother ‘Rachel weeping for her children’ (Jeremiah 31:15). A strange combination of physiology and theology, it reads (in John Felstiner’s translation): NEAR, IN THE AORTA’S ARCH In bright blood: the brightword.

NAH, IN AORTENBOGEN Im Hellblut: das Hellwort.

Mother Rachel weeps no more. Carried across now all of the weeping.

Mutter Rahel weint nicht mehr. Rübergetragen alles Geweinte.

Still, in the coronary arteries, Still, in den Kranzarterien, unbinded: unumschnürt: Ziv, that light. Ziw, jenes Licht.81

‘Near’ in the poem is a loaded word. It evokes the ‘nearness’ of an earlier poem, ‘Tenebrae’, with its image of Jews in the gas chambers ‘clawed into one another’ (ineinander verkrallt) and, at the same time, the nearness of God as in Deuteronomy 30:14. Celan thereby invites us to see things in different perspectives, those of death and of life. What, then, are the connections between these differing levels of meaning? Felstiner suggests that in the writing of the poem ‘something clearly sparked as between the technical matter of vital organs and the stuff of spirituality’. This is born out by what Celan had been reading at the time: Gershom Scholem’s book The Mystical Shape of the Godhead and, during a visit to a Paris clinic, a handbook on human physiology. It was inside the front cover of the latter that Celan wrote the first version of the poem. In it he read a section on the heart where, in describing the coronary arteries, the text speaks of ‘clear’ or ‘bright red blood’ (hellrotes Blut) in the aortic arch. It also goes on to instruct the reader in how to put a tourniquet or binding (Umschnürung) on a wound. The poet’s mind – via the image of ‘brightness’ – leapt to a passage in Scholem’s book where he describes the Shekinah or presence of God as female, an ‘unearthly brilliance’ con81 For this and what follows, see John Felstiner, Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995, pp.236–41.

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cretely visible in Jeremiah’s image of Mother Rachel who, says Scholem, ‘weeps for her children going into exile’. The connection, then, that Celan invites us to make is between the voice emerging from the divine nearness (‘the brightword’) and the living, beating human heart (‘the bright blood’). Yet the image of Mother Rachel is double-­edged in the sense of having theological meaning as well as concrete historical reference: to Auschwitz, that is, and to the mode of God’s presence. As Scholem put it, Mother Rachel is ‘a figure of the Shekinah, God’s luminous presence dwelling in the world. Wherever the tribes of Israel are suffering, she weeps and entreats God’s mercy’ (Felstiner). That this double reference is what Celan intended is confirmed by a doggerel poem in Yiddish scribbled by him at the bottom of the relevant page in his copy of Scholem’s book. In Felstiner’s translation: Mama Rochl starts her weeping Vet di mamme Rokhl veynen Then Messiah can’t bear keeping Vet Meschiekh nit mer kenen Far away from such lamenting. Dos geveyn aribertogn.

The poem, however, is not yet finished. Celan tells us ‘Mother Rachel weeps no more’. Why no more? The idea seems to be that as ‘all of the weeping’ is ‘carried across’ from one generation to the next, so, in the survivors, it can become the very place where there is promise and hope. Just as a remnant returned from the Babylonian Exile after the destruction of Jerusalem, or Christ survived the slaughter of the innocents, so the survivors and successors of Auschwitz may be heirs to fulfilments as yet undreamed of. The final stanza can be read as Celan’s response to that promise. The bright blood in the aortic arch is ‘unbinded’. The heart is healed, the tourniquet removed or unclamped, the constriction of grief thereby loosed. The blood, purified and made passionate by grief, flows on as co-­passion; the breathing, we might add, as inspiration, as prayer. This is because there has been an illumination, an inspiration, a ‘brightword’. That word is Ziv, the Hebrew for ‘light’. In the stillness or silence with which the poem begins – ‘Still’ – Ziv, light, is the word we are invited to hear. What is unbinded is, like the heart, Ziv, ‘that light’. So what light is this? Here we reach the heart of the poem. The answer for Celan was revealed by Scholem’s remarks about Ziv in his chapter on the Shekinah. There he read and underlined the passage where Scholem writes that God’s indwelling presence can ‘reveal itself in an unearthly brilliance that is often [in the Kabbalah] called the light (Ziv) of the Shekinah’. Here, in a wonderful life-­giving synergy, the ‘bright blood’ and the 

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‘brightword’ are both ‘unbinded’, the one illumined and enlivened by the other. As in the chaos prior to creation when all was ‘dark and void’, God said, ‘Let there be light’ (Genesis 1:1–3), so now, in and after Auschwitz, whenever Ziv, the brightword is spoken and taken to heart, the new possibilities for life and creativity open up.

IV. The theology of presence that Celan here articulates opens up powerfully onto an equally important one of action or agency. Rabbi Albert Friedlan­ der, for example, and building on a similar notion of presence, is strongly insistent that the notions of presence and agency, God’s and ours, must never be prized apart. In a statement intended to be inclusive of Jews and Christians, he writes: Positive Christian thinking brings the teaching of the Suffering God into the human situation, where divine pain can only be alleviated by human action that directs itself to the removal of evil in the world.82

There is, according to Friedlander, one further lesson to be learned from this linkage of presence and agency in the suffering God: ‘that God is on the side of the victims, not on the side of the perpetrators’ offering salvation to the one and calling for the repentance of the latter. That is exactly in line with the thesis of this book: that we should be instructed by the suffering Christ to ‘hear the cries of the victims’. Here by another route, that of hearing – and it could be seeing or touch – we glimpse the face of the suffering God in whom presence and action are one. This surely is the ethical logic of the Judeao-Christian story of redemption whether it be played out on Calvary or in Auschwitz or simply wherever innocent people suffer. This is the kind of ethical agency that stems from the presence of the suffering, co-­passionate God who, alike for Jews and Christians, is their common and deepest imperative. On this more anon.

82

See Albert Friedlander, ‘Jewish and Christian Suffering in the Post-­Auschwitz Period’, in Rittner and Roth (eds), Memory Offended, p.181 – with allusion to Dorothee Sölle.

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7. Holy Places II Paul Ricoeur and Memory

He [Abel], though dead, still speaks. Hebrews 11:4

We could paraphrase Paul Celan as saying that grief, once touched by the living God, can modulate from paralysis to life and from thence to action. The present chapter comes at the same problem, but from a different angle – that of memory. Grief, we could say, stems from what is remembered and how. Indeed; but how can we understand the relation between the grief we feel now and what we remember factually from the past? I propose to approach this problematic through philosophical reflection rather than poetic insight, the two, of course, never fully distinct. In brief: in Shoah context, what kind of memory informs and fuels grief? This, as we shall see, opens out onto a large agenda. Already we have quoted Genesis 4:10, God’s word to Cain, the murderer of his brother Abel. ‘Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.’ Earlier I made the distinction between things that have happened ‘in living memory’ – decreasingly true of the Shoah – and things that persist across generations as ‘living memory’. Given that the places I have visited are called Gedenkstätte, places of memory, is there a concept of memory that allows them to be known as holy as well as unholy? Further questions flood in. Are the representations of memory – in the mind or heart, in story, discourse, monument or the very sites themselves – designed to lock us into the past with as much realism as can be achieved? Or are memories ‘living memories’ in the sense that they goad us into creating a future for ourselves in which the horrors of Auschwitz become unthinkable? Or are memories – to go to the opposite extreme – simply ways of numbing or anaesthetising our perceptions of the past so as to make them bearable?



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I. In responding to these questions, I turn to Paul Ricoeur’s great book, Memory, History, Forgetting.83 To take the last of our questions first, memory for the pilgrim cannot be what Ricoeur calls ‘commemoration’. He means commemorative practices that effectively by-­pass the heart, conscience or quick of any who seek to memorialise the Shoah. He has in mind the erection of impressive memorials accompanied by pompous quasi-­religious civil ceremonies. Ricoeur characterises these as ‘a structuring of forgetfulness’ in which ‘death [is] calmed down’ by the power élite, the establishment, in order to impose some dominant myth whether this be of victory or resistance. Neglected in this anodyne commemorative version of memory is the bloody mortality involved in victory – now aseptically calculated quasi-­mathematically in terms of body counts – or the degree to which resistance in public mythology masks a deeper, more widespread complicity.84 In commemoration, in other words, we have a ‘no fault’ situation in which everyone who accepts that the victors’ version of the past is justified in their own eyes comes up smelling like a rose. Its function is to repress psychologically or suppress politically anything that would threaten the power élite’s self-­legitimating mythology (pp.450 ff.). Citizenship now means the meek acceptance of this version of events. In place of, say, forgiveness or any real reckoning with the past, we have a domesticating amnesty, an amnesia which is the polar opposite of anamnesis, the living memory that makes real or re-­presents the past in the present. If ‘commemoration’ in this mode were the function of Gedenkstätte, they would indeed be unholy places, dedicated to a thin veiling of unhealed wounds, a bland ignorance of the real horrors of the past. Such sanitised remembering is the syndrome of the tourist, 83

In what follows, the relevant page numbers for Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting are indicated in brackets in the text. 84 On the ‘body-­count’ version of victory, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, 1985. For a systematic deconstruction of national myths of resistance, see David S. Wyman (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1996. More recently, Tony Judt, A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin, Harmonds­ worth, 2006, especially pp.803–34, ‘Epilogue: From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’.

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the person who, in lockstep with the Zeitgeist, is out to have ‘fun’, ‘a good time’, be enriched by yet another experience. This, it hardly needs stressing, is not the pilgrim way.

II. Ricoeur now contrasts the inherent superficiality – and therefore melancholia – of commemoration with the kind of memory that gives rise to genuine mourning and grief and, with it, the possibility of ‘working through’ to a new and potentially creative frame of mind. If, in place of Holocaust denial, we accept as veridical testimony from many sources about the events in question, then this kind of remembering – by the sheer reality of what it relates – is inescapably linked to mourning centred on overwhelming grief. How can we remain unaffected by what we see or hear or read? Any healing of memories that may now take place is therefore not achieved by the oblivion of forgetting, but by mourning, the hard work of working through the real heartfelt grief provoked by past events that are acknowledged as inescapably real (p.180). The crimes of the past can in this way be compared to wounds that are inflicted on memory. The question is, can these wounds be healed (p.319) even if the scar will always remain? This kind of mourning Ricoeur compares to the experience of losing a loved one. He writes, ‘As for loss, separation as rupture of communication – the deceased as someone who no longer answers – constitutes a genuine amputation of oneself to the extent that the relation with the one who has disappeared forms an integral part of one’s self-­identity. The loss of the other is in a way the loss of self […]’ (p.359). Any Jew who has lost multiple relations or forebears in the Holocaust will know the painful diminishment brought about by such losses. For a Christian like Dietrich Bonhoeffer for whom the Jewish people were ‘the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ’ (Ethics), his belief in Christ as Jew and as victim provoked not only empathy but also a resolve, fraught with risk, to come to their aid.



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III. But now Ricoeur comes up with a brilliant insight. He compares the work of memory and the grieving and ‘working through’ that go with it to the construction of ‘the sepulchre, the tomb of yesterday’s dead’ (p.337). Ini­ tially this powerful image functions as a way of creating a gap for the historian between the present and the past, a past that is still ‘too close’, if, like the Shoah, it happened in living memory. The sepulchre thus creates a distance or detachment from the events being remembered. It allows the past to break off from the present – Ricoeur frequently quotes Aristotle’s blunt reminder that ‘all memory is of the past’. In line with this, the aim of the sepulchring of the past is to shift the historian’s perspective from the subjective to the objective; given, of course, that ‘the conflict of interpretations’ over the events in question will never cease. There is, however, more to this image of the sepulchre than ‘the privilege of history to offer to those absent ones of history the pity of an offer of burial’ (p.350). Now he draws a parallel between the writing of history and the rite of burial, rite corresponding to writing. The work of the historian, says Ricoeur, is ‘the scriptural equivalent of the social ritual of entombment, the act of sepulchre’ (p.365). This, however, is not confined to giving the victims a decent burial. It is also a way of giving them a voice, allowing them to speak. Yet the historian goes one step further. In giving voice to the dead, he or she focuses particularly on the poor, the anonymous, the masses – as opposed to kings and rulers. In this ‘heretical’ history, the historian says ‘what these others might say’ (p.342). Accordingly, a history that is ‘irredeemable’ is one that has never been spoken about; while, correspondingly, redemption consists in the historian’s ability to be the one who ‘makes the dead speak’ (p.368). Already we can see one part of the sacredness of a place of memory like Auschwitz – its potential to give voice to the silent, the victims. In my ‘pilgrim’ discourse, I have spoken of ‘hearing the cries of the victims’. Ricoeur’s master image of the sepulchre, however, has further connotations. It does not just refer, first of all, to what happens in cemeteries, the places where the physical remains of the dead are disposed of – the same, of course, applying to crematoria. This would be burial (or cremation). Sepulchre, rather, is an act whose resonance is not confined to the moment of burial. In his own words, ‘The sepulchre remains because the gesture 230 

of burial remains; its path is the very path of mourning that transforms the physical absence of the lost object into an inner presence. The sepulchre as the material place thus becomes the enduring mark of mourning, the memory-­aid of the act of sepulchre’ (p.366). Immediately we can see the potential of Gedenkstätte to be ‘holy’ in the sense of places where memory is as painfully real as the corresponding work of mourning and ‘working through’ is real. Memory, in other words, can be the act that, pilgrim-­ fashion, is done in situ, at the very place of memory, Auschwitz, say, where, as with the perpetual mnemonic of the sepulchre, the true work of memory in grief and ‘working through’ takes place. Once again we glimpse the sacredness of places that at first blush appeared irredeemably evil. Such acts of memory are made all the more powerful when the image of sepulchre so understood is combined with the historian’s grounded art of allowing the dead to speak. Sepulchre is thus the place where the ‘working through’ of mourning happens in the encounter with real people – the victims in the living memory of history – and real grief of the bereaved, the mourners. There is, however, more to it than that. For Ricoeur the sepulchre does not signal a crippling obsession with death as an event in the past. Could it be, rather, that, along with burial/entombment, there might go some form of resurrection? In this way sepulchres can liberate the dead as well as entomb them. This figures if sepulchres are conceived of as ‘houses of language’, ones in which historians strive for the wholeness of memory or recall, where the dead are remembered not only for their dying but equally for their living. What, then, is meant by living? Here Ricouer refers to his earlier work, Oneself as Another,85 where the ‘I can’ of the ‘I’ lived in relation to the ‘other’ expresses itself ‘in verbs of action and passion’. These define the capacities inherent in the gift of being human: the one who is ‘capable of speech, of action, of narrative, of imputation’ (p.362). Following Aristotle’s dictum ‘There are many senses in which a thing may be said to be’, Ricoeur adds to this list ‘the power to remember’ linked (as above) to ‘the power to speak, the power to act, the power to recount, the power to be imputable with respect to one’s actions as their genuine author’ (pp.344–5). So we’re not just talking about ‘being-­busy’, but rather ‘astonishment, suffering, and joy, along with initiative’ as things that theories of action with respect to both past and present have to take into account (p.348). These, in other words, are the very things the historian would be looking for in fuller 85 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another. Trans., Kathleen Blamey, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1992. 

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accounts of the victims in their living as in their dying. Examples of this kind of history writing would be Theo Richardson’s Konin, Eva Hoffman’s Schettl or Hannah Mandel’s Beim Gehen entsteht der Weg (roughly, ‘The way opens up as we go along’). In these accounts the richness and depth of the pre-­Holocaust lives of some of the victims is vividly recounted.86 In Mandel’s case this extends to her life after Auschwitz. We have to ask ourselves: how shall we ever understand the victims if we don’t know what it meant for them to live; and, in the case of victim-­survivors, to live on?

IV. The purpose then of talking ‘sepulchre’ as the place/space of the resurrection of the past is to ask how it can offer resources for living in the present. Can we, in other words, to some extent repair the broken connections between the past (caused by Auschwitz) and the present? To pursue this theme Ricoeur has to build bridges between the living past, however tragic, and the living present. We have already noted the historian’s function of making the dead speak; and in a later chapter we shall look at the concept of ‘recognition’ to mean recognising the dead for who they were in a spirit of active thanksgiving in the present.87 Here, in Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur makes use of the concept of ‘debt’. He writes, ‘The tie between futureness and pastness is assured by a bridging concept, that of being in debt. Anticipatory resoluteness can only be the assumption of the debt that marks our dependence on the past in terms of heritage’ (p.363). We are, in other words, indebted to the past for our culture, religion, language, understandings of life, that whole ‘soil’ in which we live and grow. This is our ‘heritage’, and it can include negative things like guilt as well as positives such as discovery and achievement. 86

Theo Richardson, Konin, A Quest. Vintage Books, London, 1996; Eva Hoffman, Shettl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 1997; Hannah Mandel, Beim Gehen ensteht der Weg: Gespräche über das Leben vor und nach Auschwitz. Aufgezeichnet von Norbert Reck, Literatur Bibliotek, Argumente/Ariadne, 2008. 87 Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition. Trans. David Pellauer, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2005.

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The – at first sight – opaque notion of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ is the fruit of a sustained critical dialogue between Ricoeur and Martin Heidegger – too complex to reproduce here. The fundamental contrast, however, is between Heidegger’s concept of ‘being-­toward-death’, in which death is a matter for each individual and which, until the actual moment of death, always lies in the future; and Ricoeur’s more nuanced idea of ‘being-­inthe-­face-of-­death’. This is not the obsession with death I mentioned earlier. Rather, in a way that is inclusive of death whether remembered from the past or anticipated in the future, Ricoeur speaks of ‘the-­potentiality-of-­ being-as-­a-whole’ (p.362). Making use of Kierkegaard’s ‘theme’ of ‘repetition’, Ricoeur sees history ‘not only as the evocation of the dead but as the theatre of the living of other times’ (p.351). Or, if in Heidegger’s ‘being-­ toward-death’ the ethical keynote is ‘care’/Sorge, in Ricoeur’s re-­writing of him, care is twinned with ‘birth’ in a vita activa whereby ‘care’ in the present – albeit hemmed in by the individual’s inevitable death – opens out into ‘care’ as an ‘anticipation of possibility’ (Heidegger’s phrase) not only for the individual in the present, but also in an ‘openness’ that leaves space for what is ‘outstanding’ or unfinished in the lives of the yet unborn of future generations (pp.356–7). In this way the past cares for the present. Ricoeur summarises: ‘The vis-­à-vis of the historian is not only the dead for whom she constructs a scriptural tomb; the historian does not only strive to resuscitate the living of the past who are no longer but who once were, but also attempts to re-­present actions and passions’ (p.384) with a view, we may add, to their resonance in the present.

V. So where is all this heading? Ricoeur’s reflections run in two directions: towards the outer world of politics and, equally, toward the inner life where individuals have to wrestle with the issues of forgiveness and reconciliation. Both these foci have potential for life or death. Continuing the metaphor of ‘sepulchre’ he writes, ‘[the] scriptural sepulchre extends the work of memory and the work of mourning on the plane of history’ (p.499). He could have said ‘onto the plane of history’ because the final destination of the living memories enshrined in history is to be put into ‘the hands of 

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those who make history’ in the present. This is a reversal of roles because we are no longer talking about the impotent passivity of victims, but about the active willingness of people to learn from the victims in the decisions they make or the influence they wield in their political lives. Now we are not only concerned with the historian who writes about the past, but much more with ‘the citizen who responds to the events of the past’ (p.500) in the unfolding of the present. The ethos of this kind of responsible citizenship consists inter alia ‘in correcting, criticising, even refuting the memory of a determined community, when it folds back upon itself and encloses itself within its own sufferings to the point of rendering itself blind and deaf to the suffering of other communities’ (p.500). Does not this exactly describe the dilemma of present-­day Israel? The Epilogue to Ricoeur’s book is entitled ‘Difficult Forgiveness’. While it does not address the Holocaust specifically, we can see the issues it raises as addressing the inner lives of all caught up in that event, ranging from the perpetrators to the victims. The underlying issue – highlighted by what has just been said – is whether any memorialising of the past that does not include the biblical categories of repentance and forgiveness so locks people into the past that their perceptions of the present become fatally skewed. This applies equally if we switch from the religious language of repentance and forgiveness to the secular discourse of the making and acceptance of apologies.88 Might not part of the holiness of unholy places be their invitation to the descendants of the perpetrators, Germans, as to the descendants of the victims, Jewish people, to meet each other in a spirit of reconciliation? That this could happen in situ at the very places of memory themselves (Gedenkstätte) would be testimony to the reality of what was there transacted. This, I would say, has already begun in a small, anticipatory way in the Carmelite convents I have visited. To many this suggestion will sound preposterous. How can there possibly be forgiveness for acts that can with justice be seen as unforgivable? We’re talking, let us recall, about the racially motivated, intentional and utterly ruthless slaying of millions of Jewish people whose loss is still felt with undiminished pain by their descendants. ‘My pain is ever before me’ (Psalm 38:17), a text chosen by the President of Israel and on display at Auschwitz I, surely part of the full human meaning of the concept of ‘living memory’, the remembrance (anamnesis) of a dead who refuse ‘to be calmed 88

See, Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, 1991.

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down’. On the other hand, there are issues to be confronted that are no less real which, while they root back into the Shoah, have more to do with the present and the future. For example, does the Holocaust-­inspired claim to victim status by Israel blind it to the sufferings of the Palestinian people? Or, does the burden of guilt and blame from the past carried by Germany as a nation get in the way of Jewish recognition of the immense goodwill for Israel felt by Germans one or two generations after ‘what happened’? At the same time, might not the same guilt fuel an uncritical support for the state of Israel by Germany? All concerned can thus be seen as saddled with mutually distorting mythologies about themselves and each other that hinder constructive dialogue or other actions in the present or future. It goes far beyond my competence to resolve such questions. Rather, with the help of insights from Ricoeur, I wish to suggest that it might now be time to regard Gedenkstätte as more than places where memory is kept alive with the sole purpose of perpetuating old pain and old enmities. Can we, like pilgrims, become aware of the horror, pain and loss these places represent, learn from them, and yet nevertheless be prepared to move on? In his discussion, Ricoeur quotes Kierkegaard and Jacques Derrida. Kierkegaard, in a little-­known work – ‘What We Learn from the Lilies of the Field and from the Birds of the Air’89 – cautiously sounds the praise of ‘forgetting as the liberation of care’. Warily, Ricoeur comments, ‘under pain of slipping back into the trap of amnesty-­amnesia, ars oblivionis [this cannot] constitute an order distinct from memory’; but, as Freud puts it, the ‘working through’ of care/cares in analysis is in principle ‘terminable’ (p.505). Kierkegaard puts it more positively. The point of contemplating ‘the lilies of the field and the birds of the air’ is ‘to consider how glorious it is to be a human being’, and this no matter how burdened we feel by cares, anxieties, distress. The outcome is that ‘we learn something about ourselves’, and that ‘something’ does not lie in any forgetting of the twin works of memory and mourning, but rather, as he puts it, in understanding that man ‘without working, without spinning, without any meritoriousness, is more glorious than Solomon’s glory by being a human being’. Accordingly – in this matter of forgiveness and repentance – we might ask ourselves, does not the glory of being human outride the grievances and guilt that drive us apart? In typically nuanced fashion, Ricoeur concludes, 89



Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Trans., Howard V. Hong and Edna D. Hong, Princeton University Press, New Jersey 1993, pp.155–212.

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‘Carefree memory on the horizon of concerned memory, the soul common to memory that forgets and does not forget.’ Jacques Derrida, therefore, or so it seems to me, hits exactly the right note when he writes, ‘Forgiveness is not, and it should not be, either normal, or normative, or normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, standing the test of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.’90 If resurrection interrupts and relativises human categories of death and its entire related semantic field, forgiveness has the potential to do the same for a humanity locked into issues of grief, guilt and grievance. For no genuinely new or constructive future can possibly be created out of attitudes that have more to do with mutual accusation than mutual reconciliation or genuine co-­operation. It boils down to this. If we can’t forgive, are we fated to live in the past, to remain entrapped not in the sepulchre of living memory with all its potential for life, but rather to be entombed with both victims and perpetrators in an endless, implacable and ultimately sterile interchange dominated by self-­righteousness met with equally futile attempts at self-­justification? This surely is a road that leads to nowhere. For while it may have been appropriate at the time of the crimes remembered, it provides an increasingly dysfunctional model for interpreting the present or future – or, worse still, has no future through being locked into the past. We have to ask ourselves: does living in a state of wilful irreconciledness not only prevent co-­operation in the construction of a humane future but also, more dangerously, fuel rankling enmities that irrupt all too easily into murderous strife? Reconciliation, by contrast, is as truth telling in its intention as it can be liberating in its performance.

90 Quoted in Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, pp.469–70.

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C. Jewish–­Christian Dialogue 8. Rachel Weeping For Her Children Biblical Precursor of the Holocaust

We now turn to the section of this book devoted specifically to Jewish–­ Christian dialogue. The question that underlies it is that of the theology of history, fundamental to biblical tradition. Specifically: given the silences and absences of Auschwitz, is there any meaningful way of talking about God’s agency or way of acting in history? Or does the silence of the victims reveal an inexplicable silence of God? Does their absence betoken the absence or impotence of a supposedly interventionist omnipotent Lord? For all their familiarity, these questions still, in my judgement, await answers.

I. My strategy in addressing them – how successfully is for the reader to judge – will be threefold. First, in the figure of ‘Rachel weeping for her children’ we have what is perhaps the most profound biblical reflection on catastrophe. Jeremiah 31:15–17 wrestles with the fact and horror of the destruction of Jerusalem in 566–7 bce and the deportation of its inhabitants to Babylon. How is the voice of God to be heard in this situation? The text, moreover, is common to both traditions, Jewish and Christian. Similar questions arise in conjunction with the massacre by Herod of babies and toddlers – ‘the innocent’ – after the birth of Jesus (Matthew 2:16–18). Is there anything we can learn, then, from Jeremiah 31, the whole chapter, as we confront the Holocaust? Second, still with the question of agency in mind – whether of God or the victims themselves – I propose to listen to Jewish responses to the Holocaust. Most Christians have heard of Elie Wiesel, but what of the vibrant 

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debate within Judaism itself involving names such as Mark C. Ellis, Richard Rubinstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Ignaz Maybaum, Zvi Kolitz, David Weiss Halivni, Emil Fackenheim, Arthur A. Cohen, Irving (Yitzshak) Greenberg, Steven T. Katz, Jonathan Sacks, Melissa Raphael (now Raphael-­Levine) and many others? In wrestling with the fundamental theological questions posed by their own Shoah-­wracked history, Jewish thinkers provide much that is of indispensable value to others faced with tragedy, atrocity or geno­ cide. The Christian, as I can testify, will, in listening to Jewish voices, also encounter a depth of theological reflection and particularity of historical reference that is seldom replicated in works of Christian theology. My third strategy – the most risky and the most difficult – will be to ask whether any valid analogies or parallels can be drawn between Golgotha and Auschwitz. Is there some real kinship that we can discern between Jesus as Jew and as victim and the victims and victim-­survivors of the Holocaust? In that exploration two other questions come to the fore. Is there anything – as we look at the victim of Golgotha and the victims of the Shoah – that we can learn from them about victimhood as such? Do historic victims have a peculiar power, both ethical and theological, to speak to us today? Are they in that way akin to martyrs? And, closely related, if Jewish–­Christian dialogue around the above-­mentioned topics can give rise to shared understandings of the ethic embedded in Torah and covenant, in what will this consist?

II. So much by way of preamble. Turning now to the matter in hand, that of historical precedent, there are many biblical narratives we could learn from. The Book of Esther, for instance, celebrates the deliverance of Jews from a pogrom. The Exodus itself is similar, moving, as it does, between the poles of threatened genocide and liberation. If Esther calls to mind the long tear- and blood-­stained history of pogroms against the Jewish people throughout their history, Exodus evokes other realities that re-­surfaced in modern form in Hitler’s Reich: brickworks, granite quarries, slave labour, grandiose building projects, deliberately engineered mortality and much else. All this is forcibly brought home to the pilgrim as he or she visits such places as Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg or Buchenwald. 238 

For all the singularity of the Holocaust, narratives such as Esther or the Exodus could be seen as providing valid starting points for contemporary essays in the theology of history after Auschwitz. I have, however, chosen Jeremiah 31 and the figure of Rachel not only for its ecumenical resonance, but also because it addresses head-­on the fact of an historic catastrophe and the mortality and suffering it involved. If we bracket out the crucifixion of Jesus, this, I would argue, offers the nearest biblical precedent for theological reflection on the Holocaust. Jeremiah 31, the whole chapter, is a collection of prophecies born out of the horrors of the destruction of Jerusalem in 587–6 bce by the Babylonians and the exile of its inhabitants. Five key details provide starting points for the kind of theological reflection I have in mind. The first has to do with the figure of Rachel herself; the second with the significance of Ramah as an ancient transit camp; the third with the horror and finality of the murder of children; the fourth with the embodiment of hope in the birthing of children in exile; and the fifth, living memory of the past as key to any sustainable future. In v.15, if we can begin there, we have the person of Rachel ‘weeping for her children’. Only her first name is given, not her family name. In this anonymity she represents all Jewish women at that time and place, women whose children had either been killed or ripped from their bosom. This, shall we say, was the historical fact then and there. The historical analogy with the Holocaust – the here and now – is striking. On the memorial at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw, the place where Jews from the Ghetto were assembled before being herded into cattle cars bound for Treblinka, only representative first names of victims are inscribed: Miriam, Yitzak, Abram, Sarai, Moshe, Esther… This reflects the fact that Jews were loaded holus bolus into the trains without anybody bothering to record their names. The subtext of Rachel’s ‘voice’ might therefore be: ‘what they did to you is what they did to us’. Not only do we have here a striking historical analogy between past and present, but also potential for an expression of historical solidarity between women and children, victims and victim-­survivors, both then and now. Rachel, we could say, is always weeping for her children. To take this one step further: in Gershom Scholem’s interpretation, Rachel is the symbol – or embodied reality – of the Shekinah, the bright tabernacling presence of God present wherever the people of Israel suffer.91 In the figure 91 Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. Schocken Books, New York, 1991, pp.143–7. 

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of Rachel, then, do we have – as starting point for Holocaust reflection – both an imperative about recognising the terrible suffering involved – ‘Rachel weeping for her children’ – and, in discernment of the presence of God, the principle of hope for the future? In Auschwitz terms, we should also speak of Rachel weeping with her children: evoking the many mothers who decided to stay with their children en route for the gas chambers, instead of offering themselves for slave labour and possible survival. In v.15 there is another piece of historical particularity. ‘A voice is heard in Ramah.’ What is the significance of Ramah? Jeremiah 40:1 and 4 give the answer. Ramah, just a few miles north of Jerusalem, was probably the transit point, the place where people were gathered before being deported to Babylon. After the brutality of the destruction of Jerusalem, the prospect of exile must have seemed like a sentence of death, at best an uncertain future. In fact many did survive, a generation or two later to ‘return to Zion’ as related in Isaiah 40–45. In this we see both the equivalences and the differences in historical precedents. Ramah, as collecting point for exile, is uncannily like Drancy in France, Westerbork in Holland, the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw – and countless ghettoes – where Jews were assembled prior to transportation to one or other of the death camps. That is the similarity; the dissimilarity is glaringly obvious. In the Holocaust there were pitifully few survivors. The modern interpreter is thus confronted with the singularity of the Holocaust: the racially motivated attempt to slay all, not just some, Jews. The same v.15, therefore, forces us to face up to the finality of what happened. ‘They are no more.’ Not only had children been ripped from their mothers’ arms, they had also been murdered. Psalm 137:7–8 gives a graphic account of what happened: the city razed to the ground, babies smashed against rocks. Yet Rachel is still alive, albeit weeping, grieving. In Holocaust terms, this is reflected in how able-­bodied women were sometimes retained as slave labour and for other purposes such as enforced prostitution, their children (if they were mothers) brutally discarded. Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s 1974 remark about Holocaust discourse of any kind resonates with this. ‘No utterance, theological or other, should be made that is not credible in the face of burning children.’92 Jeremiah 31:15, we could say, is fully respectful of that principle. Rachel, weeping for her children, incarnates the appropriate work of mourning. Is there any grief 92 Irving Greenberg, ‘Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust’, in Eva Fleischner (ed.), Auschwitz – Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust. Ktav Publishing, New York, 1977, p.23.

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like a mother’s for a dead child, especially one who has been brutally or callously murdered? The text nonetheless strikes a note of hope. ‘Keep your voice from weeping […] for there is reward for your work […] they shall come back from the land of the enemy […] there is hope for the future […] your children will come back to their own country’ (vv.16–17; compare v.22). What justifies language like this – coming (as it does in the text) from the mouth of God? ‘Thus says the Lord.’ The fact that the addressees of this text are woman exiles could mean that whatever their work or role in the community, their prime task in this situation was to be the mothers of the next generation. For without a new generation, there would be no Israel, no long-­term survival. ‘Your children’ could therefore refer to children, children to be born in the seemingly hopeless situation of exile. This can be strengthened by v.22, ‘a woman encompasses a man’, which, according to one interpretation, means that ‘Virgin Israel’ – the childless woman, whether Rachel, bereft of hers, or young women not yet mothers – will bear offspring.93 In this way, Israel will have posterity, a future. Is this how Israel survived, in the willingness of shocked and enslaved women to bear children in hope, hope here anchored firmly to the birth stool? That this is indeed what Jeremiah intended is confirmed by his letter to the Exiles (29:4–9). Part of this reads, now an exhortation to men, ‘Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease’. The reference to the original Genesis mandate to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (1:22, 28 & etc.) is clear; and historical memory will spring back to Exodus 1:5–22, the defiance of the Israelite midwives in the face of the genocidal intentions of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Survival – understood as the bringing of the next generation into life – is thus one basic meaning of hope. The same note is struck in Isaiah 7:14: that the ‘young woman’ – possibly wife of king Ahaz – is with child, is the sure sign that there will be a peopled future, that God, Immanuel, is ‘God with us’ – ‘us’ being the inhabitants of Jerusalem in context of the Syro-­Pheonician war. Once again this offers focus for contemporary Holocaust interpretation. If we are to identify points of life or hope amidst the prevailing devastation, could it be in women and men willing, for all their loss and grief, to birth children in 93 Leo G. Perdue, ‘Introduction and Notes for Jeremiah’, Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV. HarperCollins, New York, 1993, p.1173, writes, ‘In contrast to Rachel bereaved of children, Virgin Israel will bear a son, a posterity, and thus have a future.’ 

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hope, a new generation?94 This was the very question that faced thousands of shattered Jewish ‘Displaced Persons’ given shelter in the Bergen-­Belsen Camp in the immediate post-­war years. Here we’re talking about victim-­survivors. In the Holocaust itself, to be pregnant was a sentence of death. No less interesting are vv. 38–40. Integral to the post-­exile, rebuilt Jerusalem is a memorial site. ‘The whole valley of the dead bodies and the ashes […] shall be sacred to the Lord.’ The place in question, the Valley of Hinnom, was the site of child sacrifice, one of the murkiest episodes in Israel’s past (see Jeremiah 7:31–32, 19:2, 6; 2 Kings 23:10), fiercely denounced by Jeremiah. It was also called the ‘Valley of Slaughter’, reflecting the ruthless slaying of people during the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 587–6o BCE. This site, then, is a place of memory in many senses: the outermost mark of Israel’s sinfulness – what could be worse than killing the coming generation? – and, at the same time, the unholy place of slaughter. This provokes the question: is to remember in this full, uncensored way to cut the very nerve of hope? The meaning of hope in the text, however, seems to be the opposite. Along the lines of J.B. Metz’s ‘the future in the memory of suffering’, remembrance of this kind is the pre-­condition for the opening up of any ethically informed life in the future. We are talking about learning the lessons of the past in an unflinchingly particular and viscerally hard way. Some of the implications of this come out in Isaiah 65:17–25, a text dateable to the same post-­exile situation as that addressed in Jeremiah 31. It promises, for instance, that women will not ‘labour in vain, or bear children for calamity [or sudden terror]’. Zechariah 14, similarly, envisions a future when ‘Jerusalem will abide in security’ (v.11) and where, as a sign that all life is sacred – holy as consecrated to God – even the cooking pots of each household will be as sacred as the sacred vessels ‘in front of the altar’ in the Temple (vv.20–21). In this way God is present to all the inhabitants, and not just through priestly or other mediation – perhaps the thrust of Leviticus 27:30–33. This begins to look like the first glimmerings of the messianic age. Are there analogues, we can ask, around survival in the life 94 Lest we should be tempted to interpret this (à la Richard L. Rubinstein, see chapter that follows) as merely the natural cycle of birth and death, it is in fact a very focused historical dialectics of hope: death is to birth, as end is to beginning, as atrocity is to hope. Just as the deaths involved in genocide, attempted or achieved, are shocking, so the ‘nevertheless’ of birthing can open up possibilities as unheard of as the preceding deaths were paralysing. The question of how hope makes its appearance in history is dealt with later in this chapter.

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of contemporary Judaism?95 Jeremiah 31:38–40, furthermore, provokes reflection on the role of memorial sites, the ‘unholy places’ of this book, in the generation of hope. Is the inviolable function of remembering – ‘My sorrow is always before me’ (Psalm 38:17) – the indispensable counterpoint in the dialectics of genocide and hope as racial survival alluded to above? Is the one impossible without the other?

III. If then we define hope as the survival of a people in the birthing of future generations, this will always come at a price. The oft-­quoted text, Jeremiah 31:31–34, makes the connection between ethics and the vision of the covenant and any sustainable future. ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’ Just as even the pots and pans in the new and re-­built Jerusalem are sacred, so all the members of the new community must have the covenant engraved on their hearts – in contrast to its being inscribed on stone tablets. This means that in contrast to the destroyers of Jerusalem, the oppressors, pagan in their worship of idols rather than the living God and answerable only to the non-­ethic of self-­interest, power and control, Israel must be a covenant people: able, that is, to recognise that their return from exile and new-­found freedom is the gift of God. Echoes of the Exodus are palpable: not just liberation, but liberation and covenant. In other words, hope in the form of sustainable life is only possible as a covenant life that is answerable to God-­given ethical norms – just as no secular society is viable without general adherence to a widely accepted social contract. What this ethic might be in post-­Holocaust terms is a question we shall address later. In the spirit of Jeremiah 31, however, it must not be one that is heteronymous,

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Jonathan Sachs, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, 1991–2013, has pointed to the record of Orthodox Jews in continuing to birth – in hope! – the post-­Holocaust generations of Judaism. See his essay, ‘The Valley of the Shadow’, re-­printed from his book, Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought After the Holocaust. London, 1992, in Steven T. Katz et al. (eds), Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust. Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.677–8.

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external or imposed, but one that is heartfelt, the very stuff of sustained hope and freedom, now or in any future. All of the above, according to Jeremiah 31:2, 3 is finally the expression of the covenantal faithfulness of the Lord of history, of this particular bit as of any other. ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.’ It is as though the covenantal love of God is so strong that it will always find expressions or ways through no matter what human obstructions are erected to the contrary. Whether or not this covenant theology is adjudged to have survived Auschwitz, the historical precedent furnished by Jeremiah 31 can at least serve to give us the beginnings of answers to questions about the theological ground and nature of divine agency as well as asking after the location of moral and spiritual authority in the post-­ Auschwitz world. In response to those questions, the historical experience of Judaism, particularly of progroms, would teach us many things: that the covenant love of God perdures before, during and after an historical catastrophe; that, humanly speaking, moral and spiritual authority resides in those closest to the actions of history, in the very participants themselves. Hope therefore is not an abstraction but a set of actions with a view to survival in a community blessed with a life-­giving ethic. One way (among many others) that this may happen is through our actual body-­selves as in the birthing of children; and, far from being a fascination with biology or sexuality for its own sake, it is through and through informed by a normative or covenantal ethics. We are talking about the nature of sustainable human community. In ‘Rachel weeping for her children’ we thus are given a Judaeo–­ Christian icon of covenant faithfulness. On the divine side, this faithfulness is sustained and unbroken even in the face of catastrophe or murder. On the human side, the face of the same covenant is visible in the totally human activities of grieving, on the one hand, and birthing children in hope, on the other – always bearing in mind that the biblical Rachel died in childbirth on the road (Exodus 35:16–20). Is Mary/Miriam, the mother of Jesus, we may ask, similar: a woman whose heart was pierced by the sword of grief (Luke 2:35) but who, nevertheless, in the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:14), was enabled to live an extraordinarily fecund life in obedience to God, in affirmation of life, and all in the mode of hope? Are Rachel and Mary thus sisters as much in motherly grief as in hope for a shared and covenanted future with God?

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9. Jewish Responses to the Holocaust Agency, Divine and Human I believe in the sun even when it is not shining; I believe in love even when feeling it not; I believe in God even when he is silent.96 The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness … I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Jeremiah 31:2, 3

The question the Christian faces in seeking to dialogue with Judaism around the Holocaust is obvious and blunt: can he or she who is seen to have inflicted a grievous wound have the credibility to offer healing? Given the long history of Christian anti-­Semitism, voices from within Judaism have answered with a resounding ‘no’. Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, for example, speaking of the Christian churches, says that, with their ‘Heil Hitler and Jesus!’ attitude, ‘they lost all claim to moral and spiritual leadership in the world’.97 The strength of feeling behind this is fierce and deep-­rooted. Whatever the truth of Rabbi Berkovits’ remark, my approach at this point will be to adopt the stance of the learner; and this as a real expression of humility and, let me add, repentance; repentance, that is, for any Christian complicity in the Holocaust either as among its causes or as among its actual perpetrators.

I. Jewish responses to the Holocaust: the topic is vast. My proposal is to delimit the discussion to history or, more precisely, to the question of agency – 96 Inscription on a cellar wall in Cologne where some Jews hid for the War years, 1939–45. 97 Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust. Ktav Publishing, New York, 1973, pp.15, 16. 

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divine or human – in the context of the Shoah. What does it mean to talk of God acting at a time of the silence of God? Mention of history in the context of Jewish–­Christian dialogue points, moreover, to the peculiar vocation of the Jewish people as covenant people of God, a vocation inherited and shared by Christians. Namely, to discern meaning in historical events, no matter how terrible, as in some sense to do with God. The question of ‘in what sense?’ is the burden of what follows. By agency I mean any action that is intentional or deliberate in that it involves pre-­meditation or deliberation by the agent in question. Agency thus entails choices that are real in the sense that the action decided on could have been otherwise. For example, I choose to go on a journey, but could have decided to stay at home. Agency is thus free because not determined – or not wholly determined – by factors external to the choosing subject. It makes a difference. This definition holds, I would argue, even if the action in question is immediate or spontaneous, with little or no forethought or pre-­meditation. Such actions still make a difference, is in neither case pre-­ determined. Agency thus defined has the further characteristic of being discernable by others. It can thus be imputed to the agent in question – ‘you did it, not me’ – just as the agent can claim responsibility for his or her action: ‘I did it’ – stole the jam, shot the dog, or whatever. With this basic definition of agency in mind, we arrive at two related questions. Of the victims we could ask, was it possible for them to exercise the agency of choice, be it ethical or spiritual, under death-­camp conditions? Could they become, however minimally, the subjects of their own history? As concerns God, secondly, I ask: what kind of agency can we discern in God under the same circumstances? This agency, moreover, needs to be one that is compatible with the identity or character of God as as a loving God; and one, furthermore, that has the potential to make a difference to events as they unfold. We are therefore talking about the relation between the divine freedom to take initiatives and the human freedom to exercise agency in moral or spiritual choice. The question then becomes, what is the nature of the interaction between these two freedoms? But first a word of caution. Empirical study of people in death camps can determine whether or in what way they did or did not exercise agency in such places. With God, however, our research can never be so straightforward. The task is rather to explore what in principle might constitute divine agency in death-­camp space. Certain models will be entertained with

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a view to gaining insight into whether they ‘fit the facts’ or correspond to any credible understanding of God. This asking of the question of agency, divine or human, is, moreover, central to the biblical theology of covenant, a reading of history linked to an ethic – what has been called a ‘covenantal nomism’ – both as basic to Jewish as to Christian self-­understanding. We could call it a theology of history – what God does or has done; and, in concert with these deeds, what humans should or should not do. This I contend is the most challenging and potentially the most fruitful ground for Jewish–­Christian dialogue around the Holocaust. This is partly because neither party has yet arrived at satisfying answers; and also because the search for them springs from enough commonalities to make dialogue possible. Shared in this common exploration will be, first, a theology with a memory; one, that is, that lives with – brings to awareness, does not repress – extensive, and where possible, first-­hand knowledge of horrors, past or present. History and memory thus go together; for what is history but a collection of remembered events, how and by whom? Being a ‘pilgrim to unholy places’ is in this way a deliberate act of remembrance. Equally it would be one restlessly in search of an ethic – a new Torah – adequate to address the realities of the modern world. For is not the question of ethical agency, flowing from acceptance or rejection of God, key to the life of any human community?

II. If this sets the scene for what follows, I want at the outset to acknowledge my debt to Christoph Münz’s book, To Give the World a Memory: Theology of History in Jewish Thought After Auschwitz.98 This opened my eyes to a whole world of which I had only been partially aware. Picking up, then, the nodal points and parameters of a covenant theology of history as defined above, we can see why, from such a standpoint, we cannot be content with 98 German original (not yet translated): Der Welt ein Gedächtnis geben, Geschichtstheologishes Denken im Judentum nach Auschwitz, 2e Auflage. Kaiser/Gutersloher Verlagshaus, Gutersloh, 1996. 

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the a-­theology of Richard L. Rubinstein or the liberation ethics of Marc C. Ellis. In his book After Auschwitz,99 Rubenstein rejects both God-­talk and history as viable categories for any future religious outlook. Decisive in this respect was a 1961 encounter in Bonn with Heinrich Grüber, Provost of the Evangelical Church in East and West Berlin. Grüber maintained that Hitler, like the biblical Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus or others, was, in relation to the Jewish people, an instrument – for whatever purpose – in the hands of God. This triggered in Rubenstein a complete ‘God-­is-dead’-style rejection of the standard biblical notion of God and in particular God’s alleged sovereign control of history. God, he reasoned, could not have caused the Holocaust and, at the same time, retain credibility as a deity with moral or spiritual authority. The Holocaust, unimaginable but real, did take place. God therefore, it seemed to follow, was either malign, impotent or non-­ existent. In choosing the latter more radical option, Rubenstein abandoned any attempt to see meaning in history, theological or otherwise. God now becomes ‘holy nothingness’; and, as a way life, Rubenstein advocates a ‘new paganism’ lived in the rural setting of the Israeli kibbutz. Here it is ironic that Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), key Nazi thinker, wished to make paganism a core part of Nazi ideology. Be that as it may, Rubinstein’s approach is a-­historical in that it tries to identify what is pristine, life-giving, untainted by human evil. This in my view is open to several objections. Mother earth, for all her fecundity, is inescapably the stage on which history is acted out. She is the ground, moreover, from which the blood of the victims cries out for vindication. Not only that, in the gathering climate change/global warming crisis, which now by common consent threatens our planet, it is becoming clear that the whole biosphere – land, sea, air – is being adversely affected by actions for which we as humankind are responsible. If we understand history, then, as the story of human actions on earth, history is not something that can be eliminated from the picture as we retreat into some putative ‘safe place’ called nature. History will always return to haunt us. We cannot, in other words, prescribe a ‘nature cure’ for the victims. Their problems lie too deep for that, not to speak of the sheer unreality of expecting the huge urban populations of the modern world, the growing majority, ever to access anything that could be classified as nature with healing properties. 99 Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, 2nd edition. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1992.

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Michael Berenbaum makes all this specific to Israel. Rubenstein hypothesized [in the first edition of After Auschwitz, 1966] that the return to the land would paganize Judaism. The religion of history would be superseded by the religion of nature […] The model seemed to be the kibbutz, Israel’s utopian farm communities, where agricultural festivals were revitalized and replaced the religio-­ historical components of Jewish tradition. Passover became the spring festival, not merely the festival of freedom. Shavuot and Succot became festivals of planting, of the first fruits, and of the harvest replacing the more theological festivals of revelation. Events have proved him wrong. The requirements of a modern economy have transformed Israel from an agrarian society into an industrialized, urbanized country. Even the Kibbutz has been forced to industrialize to remain agriculturally viable. Most importantly, the impact of war and the sustained struggle for survival did not permit an escape from history.100

In thus placing himself outside the mainstream of Jewish tradition – understood as a striving to understand the theological meaning of the actions, divine or human, that go to make up history – Rubenstein, in my judgment, has lost purchase on the problem that continues to be central to Jewish theology: can we talk about Auschwitz and God in the same breath? Rubenstein, it seems, wants to retain the human tragedy yet blank out all talk of God. It could thus be said that while Rubenstein cares passionately about history – what people are doing on planet earth – he does not have a theology of history. Everything has devolved onto human agency in its setting in nature (‘the new paganism’), God having dropped out of the picture. Rather than appeal to nature, Marc C. Ellis takes his stand, highly critical of the State of Israel, in works of liberation theology stemming from Palestine, Latin America and elsewhere. This is the moral high ground from which he referees his own native Judaism. Central to it are categories of justice, of liberation and oppression, the standard repertoire of liberation theology.101 The question this raises, central to our inquiry, is whether this ‘liberation’ approach can deliver a satisfactory post-­Auschwitz theology of history. More precisely, is it justified, using the moral calculus of liber100 Michael Berenbaum, ‘After After Auschwitz’, in Betty Rogers Rubenstein and Michael Berenbaum (eds), What Kind of God? Essays in Honour of Richard L. Rubenstein. University Press of America, Lanham, New York, 1995, p.35. 101 The depth of Ellis’ commitment to liberation theology comes out in his institutional location and commitment. Ellis is Professor of Religion, Culture, and Society Studies and Director of the Justice and Peace Program at the Catholic Maryknoll School of Theology in New York. 

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ation and oppression, simply to categorise the Palestinians as victims and the post-1948 Jewish settlers as oppressors? In favour of Ellis’ position is the fact that the memory of the Holocaust has sometimes been misused by Israel to justify not only self-­defence and survival, but also acts of conquest and aggression. Against it, and in the light of the blood that has been spilled, often indiscriminately, by both sides in the on-­going conflict, the categorisation of one as ‘victim’ and the other as ‘oppressor’ strains credulity, is altogether too simplistic. It is around the category of justice that Ellis’ critique of Israel is most damning. It touches on the survival of the Israeli state. Could Israel one day lose a war? And would this constitute another Holocaust, the end of a further large section of Judaism? If, says Ellis, Israel continues to pursue policies that are unjust – i.e. given to oppression, aggression and conquest – then it deserves to be humiliated. This, however, will not qualify as a Holocaust for two reasons: that Israel will not be innocent, but in the wrong; and because the majority of the 12–15 million or so Jews in the world no longer live in Israel.102 Quite apart from whether Israel’s allies, notably the US, would ever allow such a thing to happen, one feels that Ellis is too sanguine about the realities of what an Arab conquest of Israel would actually mean. Misha Brumlik, in a critique of Ellis, writes, ‘The SCUD rockets on Tel-­Aviv and the fate of the Kurds are a warning – why should the Arab armies deal any more leniently with the Jews than with the citizens of their own States?’103 This brings us to the nub of the problem. Is Israel’s traditional Torah-­ based way of giving living witness to a theology of history, however compromised, such that it cannot be substituted by liberation theology? That it cannot, comes out in the fact that justice, construed only in terms of oppression and liberation, may be bereft of any independent, non-­ negotiable ethics capable of intervening in the endless cycle of oppression and liberation. How can we discriminate, in other words, between true and false liberation? In Jewish terms, Exodus, historically Israel’s quintessential experience of liberation, was not only driven by divine compassion, it was also informed by the Sinai revelation of Torah. According to this, freedom, both 102 This is argued in his book: Marc C. Ellis, Towards a Jewish Theology of Liberation: The Uprising and the Future. Maryknoll, New York, 1987. 103 Article, Theologie im nationalen Befreiungskampf der Palistinenser, in, Babylon, Heft 9, p.136. My translation.

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in its achievement and its outcomes, is always governed by an ethic, the ethics that structure freedom and make it sustainable. Without this kind of ethical stuffing, symbolised by the Ten Commandments, freedom threatens to become an empty slogan or a justification for exactly the kind of ethical malpractices that Ellis so trenchantly criticises in contemporary Israel. In my view, then, his critique would be more effective if he reminded Israel of her own history, her own tradition. For does not historic Judaism, with its twin concerns for liberation and for the ethical structuring of the fullness of life, the two related poles of the presence and agency of God in history, offer something far richer than the echo of that tradition in modern liberation theology?

III. And so we move on to the central theological question. Does the deliberately attempted genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazis – hand in hand with their equally deliberate attempt to eliminate God – amount not only to the felt absence of God but also to the demise of God in an absolute sense? Is ‘God’ after Auschwitz both inconceivable and strictly non-­existent as that ‘reality so absolute that all other realities are relative’ to it?104 Is all discussion of ‘God’ now unreal or academic? Did the Nazis, in other words, succeed in what they set out to do in respect of God? As a way of scoping the problem, we return to Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, a conservative thinker in the spectrum of Jewish responses to the Holocaust. His defiance of modern atheism is crystallised in words quoted from a survivor of Auschwitz-­Birkenau. She wrote: I believe that the still small voice of Israel will remain and continue to proclaim the law of truth and justice […] Now I know that fire cannot extinguish the heart of man and gas cannot stop the breath of God.105

More precisely, Berkovits, basing himself on the unthinkability of the abrogation of God’s covenant with Israel – expressed, as we have seen, in Jere104 Sister Wendy Beckett, Sister Wendy on Prayer. Continuum, London, 2006, p.64. 105 Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, p.85. 

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miah 31: 2–3, 35–36 – turns the question away from God to that of human responsibility. He raises, for example, the matter of German responsibility and guilt. He also points to the unwillingness of western nations to succour Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis and, equally, their failure to take military action against the death camps. Like Jewish theologians in general, his discussion never strays far from historical facts. It is their meaning – or meaninglessness – that is at stake. For it is in the above-­mentioned failures that Berkovits sees symptoms of the breakdown of western civilisation, the collapse of ‘modern man’ as moral being. Does all this, he further asks, betoken a return to an atavistic or pre-­modern state; or, rather, reveal the ethical vacuum at the heart of modern secular belief in progress with its faith in science and technology? While human responsibility occupies the foreground of Berkovits’ discussion, he does not flinch from asking the theological question. The related problem of God and the meaning of history still remains, cannot be avoided. ‘Undoubtedly’, he writes, ‘for our generation Auschwitz represents the supreme crisis of faith.’ With reference to Elie Wiesel, he continues, ‘“Where is God now?” is the right question to be asked. Not to ask it would have been blasphemy. Faith cannot pass by such horror in silence.’106 He then illuminates the way in which the question of God needs to be asked by a further empirical observation. It needs to be pursued in recognition of the fact that just as the Holocaust exemplifies extremes of evil, so it also presents us with instances of extraordinary goodness. To this he adds an acute observation about the silence of God. Is this in fact a form of agency, of choice? Often in Jewish history, he reminds us, God has been silent. In that way every generation has its ‘Auschwitz’ problem. He then observes, ‘The Rabbis often spoke of the silence of God as an historical fact, but not of his absence. To say of anyone that he is silent, is only meaningful if he is present.’ Silence is thus not necessarily evidence of absence. It could be a form of agency. Instead of speaking, God could have chosen to remain silent. Rabbi Berkovits’ observations prepare us for other theological attempts to make sense of the silence of God, whether or not this is conceived of as rooted in God’s presence. Two Jewish thinkers will now engage our attention, Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, especially his book, Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Holocaust, and, more briefly, the Jewish-­ 106 Ibid., p.68.

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American author Zvi Kolitz and his extraordinary tribute to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.107 Like Berkovits, Halivni pre-­supposes a perception of God’s agency. To fall silent assumes of the agent that he or she once spoke and may do so again. Halivni’s question then is: if God falls silent – in this sense withdraws or is absent – what does this betoken? In this way he focuses not on the recovery of God’s voice (or agency) but on its falling silent, its absence. Halivni asks this question, it should be noted, as one of the foremost Torah interpreters of his generation and himself a survivor of Auschwitz. He begins his exploration of the divine absence by rejecting the traditional notion of hester panim, the hiding of God’s face. In Deuteronomy 31:17–18, for instance, this ‘hiding of God’s face’ occurs as a consequence of human sin. God, as it were, ‘of purer eyes than to behold iniquity’, averts his gaze from human evil, its propensity to flout the moral law and to worship death-­dealing idols. Why, then, does Halivni reject this notion that prima facie might make sense of the divine absence? The answer lies in his equally trenchant rejection of any sense in which the Holocaust can be construed as a punishment for the sins of Israel. As a former inmate of Auschwitz, Halivni is clear that the sufferings of his people were, in virtue of the singularity of the attempted genocide of the Holocaust, out of all proportion to any conceivable sin that may have occasioned it. In thus rejecting ‘the hiding of God’s face’ as punishment for sin, Halivni distances himself from a widely held Jewish tradition that suffering (and catastrophe) are the consequence of sin. More than an outsize capacity for self-­criticism, this tradition held that suffering is on account of our sin (mipnej chata’ enu) and that suffering (in the form of martyrdom or death) is a supreme means of glorifying God (kiddush haShem). Against that background one can appreciate the force of Ha­ livni’s statement: It is written in the Torah, a second time in the Prophets, a third time in the Writings, and a fourth time in the words of our sages, that the Shoah was not the consequence of sin – the sin, that is, of the victims.108 107 David Weiss Halvini, Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Holocaust. Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland, 2007; and, Zvi Kolitz, ‘Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God’, in Frans Josef van Beeck, SJ, Loving the Torah More than God?. Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1989, pp.13–26. 108 Halvini, Breaking the Tablets, p.17. 

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How, then, does Halivni fill the vacuum he has thus created in Jewish reflections on the Holocaust? He writes, ‘I still long to find an appropriate metaphor to capture the singular fate of our generation, who suffered so terribly, not because of anything they did or as a result of any misdeeds of their own.’109 The metaphor he fastens on, that of ‘cosmic adjustment’, comes from the Lurianic Kabbalah, a text central to the tradition of Jewish mysticism. In it we find the notion of tsimtsum, the Divine Contraction. What does this mean? According to Lurianic wisdom, creation occurred when God contracted Godself in order to make room (or space) for the creation of human beings as autonomous moral agents. This contraction, however, did not leave a total vacuum. Rather God ‘gnaws away’ at the vacuum, maintaining it and rejuvenating it as moral space. This takes the form of divine interventions in history of which the history of Israel is the most important instance. The danger of these interventions, Halivni concedes, is that the tsimtsum can get out of balance. ‘The divine presence’, he writes ‘[can] devour the tsimtsum altogether and vitiate [human] free will.’110 To address this imbalance, says Halivni, ‘the Holy One periodically regenerates the tsimtsum’, thus ‘restoring it to its original source and enabling free will to function as before’. This, he adds, ‘occurs very rarely and has no parallel in history’. This contraction/tsimtsum of God had – and continues to have – potential for good as well as catastrophic evil. On the positive side, humanity can be brought to the summit of its moral freedom, a capacity for good and evil in which ‘there is only minimal intervention from above’ to the point where ‘the normal balance between humanity’s bounded freedom and the absolute freedom of God’ is ‘re-­equalized’. This was God’s intention. Tragically, however, it backfired. In Halivni’s own words: Those murdered in the Shoah lived, as it were, outside of normal history. Their lives depended on how free will would be exercised by those whose freedom was fully liberated by the ‘renewal of tsimtsum’ that took place in their days, returning the divine tsimtsum to what it was when humanity was created. Unfortunately for their victims and for us, those who exercised this free will exercised it in the most evil of ways, while their victims remained unprotected and undefended, without any intervention from Above. They suffered and died, but for nothing they had done. The cause of their suffering was cosmic.111 109 Ibid., pp.32–33. 110 Ibid., p.33. 111 Ibid., pp.33–34. Italics in original.

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The chief merit of Halivni’s Shoah-­related discussion may thus be to force us to define whether we are talking – in respect of divine agency – about divine nearness or immanence or, alternatively, about divine transcendence as distant or virtually absent. If the latter, as per Halivni, he, like Ber­ kovits, puts the stress on the role of human agency as being responsible for the Holo­caust. The notion of punishment – or any notion of agency whatsoever – is thus in the first place human. It resides in the evil consequences of gross misuses of human freedom in self-­destructive, amoral behaviour – something inflicted within history by one group, the perpetrators, on another, the victims. Yet to grasp the full import of Halivni’s strategy – that of placing his account of human agency in the wider context of the withdrawal of divine agency as cosmic event – we could understand it in terms of the ethical notion of collateral damage. According to this, the evil outcomes of human agency by the perpetrators in the death camps could be seen as collateral or unintended damage resulting from the divine withdrawal into absence or silence. God withdrew in order to enhance human freedom. In the event, this gracious offer was misused, its misuse in no way reflecting God’s actual intention. In respect of punishment, therefore, we are talking, as concerns God, at best about a type of secondary or indirect causality. As in all of history, God is involved, yet only in a certain way. If this gives one possible answer to our question about divine agency, the flaw in Halivni’s ‘lurianic’ approach lies in God’s inability to see that his strategy of withdrawal wasn’t working, that, for all its good intentions, it had unacceptable consequences. In Halivni’s understanding, God seems to lack kubernesis, any capacity for compassionate self-­correction. Would not this be involved in God being ‘the living God’? Halivni himself seems to sense this, for now his discussion takes a new turn. Very movingly, it is conducted in the context of prayer, ‘prayer in the Shoah’, meaning prayer both human and divine. Its essence is that God may recover his proper sovereignty and, in doing so, come to rule over us again – restore, in other words, the broken moral order in human affairs exemplified by the Shoah. The pathos of this is encapsulated in Isaiah 63:19, ‘We have long been like those whom you did not rule, like those not called by your name’ – the prayer of Israel, and potentially the prayer of humankind. In Christian terms, this would be the prayer of Jesus, ‘your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven’. Halivni’s account of prayer begins with himself as a sixteen-­year-old boy in the Wolfsburg Labour Camp attending a Rosh Hoshannah service led 

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by another Jewish inmate. He calls this ‘prayer from the heart’. Yet for all its human content in heartbreak or enthusiasm, this prayer is set in the form of prayer canonised by sages of earlier generations – hence the mention of Rosh Hoshannah. The fact that such prayer took place in the context of the Shoah leads Halivni to state: There is no society without worshippers, There is no time without someone who prays, There is no place that cannot be transformed into a place of prayer And there is no human being who does not, in the privacy of his heart, embrace a silent prayer, offered up to the hidden powers, to redeem him from his distress, to improve his condition and better his lot. The human being is a being who prays.112

The full content of this prayer (in the words of Peter Ochs) is that, We [Holocaust-­afflicted Judaism] prayed that God might rule over us again, reduce His distance from us, and thereby reduce humanity’s capacity to practice its freedom in evil ways. Now [post Shoah] we pray the same prayer again so that by reducing His distance from us, He might enable us to see more clearly what He spoke to Moses and, thus, what our way of Torah [or divine law] should be.113

One glimpses here the costly historic meaning of Judaism, the burden and the glory of being the Chosen People in the sense of the guardians of a binding moral law, codified as Torah, without which humankind cannot function or flourish, or without which it will again and again collapse into self-­destructive ‘lawless’ evil. What then of God? Halivni asks. Is there a sense in which God prays? Citing rabbinic and biblical sources, Halivni acknowledges that in a world accountable to divine law there must be some form of punishment for transgressions of law. Nevertheless God’s prayer – if we can speak of such a thing – is not merely for a clearer perception of order and its divine enforcement by punishments or rewards. Rather, says Halivni, ‘God’s prayer is that punishment would be restrained by the attribute of mercy’. The fundamental mercy here is that God will move from absence to presence, 112 Ibid., p. 16. 113 Ibid., p.xxi.

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that in coming near he will once more – or even for the first time – rule over humankind in mercy as well as judgement. To gauge the depth of what Halivni is saying we must hear two affirmations, one about God, the other about humankind. Of God, he writes: Despite the enigmatic character of ‘God’s praying’, there is reason to add this supplement to God’s prayer as a metaphor for this enormous and ominous tragedy – as if He Himself stood, as it were powerless before these horrible events and expressed his grief in petitionary prayer.114

As for humankind, Halivni relates what for him was an extraordinarily painful incident. Once again we are back with the sixteen-­year-old David in Wolfsburg. He tries to escape a work detail by hiding under his bed. Here is Halivni’s account of what happened. An SS trooper entered the room. The room was supposed to be empty, but, like a dog, he smelled the scent of flesh. When he raised his whip, I pleaded with him in German, and I began saying, ‘Herr Übersturmführer, Merciful One (harachamim)’. And I escaped by the skin of my teeth.

His theological reflection on this cry for mercy is as follows: I cannot judge how much this supplication helped me stay alive and not collapse under the lashing. But every day I grieve for having used this holy word, ‘Merciful One’ (harachamim) – which appears in the sources only in relation to the Holy One – to pray for mercy from this villain. I simply knew no other words of entreaty. I drew them from the prayer book and translated them directly into German. Perhaps, subconsciously, I thought of the SS, as it were, as God. They ruled over the camp with absolute authority; life and death – literally – remained in their hands, and I unconsciously used an expression appropriate to God.

In words that interface his own repentance with his profound sense of the mercy of God, Rabbi David Weiss Halivni concludes: May it be your will that, by virtue of my having understood the correct meaning of the prayer, melokh al kol haolam kulo behh’vodekha, ‘Rule over all the world in your full glory’, that all the world comes to eradicate the condition that ruled in the forced labour camp. May it be Your will to repair the damage I have caused by substituting the profane for the holy. And may we be worthy of beholding the fulfilment of the prayer, ‘And His dominion rules over all’.115 114 Ibid., p.35. Italics in original. 115 Ibid., pp.37–38. 

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From Halivni’s account one sees again the burden – here shot through with the covenant mercy of God – this places on the person who identifies as Jewish either in or after the Shoah. This burden is none other than that of reality, reality, however, seen in the light of our earlier designation of God as that ‘Reality so absolute that all other realities are relative’ to it. Halivni’s account of human agency in ethical action and prayer is thus grounded in painfully concrete detail. Yet it is also through and through theological. It cannot, for example, be dubbed a rational historiography meaning, that is, a set of rational deductions made from strictly empirical or observable data. It could, rather, be called ‘depth’ historiography, one that is only possible when God is brought into the picture as the final moral and spiritual context in which history unfolds. Meaning and authority reside, therefore, in the interaction of God, however defined, and the facts, however terrible, of human history. This ‘depth’ history, moreover, in no way an invitation to fantasy or irrationality, has its own rules, logic or coherence. Peter Ochs sets these rules out as follows: The first rule of depth historiography is to eliminate answers that would flatly contradict the evidence. The second rule is, to select one answer that responds to the community’s sense of Torah by helping to repair present-­day crises in the community while at the same time reaffirming and extending the wisdom of classical rabbinic Judaism. The third rule is that the capacity to make profound judgments of this kind requires prayer as well as critical rationality.116

It is too early to say whether Halivni’s theological approach to the historical problems of the Shoah will find acceptance in contemporary Judaism. There will necessarily be debate, questions and answers, as authentic Judaism unfolds its response to the Holocaust. In view of the magnitude of the problem, this undoubtedly will engage the best minds of many generations. One could, however, hazard the guess that Halivni’s theological strategy for engaging with history – coupled as it is with a life’s work in repristinating the classical texts of rabbinic Judaism – will command, if not universal assent, at least profound respect. The actual solutions he offers are another matter. Here, one should perhaps add, critics, in order to be credible, should offer alternatives that make better sense than those offered by Halivni. That will be no small task.

116 Ibid., p.7.

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IV. If Halivni’s approach tries to occupy the theological high ground of cosmic vision, there is another quintessentially Jewish strategy, no less vital for our exploration of a theology of history in relation to the Shoah. It focuses on precise instances of how faith and its ethical outcomes was acted out by believers in, around or after the Holocaust itself. The integrity, both ethical and religious, of such acts can thus be seen as yet another way, costly in the extreme, of coping with the felt absence of God. There is, however, and as I shall argue, more to these actions – and the stories that relate them – than that. They are not just stories about absence. The actions related can be read as providing glimpses, however ambiguous or compromised, of modes of God’s presence in the events of the Shoah itself. Does the commitment to believe, coupled with determination to make ethical choices – no matter how restricted the room for manoeuvre – constitute evidence of how God can be present – or shall we say ‘humanly incarnated’? – amidst the horrors of the Holocaust? Because we are talking about actual instances, the literary form or genre of the relevant material is necessarily anecdotal and expressed as story. Whereas with Halivni, the accent was on transcendence, now we explore the complementary pole of immanence – agency ‘from below’ rather than ‘from above’. An example of the ‘nevertheless’ of belief acted out in utterly unpromising circumstances would be Zvi Kolitz’s well-­known parable contained in his fictional ‘Yossel Rakover Talks to God’. Kolitz (1919–2002), a Lithuanian Jew whose long and varied life ended in New York, imagines Rakover as a person caught in the dying moments of the Jewish Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. The revolt has failed; all face death. Does this lead Rakover to curse God, doubt the covenant or give way to self-­pity? No, it rather elicits a statement of faith expressed as a willingness to serve the God of the covenant no matter how appalling the circumstances. It can be read as a commentary on the classic statement of Job 13:15 which, in one translation, reads, ‘Though he kill me, yet will I trust in him.’ My rabbi would frequently tell the story of a Jew who fled from the Spanish Inquisition with his wife and child, striking out in a small boat over the stormy sea until he reached a rocky island where a flash of lightning killed his wife; a storm rose and hurled his son into the sea. Then, as lonely as a stone, naked, barefoot, lashed by the storm, and terrified by the thunder and lightning, hands turned up to God, the Jew, setting out on



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his journey through the wastes of the island, turned to his Maker with the following words: ‘God of Israel, I have fled to this place in order to worship You without molestation, to obey Your commandments and sanctify Your name. You, however, have done everything to make me stop believing in You. Now lest it seem to You that You will succeed by these tribulations to drive me from the right path, I notify You, my God and the God of my father, that it will not avail you in the least! You may insult me, You may castigate me, You may take from me all that I cherish and hold dear in the world. You may torture me to death – I shall believe in You, I shall love you no matter what you do to test me!’117

Comment is superfluous. Rakover’s appeal, however, can provide us with insight into the ‘immanent’ side of the ‘deep history’ of the Holocaust: the faithfulness to the covenant of rabbis and other Jewish persons in the Shoah itself. Here the question, well posed by Lawrence Langer, is the one, the reader will recall, with which my 1995 pilgrimage to Auschwitz began. Langer writes, In our search for the meaning of Auschwitz, to our dismay, we meet only its absence; what we forgo to establish contact with such barren terrain is the theme that absorbs most writers who venture into it […] When the goal of moral being is not virtue, but staying alive, then our sense of character loses its mooring in literature, scripture, or philosophy and succumbs to circumstance.118

To make Langer’s question more precise: given, as per Zvi Kolitz, that acts of faith can be made in any situation whatsoever, is this invalidated by the Shoah? Were the circumstances of the Shoah qualitatively different in that they either reduced ethical choice to matters of survival or, more radically, eliminated the possibility of ethical choice altogether? Without any possibility of ethical agency, religion or faith become inconsequential, otiose. In other words, was survival merely a matter of chance, not choice? For many people, of course, it was. Recent research, however, suggests that Langer doesn’t do justice to what – albeit in a limited number of cases – actually happened. For here we discover that survival frequently involved making decisions that were genuinely ethical or spiritual in character and that, furthermore, had to wrestle with real – i.e. not predetermined – alternatives. Typical of these decisions were situations in which choices had to be made as between sacrificing one member of a threatened group – often 117 Printed in Stephen T. Katz et al. (eds), Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust. Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.399–400. 118 Langer, ‘The Literature of Auschwitz’, pp.603, 611.

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a crying baby – as against the possible survival of the remainder – a relatively common occurrence for groups of Jews in ghettoes hiding from Nazi search-­and-destroy missions. We touch here on the Jewish practice of Halakhah, literally ‘how one should walk’, the whole question of interpreting the Torah when faced with a situation that is new or unprecedented. What might count as a precedent here would be Maimonides’ ruling that Jews should only be surrendered to an enemy if they were already convicted of a capital offence and therefore under sentence of death. Does this cover the dilemma posed by the crying baby? Obviously not, for what could be more innocent than a crying infant? So the dilemma remains. Christoph Münz gives examples of differing rabbinic reactions to this appalling dilemma.119 In one case Rabbi Shimon Efrati was consulted by a group as to the ethics of their action, a group who had in fact suffocated a baby whose crying threatened to betray their hiding place. In considering their question, Rabbi Efrati appealed to Tractate 7:20 of the Tosefta, itself a consideration of the story of Sheba son of Bichri, related in 2 Samuel 20:1–20. According to this, Jews should stand in solidarity against a threatening foe, not release one of their number to save the rest, unless, as in the case of Sheba, one of their number was specifically named and for good reason. In this the rabbinic precedent resembles the ruling of Maimonides yet with a somewhat looser criterion. How then does this apply to the group that had suffocated a baby? Rabbi Efrati’s ruling was to make a distinction between a situation in which the whole of a group was threatened or only a part. In the former case, ruled the Rabbi, it would be permitted to offer the life of the baby, but only in a situation of extreme persecution. But another ruling would, of course, be possible. Rabbi Shimon’s brother, Rabbi Yitzhaq Zevi Efrati, is a case in point – as related by Shimon. Faced with the same choice, Rabbi Yitzhaq, himself one of a group so threatened, appealed to another verse in the Torah: ‘Even when a sharp sword lies on a person’s neck, they should not cease from prayer’ (Berakhot 10a). In the light of this, the Rabbi absolutely forbad the suffocation of the child. As a result, all those in hiding were discovered and shot by the Nazis.120 119 Munz, Der Welt ein Gedächtnis geben, n. 3, pp.227 ff. 120 This should be compared with the story of the Fugitive and the Rabbi related by Henri Nouwen in his book, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith. Harper, San Francisco, 2006, pp.26–27. ‘One day a young fugitive, trying to hide himself from the enemy, entered a small village. The people were kind to him and offered him 

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Which, then, is the higher value, solidarity, or the survival of the majority at the cost of an innocent life? The answer is not obvious, but the choice is real. Just how painful such decisions were comes out in a third example. It concerns a certain Joseph Kramer, his wife and their eighteen-­monthold son David. The incident took place in a small town called Dolhinor near Wilma in Poland. The Kramers had constructed a hiding place for themselves; and in 1943 forty-­seven Jews were packed into it to escape the Nazis. Little David started to cry and, despite all attempts to quieten him, continued to howl. Joseph – perhaps recapitulating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac – strangled his son with his own hands. As a result the danger passed and the group survived. They joined the partisans and, at the end of the War, found their way to Israel. The dreadful nature of Joseph’s action, however, never allowed him to live in peace. This came out in 1971 when Joseph gifted a Torah Scroll to a synagogue in Israel. He and many of the hiding place survivors were present. As the Scroll was ceremoniously installed in the Torah Shrine, Joseph broke down and wept at the remembrance of the tragic situation that cost the life of David. If these are primarily moral dilemmas, there were others that were spiritual. In his book To Mend the World,121 Emil Fackenheim tells the story of a group of Orthodox Jews in Buchenwald who managed to exchange a day’s ration of bread for a couple of tefillin (phylacteries). They did this even though such a renunciation of food would risk death by starvation and a place to stay. But when the soldiers who sought the fugitive asked where he was hiding, everyone became very fearful. The soldiers threatened to burn the village and kill every person in it unless the young man was handed over to them before dawn. The people went to the Rabbi and asked him what to do. Torn between handing over the boy to the enemy and having his people killed, the Rabbi withdrew to his room and read his Bible, hoping to find an answer before dawn. In the morning, his eyes fell on these words: “It is better that one man dies than that the whole people be lost.” Then the Rabbi closed the Bible, called the soldiers, and told them where the boy was hidden. And after the soldiers lead the fugitive away to be killed, there was a feast in the village because the Rabbi had saved the people. But the Rabbi did not celebrate. Overcome with a deep sadness, he remained in his room. That night an angel came to him and asked, “What have you done?” He said: “I have handed over the fugitive to the enemy.” Then the angel said: “But don’t you know that you have handed over the Messiah?” “How should I know?” the Rabbi replied anxiously. Then the angel said: “If, instead of reading your Bible, you had visited this young man just once and looked into his eyes, you would have known”’ . 121 Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-­Holocaust Jewish Thought. Indiana University Press, 1982.

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therefore constitute suicide. This had to be balanced, as surviving eyewitnesses reported, by the fact that they then prayed ‘with an ecstasy which it would be impossible ever to experience again’. Fackenheim comments, ‘tefillin […] a much more valuable merchandise […] than bread […] were bread also: they strengthened the spirit and hence the body. They were an elixir of life’.122 One is reminded of Deuteronomy 8:3 quoted by Jesus during his testing in the wilderness, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4). The above-­quoted instances – sometimes contradicting one another – might seem flimsy bulwarks to erect against the person who believes that in our post-­Auschwitz era they have an ‘open and shut’ case against the existence of God and that, accordingly, they can move to construct a secular worldview unencumbered by ‘God’. Against this I am arguing that in face of Auschwitz, offering, as it does, prima facie evidence of a threefold absence – of God, of human life, and of moral or spiritual choice – it is, on the contrary, in principle and in fact meaningful to talk of agency whether this be of God or of those seeking to resolve moral or spiritual dilemmas in the context of the very horrors of the Shoah itself. As we pursue our quest for a theology of history (and a concomitant ethic) around the Holocaust that Jews and Christians could share, the above understanding of agency, however minimal or ambiguous, could be seen as part of what Auschwitz is beginning to reveal. Is there anything, then, that we can add to this picture?

V. This brings us to the final agency-­related issue to be addressed in this chapter. Does Auschwitz reveal anything about humankind or God that was not known before? In asking this we should be aware that ‘revelation’ is a technical theological term that refers to God’s manifestation of his character and purpose in the history of his chosen people, Israel, and, for Christians, in the person of Christ – himself a summation and extension of 122 Ibid., pp.218–19. As other examples of this God-­driven desire to live, Fackenheim cites women refusing to abort or teenagers taking part in the Warsaw Uprising. 

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the history of Israel. Within history this revelation is known by faith; at the end of time it promises to become certain knowledge, absolute and clear. 1 Peter 1:5, for instance, speaks of ‘a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time’.123 The Greek word we translate as ‘revelation’ is ‘apocalypsis’, can also mean ‘disclosure’, the underlying metaphor being to ‘unveil’ or ‘bring to light’. All this, I realise, is what is in dispute around Auschwitz. Should we rather think of it as an ‘apocalypse’ in the modern sense, a revelation in which only horror and darkness became visible? Buried in this is the question running throughout our discussion so far: what kind of agency, divine or human, are we talking about in Auschwitz? Two Jewish thinkers who take up the challenge of what Auschwitz reveals about God and/or humankind are Arthur A. Cohen and Irving (Yitzchak) Greenberg. Cohen is chiefly known for his book The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (1981), and Greenberg first announced his views in his 1977 utterance ‘Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust’.124 To take humankind first, the problem is to say anything original in a way that doesn’t descend into cliché or bombast. Cohen writes in a style that is allusive, rich and penetrating, tending to abstraction; Greenberg’s writings, by contrast, are as lucidly reflective as they are poignantly factual. Here is a sample of Cohen: I call the death camps the tremendum, for it is the monument of a meaningless inversion of life to an orgiastic celebration of death, to a psychosexual and pathological degeneracy unparalleled and unfathomable to any person bonded to life.

To this idea of ‘inversion’ in which death reigns, Cohen adds the perception that not only did the Holocaust exceed any conceivable rationality, but that in its performance – ‘celebration’ – of death, the reality outstripped the causes. Once the process of the Final Solution had started, it fed off itself like a metastasising cancer in ways that beggar historical analysis. Who, for example, could have predicted from the amateurish gas wagons of Chelmno (winter, 1941) the mass annihilation of the Hungarian Jews in the super-­efficient gas chambers of Auschwitz in the early summer of 1944? Inversion of death over life and the unrestrained, vaulting causality of evil give insight into what was involved, its singular outcome and character. 123 Other relevant ‘eschatological’ texts in the New Testament with respect to revelation are: 1 John 3:2; Revelation 1:7; 1 Corinthians 13:12. 124 Katz, Wrestling with God, pp.497–523. Further works by Greenberg and Cohen are listed in Katz along with generous extracts from their writings.

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Greenberg, as previously noted, lays down as fundamental the following principle of interpretation: ‘No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children’ – perhaps an allusion to Elie Wiesel’s terrible memory, ‘Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath the silent blue sky’ – the full horror of which stemmed from the fact that these children were often hurled into the flames while still alive. In his analysis of what was revelatory about the Holocaust, Greenberg takes Cohen’s perceptions one step further. It reveals, says he, the worthlessness of human life in the sight of the Nazi perpetrators. How does Greenberg arrive at this conclusion? Simply by analysing the cost of gassing a person. The agent employed, as is well known, was a gas, Zyklon B, in fact an insecticide. Not only did this reflect the Nazi view of Jews as vermin, it also kept the cost of asphyxiating the victims to a minimum. Greenberg writes: Approximately 5.5 kilograms were used on every chamber load, about fifteen hundred people. This means 27.5 marks per fifteen hundred people. With the Mark equal to 25 cents, this yields $6.75 per fifteen hundred people, or forty-­five hundredths of a cent per person. In the summer of 1944, a Jewish child’s life was not worth the two-­fifths of a cent it would have cost to put it to death rather than burn it alive.

‘There’ he concludes, ‘in its starkest form, is the ultimate denial’ – the literal worthlessness of human life.125 Not only was life cheapened to the point of worthlessness, it was also, according to Cohen’s notion of ‘inversion’, given a negative valuation such as to justify unrestrained killing, and one intended to be comprehensive. In this, surely, we peer into an abyss of evil never seen before or since, one that in human terms can surely count as revelation. If this is the apocalypse of evil inherent in the Holocaust, is there a corresponding revelation of God that survives or outrides such a state of affairs? Arthur Cohen poses the question in this way: Like our ancestors we are obliged to decide whether (national) catastrophes are compatible with our traditional notions of a beneficent and providential God. The past generations of Israel decided that they were. The question today is whether the same conclusion may be wrung from the data of the tremendum.126 125 Ibid., pp.501–2. 126 Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust. Crossroad, New York, 1981, p.50. 

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Drawing from a variety of sources – the Kabbalah, the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling, and Franz Rosenzweig – Cohen responds to his own question with a dipolar theism. Starting with the kabbalistic notion of the Eyn Sof, God as mystery beyond all attributes, and the related doctrine of creation whereby creation involved the contraction or self-­limitation of God with a view to the autonomy of creation and the freedom of humankind, Cohen writes: It must be postulated that within God are two directions […]: one which is necessary selfhood, interiority, self-­containment and another, vital, electric, spontaneous that is the divine posse, the abundant and overflowing. There arises from all this the dialectic of necessity and freedom, the enmeshment of divine egoity and person, divine self-­ love and free love, divine narcissism and the created image, the sufficient nothing of the world and the creation of being. The human affect is toward the overflowing, the loving in God; his containment, however, the abyss of his nature, is as crucial as his abundance and plenitude.127

This ‘human affect’, however, is by no means straightforward, as Cohen goes on to explain. Can it not be argued […] that what is taken as God’s speech is really always man’s hearing, that God is not the strategist of our particularities or of our historical condition, but rather the mystery of our futurity, always our posse, never our acts. If we can begin to see God less as the interferer whose insertion is welcome (when it accords with our needs) and more as the immensity whose reality is our prefiguration, whose speech and silence are metaphors for our language and distortion, whose plenitude and unfolding are the hope of our futurity, we shall have won a sense of God whom we may love and honour, but whom we no longer fear and from whom we no longer demand.128

In response to the problem of God’s silence and inaction in relation to the Holocaust, Cohen is arguing for a deepened sense of the irreducible mystery of God and for a correspondingly reduced idea of revelation. With this goes a strong emphasis on human freedom. This latter is central to the so-­called Free Will Defence, sometimes referred to as theodicy, whereby the responsibility for the Holocaust is said to reside, as we have seen, in the misuse of human freedom rather than in any failure to act on the part of God. Cohen has been criticised by Jewish thinkers in many ways: for the obscurity and allusiveness of his style – his meaning is often hard to establish; his uncritical uses of his sources, in particular, the Kabbalah and the 127 Ibid., pp.89 ff. 128 Ibid., p.97.

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philosopher Schelling – highlighting the inherent difficulty of using pre-­ Holocaust authors to deal with a problem of whose magnitude they were unaware. Other criticisms have been more substantial. The first concerns Cohen’s notion of revelation. To say that ‘God’s speech is really always man’s hearing’ effectively eliminates God’s initiating agency as speaker. Stephen T. Katz writes: Our hearing the word of revelation does not create ‘God’s speech’ – this would be illusion and self-­projection. Certainly we can mishear God, or not hear what there is to hear at all – but these qualifications do not erase the dialogical nature of Divine speech, i.e., the requirement that there be a Speaker as well as a Hearer.129

To link this with what was said above about human revelation, Cohen’s argument might at best give us an account of the full extent of human receptivity, in this case, the necessary depth of humanity such that we are in principle able to hear the revelation of human evil inherent in the Shoah. In other words, the role of the hearer is of irreducible importance in any account of revelation. This, however, cannot be the whole story. God as agent – in this case as speaker – has gone missing. God’s side of the story has not been told. For all the terrifying fullness of the human revelation, there remains the properly theological question. Is there anything ‘there’, in Auschwitz, for us to hear that is not of our own making, that is ‘of God’? I will attempt my own answer to that question after attending briefly to the other major criticism that has been made of Cohen: that which addresses the shortcomings of his dipolar theism. The essence of this is that the cost of acquitting God of any responsibility for the Holocaust by means of the Free Will Defence (or theodicy) can be to eviscerate God not only of the capacity to act, but also, more radically, of the ability to exist in the substantial sense of existing beyond any conceivable human perception. If part of the necessary inventory of God’s being is thus to be the self-­existent subject of certain actions or speech-­acts, then for this God to be known at all, God must necessarily reveal Godself, and this act of revelation is the quintessential act (or exercise in agency) of God. Here, then, is how Steven T. Katz criticises Cohen at this point. If one pole (of the dipolar God) is so mysterious – ‘necessary selfhood, interiority, self-­containment’ – as to be unknowable because not involved in human affairs; and the other pole – ‘vital, electric, spontaneous that 129 Ibid., p.620. 

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is the divine posse, the abundant and overflowing’ – is only a name for human hearing (with all its attendant problems), then Katz is surely justified in saying, Such a God does not count in how we act, nor in how history devolves or transpires […] But if this is so, if God is indeed so absent from our life and the historical record, what difference for us between this God and no God at all? Again, is such a God who remains uninvolved while Auschwitz is generating its corpses any more worthy of being called a ‘God whom we may love’, especially if this is His metaphysical essence, than the God of tradition?130

In terms of our discussion: Cohen, in a laudable attempt to produce an innovative account of God, has in fact succeeded only in negating the possibility of divine revelation or any kind of self-­initiated divine agency in relation to the Holocaust or any effective divine involvement in it.

VI. In sketching my own response to the question of agency, divine or human, in relation to Auschwitz – a Christian response in context of the Jewish responses set out above – I want to pick up on Katz’s reference to the ‘God of tradition’. In my Diary entry for 6 August 2003, reacting to the peculiar horrors of one ‘unholy place’, Mauthausen, I wrote, ‘Is anything but the biblical language adequate?’ – and I meant, to describe or make sense of what I had seen. That will be my starting point here, one that I also want to test out. Are there biblical texts, in other words, that, like Jeremiah 31, survive Greenberg’s principle, ‘No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children’? Biblical texts, I am here assuming, are foundational to what both Jews and Christians mean by ‘tradition’.

130 Ibid., p.621. On p.623 Katz adds, ‘The moral, or rather, amoral corollary of the dipolar schematization of God is deeply disquieting. Cohen’s dipolar God appears, of necessity, morally indifferent to human suffering and historical acts of evil, factors of no small consequence for, in the end, the most sensitive as well as the most telling objections to theodicy arise from the side of the ethical.’

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The text I wish to explore in this regard is Isaiah 63:8b–9.131 It reads (in the New Revised Standard Version): He became their saviour in all their distress. It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.

Very interestingly, the NRSV gives us an alternative reading of the same text. This reads: In all their distress he was distressed; the angel of his presence saved them.

To understand the radical nature of what is being said about the divine presence – presence bound up with divine agency – we need to be aware of certain key texts from Exodus. For example: I am going to send an angel in front of you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. Be attentive to him and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him.132

Or, in dialogue with Moses: He said, ‘My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’ And he said to him, ‘If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favour in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.’133

Wary of violating the transcendent holiness of God, the texts from Exodus speak of the ‘presence’ of God or, alternatively, of ‘an angel’ so long as it is clearly understood that ‘my name is in him’. More radically, God is addressed as ‘you’, ‘unless you go with us’. We have here to do with what John Henry Newman invoked as ‘God’s presence and his very self and essence all divine’, a presence, moreover, that is as real in its own way as the flesh and blood realities of the people on their exodus journey from slavery to a new and promised land. The angel/messenger language is intended to convey that God communicates; and this in particular in ‘face to face’ com131 To be seen in conjunction with texts like Jeremiah 8:21, ‘For the hurt of my people I am hurt’; or Psalm 91:15, ‘When they call to me, I will answer them; I will be with them in trouble, I will rescue them and honour them.’ 132 Exodus 23:20. Compare, 23:23; 32:34; 33:2. 133 Exodus 33:14. Compare, 15:13–14, ‘You guided them by your strength’. 

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munication with Moses (Numbers 12:8).134 The personal pronoun ‘you’, furthermore, signals that the God who communicates is the one who can be called on, who is active in freeing a people from slavery, in building a covenant with them, and in faithfully accompanying them on their journey to nationhood and freedom. My suggestion, then, is that this understanding of the agency of God in Exodus is taken up and radicalised in the above-­quoted text from Isaiah. Let us therefore attend to it more closely. If we focus on the alternative reading, once again we find use of the personal pronoun: here ‘he’ rather than ‘you’: ‘he was distressed’. In the light of that, we should note that in the text – ‘In all their distress he was distressed; the angel of his presence saved them’ – the agency of God is described as both active and passive. On the one hand, ‘he was distressed’ (passive voice), and on the other, ‘the angel of his presence saved them’ (active voice). The quality or motivation of this agency, whether active or passive, is described in the NRSV text as ‘love and pity’: ‘in his love and pity he redeemed them’. If we now stand back from the text and reflect about it theologically, is there anything in it that illuminates the problem of the divine agency in relation to Auschwitz? In responding to that question I wish to recall one of the leitmotivs running through this book, namely the understanding of God as co-­passionate. For I believe that the God named in Isaiah 63:9 is precisely the co-­passionate God I have already begun to identify. This, shall we say, is a ‘dipolar theism’, but one that avoids the pitfalls evident in Arthur A. Cohen’s work in The Tremendum and, at the same time, learns from them. Specifically: the passive God, the one who ‘in all their distress […] was distressed’ is the suffering God. Essential (or central) to the passionate nature of God, this passio dei, is the unstoppable drive (or will) of this God to be involved with his people amongst, dare we say, all the horrors, the fires and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. This is the God who becomes visible in the person of the suffering servant of whom it is said, ‘He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity’; the God who declares, ‘Do not fear, for I am with you’, and, ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you […] When you walk through fire you shall not be burned.’135 Can we say, accordingly, that in the victims of Auschwitz the face of this co-­passionate God became visible – the very 134 Compare Exodus 33:11; Deuteronomy 34:10 – ‘face to face’; and, Numbers 14:14; Isaiah 52:8 – ‘eye to eye’. 135 See Isaiah 53:3; 43:5, 2.

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opposite of the traditional hester panim doctrine whereby God hides his face from his people? Can we also say that this is the God who is with his people, both victims and victim-­survivors, whether this be in life or death – whatever the implications of this are deemed to be? ‘Do not fear, I am with you.’ This, surely, is one type of agency. If we now turn to the active pole of this co-­passionate God, the One who is their ‘saviour’ in all their afflictions, the plethora of active verbs is astounding: ‘saved’, ‘redeemed’, ‘lifted them up’, ‘carried them’. This then gives onto a passage, Isaiah 63:10–14, where there is ecstatic remembrance and celebration of the active, liberative God of the Exodus, the one ‘who divided the waters before them […] who lead them through the depths’. According to the biblical text, then, the desire of this co-­passionate God to suffer with his people is only exceeded by his passion to liberate them from their distress, to lead them out of suffering to freedom and ‘rest’. This is the God who is with his people in their suffering, but also with and for them in their yearning and striving for freedom from bondage. The love and the pity of God thus express themselves both in the solidarity of God with his people as in his rage for their deliverance and survival as a people ‘in the land of the living’. The persistent question, though, is: does this ring true of the millions who perished in Auschwitz and many other places? The question here is primarily empirical, one of evidence. Where in Auschwitz do we see the active face of this co-­passionate God – given, that is, that we may see God’s face in the faces of the victims? Here I would draw the reader’s attention to people like Janusz Korczak at Treblinka or Mrs Zuckner at Birkenau (see below), who voluntarily went into the gas chambers with children or orphans. These actions, surely, were not only ones of the greatest moral grandeur in themselves, but also ones in which the face of the co-­passionate God is revealed and glorified in representatives of redeemed and redeeming humanity. They were, furthermore, ones that actually made a difference to the children concerned. For, from a child’s point of view, it makes all the difference in such a terrible situation as to whether he or she is alone and unsupported or, alternatively, is able to hold the hand of a parent or adult and thus to feel cared for no matter what. To pursue this question of evidence one step further: in a remarkable article, ‘The Female Face of God in Auschwitz’, Melissa Raphael asks not ‘where was God in Auschwitz?’ but ‘Who was God in Auschwitz?’136 Her 136 Reprinted in Katz, Wrestling with God, n. 11, pp.649–62. The question here cited is on p.652. 

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answer: in the mutual caring and mothering of women as instances of the caring face of the suffering presence or Shekhinah of God. One or two quotations must suffice to convey her meaning. Theologically, Raphael states, ‘In Jewish understanding, the suffering of the Shekhinah is that of one who, being among us, suffers with us’; and she adds, ‘In women’s care for others – emblematised in the wiping of filth from a face – God’s face was revealed as present and visible to the eye of spiritual perception in the facing image.’ In a striking passage she then spells out more of what this implies. To ask the question of God’s presence during the Holocaust is not only to ask ‘how was God made present to us?’ but also, and inseparably from that, ‘how did we make ourselves present to God?’ There is no divine presence without human presence – the hinneni or ‘here I am’. Presence is transitive: God cannot be present to nothing or nowhere. Just as a mother murmurs, ‘Mummy’s here’, when her child cries out in the night or when he is afraid because he cannot see her, to say ‘here I am’ is to say here with you I am; my being human is to find and be present to you, here, in a place, answering you.137

In Raphael’s perception of the female face of God in Auschwitz we see, I dare to suggest, not only more of the face of the co-­passionate God discernable in texts like Isaiah 63:9, but also the kind of co-­passionate response this calls forth in people, women or men, in what she calls ‘the broken heart of Auschwitz’: the passion to suffer with others and, where possible, to care for them. To be ‘present’, then, whether we speak of God or humankind, means ‘to be present to’: God’s presence to suffering humankind or human presence – and response – to God and suffering neighbour. The whole notion is through and through covenantal. It stems, moreover, from sources that Judaism and Christianity have in common. It seeks, furthermore, to do justice to the on-­the-ground realities of Auschwitz. We shall return to the elucidation of this concept of the co-­passionate God in a later chapter.

137 Ibid., pp.658–9.

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10. Auschwitz and Golgotha (1) Analogue or Adversary?

We now move to the risky enterprise of exploring the possibility of Jewish–­ Christian dialogue around readings of the Passion Narratives of Jesus in the Gospels – in this chapter confined to the Gospel of Mark. This, I realise, is fraught with difficulties. In traditional polemic it is barred on the two main grounds. On the Jewish side, any reading of the Gospels has been made impossible by the Christian accusation of ‘deicide’, not to speak of the anti-­Judaic tone of so much material in the Gospels. For Christians, the pain lies in the way Christians, and with them Jesus, have been blamed by Jews for the Holocaust. The accusation of deicide is thus met by that of genocide – the latter in a secular society perhaps weightier than the former. Be that as it may, my gut feeling is that it is time to get beyond these mutually destructive stereotypes and to dialogue our way into something more constructive. How? One way forward would be for Jewish–­Christian dialogue around New Testament texts, the Passion Narratives in particular, to catch up with the findings of recent biblical scholarship. In this regard my own journey began as a student with a reading of Paul Winter’s book, On The Trial of Jesus.138 This showed that the final responsibility for the trial and execution of Jesus lay with the Roman colonial power. Since then, Winter’s work has been enriched through analysis of the power dynamics of first-­century Palestine by Richard Horsley and others.139 The picture that emerges is of a predominantly peasant 138 Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus. Studia Judaica, Forschungen zur Wissenschaft des Judentums, Band 1, Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, 1961. The dedication of Winter’s book is ‘To the Dead in Auschwitz, Izbica, Majdanek, Treblinka – Among whom are those who were Dearest to me.’ These included Winter’s mother and sister (Obituary, The Times, London, 28 October 1969, p.12). The closing words of the book read, ‘Tried by the world, condemned by authority, buried by the Churches that profess his name, he is rising again, to-­day and to-­morrow, in the hearts of men who love him and feel: he is near.’ 139 Richard A. Horsley’s work is summarised in his article ‘The Death of Jesus’, in Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans (eds), Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the 

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population, who were taxed and oppressed, often violently, by the Roman occupying power. The latter, however, preferred to rule by proxy; by means of client kings, the Herodian dynasty, who in turn employed tax collectors to exact what was due to them, to Rome and to the Temple. The Temple, clear beneficiary of this arrangement, entered a tacit agreement with Rome to the effect that, in return for freedom of religion, the Temple authorities, the Chief Priests and the Sanhedrin, would refrain from all political agitation against Rome. With the support of Rome, the Temple authorities were able, further, to enforce their interpretation of the Law via a cadre of Jerusalem-­based Scribes and Sadducees. Jesus, a Galilean of artisan background (carpenter or perhaps roofer), but seeing himself as representative of the oppressed Jewish population, called for the reinstatement of the Kingship of God – as opposed to that of the Emperor; and for a fresh interpretation of the Law that went with this stance. It was this he called the New Covenant, in continuity with the Covenant he inherited, but at key points critical of it. His crucifixion was thus the outcome of a struggle between Godly powerlessness and the powerful combination of religious authority and ruthless colonial power. He thus represented the vast majority of contemporary Jews and became a victim on their behalf. If the political struggles of the day were between the powerless and powerful, the rulers and the ruled, Jesus was a key figure amongst a subject, powerless people. In this he would have seen himself as a true son of the Covenant between God and his people. The Temple authorities were thus complicit with Rome to do away with Jesus – which explains why there were both religious and political charges laid against him – blasphemy and sedition, respectively. To this picture should be added the fact that the Gospels were written at a time when the State of Current Research. E.J. Brill, Leiden–­New York–­Köln, 1994, pp.395–422. Horsley writes, ‘It is becoming increasingly clear that the principal political–­ economic–religious division in Palestine lay between the Roman officials and Jewish aristocracy, on the one hand, and the vast majority of the people, who were subject to both sets of rulers, on the other. It may be significant that recent literary analysis of the overall Gospel narratives highlights a similar conflict between Jesus and the established Jerusalem rulers (chief priests and elders) and the scribes and Pharisees who come from and/or represent Jerusalem, but not between Jesus and the common people in Galilean villages and towns. The conflict that led to the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels must be re-­examined in the context of this fundamental structural division in first-­century Palestine’ (p.419). Horsley is also the author of the commentary on Mark’s Gospel in the Oxford Annotated Bible.

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early followers of Jesus began to see themselves as more than a sect within Judaism. The Temple had been a victim of the Jewish Revolt (66–70 ce), making way for the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism. The Pauline mission was well underway. As time passed, these new breakaway groups, with a mission and identity beyond Rabbinic Judaism, picked up Jesus’ earlier opposition to the Temple authorities – and the Scribes and Pharisees who represented them to the people – and turned it into a general antagonism to Judaism as such. We see this, for example, in a later – i.e. c.90 CE – document of the New Testament like St. John’s Gospel. This demonising of Jews had appalling consequences for Christian anti-­Semitism in later centuries. It can be detected in all four Gospels; and the Passion Narratives, the story of the Crucifixion, are no exception. These early Christian communities, seedbeds of the Gospels, were also, for obvious reasons, intent on ingratiating themselves with the all-­ powerful Pax Romana. Yet the earlier power dynamics – inter alia highly critical of Rome – as described by Horsley and others in their reading of the Gospels, are also clearly visible. Suffice it to add that Paul’s reading of salvation history in Romans 9–11 may have been an attempt to rein in anti-­Jewish polemic in the new gentile churches.140 This, in brief historical outline, is background to what I mean by seeing Jesus in the Passion Narratives as ‘Jew and as victim’. Each of these points, I realise, would require a treatise in itself to substantiate fully. It represents, I would argue, a consensus of responsible New Testament scholarship. In any event, it takes us far beyond the old deicide/genocide stereotypes. My purpose here, however, is not only to benefit from the work of historians, but also to suggest a reading of the Passion Narratives that has two principal aims in view. The first is to make Christians aware of the full horror the Holocaust. If the Passion according to Mark, the example I intend to follow, is an 140 In his letter to Christians in Rome, Paul, the converted rabbi, writes, ‘I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen’; and, ‘As regards the Gospel they are enemies […] for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable’: vv. 9:3–5; 11:28–29. It should be noted that whereas the NRSV text of Romans 11:28 reads, ‘‘enemies of God’, the word ‘God’ does not appear in the original Greek text of what Paul actually wrote. 

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extended narrative version of the very brief and ‘kenotic’ presentation of Christ in Philippians 2:5–8, then this will be the place to verify my earlier claim that Christ (so understood) enables Christians (at least) to hear the cries of the victims in all their human as well as moral and spiritual depth. The second aim is to make Jews aware that seeing Jesus as Jew and as victim can throw light on theological and other meanings of the Holocaust. Could he be a model – among others more immediately familiar to Jews – for understanding Jewish suffering not only in his particular life, but also in the suffering of Jews at other times and in other places? This, in the spirit of dialogue, is a question to be pursued, not a statement of established fact. A third aim, to be enlarged on in the next chapter, will be to identify a basic ethical perspectives in which both Jewish Torah and Christian Ethics can be seen such that they could contribute towards Jews and Christians seeing themselves as one covenant people with a shared mission in the modern world. Integral to this desire to build bridges between the past and the present will be to sketch in some of the parallels I see between the story of Jesus and things that happened in Hitler’s Reich. With all this in mind, we focus specifically on the Passion Narrative in chapters 14 and 15 of Mark’s Gospel, the earliest and shortest of the Gospels. This, I suggest, is the place to begin.

I. The Plot to Kill Jesus: Mark 14:1–2. Shockingly, the arrest of Jesus takes place on the eve of the Passover, the great feast of liberation. Can we say that complicity with the ‘powers that be’, in this case Rome, had corrupted official Jewish religion and its leaders to the core?141 The authorities, however, proceeded warily. Jesus’ large band of followers, ‘the people’, was 141 An example of what is implied here is the so-called ‘Palatial Mansion’, home of one of the contemporary High Priests, which has been unearthed in the Upper City of Jerusalem by the archaeologist Nahman Avigad of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Details of this can be found in Nahman Aviam, Discovering Jerusalem. Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 1983. A more popular version can be found in John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, Excavating Jesus. Harper One, New York, 2001, pp. 244ff. The book also provides illustrations and a suggested pictorial reconstruction of the ‘Palatial Mansion’. See also

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a force to be reckoned with. His popular support had showed itself on his arrival in Jerusalem (11:1–11). To make this contemporary with our theme – ‘Pilgrim to Unholy Places’, 1933–45 – here are two quotations, one on how an evil exercise of power can be concealed from a society cowed into passivity; and the second on what Bonhoeffer called the ‘stupefaction’ of key individuals. When the National Socialist régime collapsed, the curtain was drawn that with astonishing efficiency had concealed the crimes of the wielders of power. The concentration camps and other horror chambers of the Third Reich opened, and they confronted the German population with a shocking reality. Certainly, tens of thousands had been fairly well informed before, and millions had to some degree known of arrests and of casualties in the concentration camps, of the deportation of Jewish fellow citizens to Eastern Europe, of euthanasia murders, and of many other deeds of violence. But they either could not or were not willing to believe that these were no frightful errors, or arbitrariness on the part of individuals or of certain organizations, but belonged to the core and essence of Hitler’s regime.

Is there a parallel here with the so-­called ‘Pax Romana’ which, like any totalitarian state, enforced its rule by violence? November 5, 1939. Walter von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the army – with overthrow plans in the background – went to the Führer in order to convince him that an offensive against France, England, Belgium and Holland would militarily be all-­ too-dangerous. Brauchitsch returned from the audience as a broken and confused man, infected with his panic Franz Halder, the chief of the general staff, and demanded the incineration of all overthrow plans. From then on, he gave in to even the most hazardous of Hitler’s plans […] The military leadership and general staff were so ‘stupefied’ that in 1941 no preparations were made for the foreseeable winter war in Russia, and the frontline troops were left pitiably in the lurch.142

Did the encounter of Herod the Great with Caesar Augustus and the whole panoply of Roman power have similar outcomes – Herod, for instance, funding the Olympic Games to curry favour with the Emperor – his son, Herod Antipas the Tetrarch of the Northern Regions of Galilee and Perea in the time of Jesus carrying on the family tradition of serving Rome? The Anointing at Bethany: Mark 14:3–9. In terms of the power dynamics sketched above, the action of the anonymous woman who, in the section ‘The Priestly Aristocracy in the Upper City’, in Jonathan Reed, The Harper Collins Visual Guide to the New Testament. Harper One, New York, 2007, pp. 90–92. 142 Tödt, Authentic Faith, pp. 260, 214. 

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Jesus’ words, ‘anointed my body beforehand for its burial’, can be seen as the deed of a powerless, marginalised person who, by this very fact, had retained her humanity intact and, with it, an ability to recognise what was going on. Can we further say that by her extravagant and beautiful gesture she may even have brought home to Jesus the true gravity of his situation? Her insight at this point can perhaps be compared to that of the Syrophoenician woman at an earlier stage of Jesus’ career (Mark 7:24–30); or even, in Matthew’s parallel account, with the forebodings of Pilate’s wife (again anonymous), ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man’ (Matthew 27:19). For contemporary reference, I would point to the 1931 oil portrait of Rabbi Leo Baeck by Ludwig Meidner in the Berlin Jewish Museum. The face contorted with grief and foreboding speaks eloquently of Baeck’s early awareness of the threat posed by Hitler and the Nazi Party to the Jewish people in Germany (and elsewhere). From the start, there were those in the Jewish community who, perhaps because a theology of history was basic to their outlook, were able to be realistic, to face facts. Baeck’s realism contrasts starkly with the blindness and false other-­worldliness of the majority of German Christians. Heinz Edward Tödt tells the story. Despite the first boycotts and violent actions against Jews beginning around April 1, 1933, and despite the so-­called Aryan clause – paragraph 3 of the Law for the Reconstruction of the Professional Civil Service of April 7, 1933 – church leadership in Germany across the board was incapable of seeing the ‘Jewish question’ as a grave ecclesiastical problem. They did notice, however, that this matter was ‘not a peripheral issue for the government, but a central part of its program’, as Regional Bishop Heinrich Rendtorff declared in the session of the governing body of the German Protestant Church on April 26, 1933, in Berlin.143

Judas Agrees to Betray Jesus; the Arrest/Mark 14:10–11; 45–50. The corruption of the Jewish power élite now spreads to Judas, the betrayer amongst the disciples of Jesus (see 14:4–5; compare John 13:18; 21–30). Money is involved. Unlike the later Gnostic gospels that tend to exonerate Judas, the Gospels, true to the realism inherited from the Jewish scriptures, focus on the shocking details of what happened. Judas, originally one of the powerless, is now drawn into the vortex of murderous scheming by the powerful. Here we are talking about real actions that have real consequences for good or evil, life or death. And the arrest? This is uncannily like the December 143 Ibid., p. 73.

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1941 ‘Nacht und Nebel’ [‘Night and Fog’] arrests of any who opposed Hitler: at the dead of night; with overwhelming force; without legal warrant or trial. Resistance was futile. Or, on an altogether bigger scale, the process first clearly documented by Raul Hilberg: the systematic concentration of Jews in ghettoes prior to being railroaded to the death camps – all accompanied by deception, brutal violence and complete ruthlessness. The scale is different, but the similarity between what happened to Jesus as to many of his followers and the fate of Jewish victims in the Shoah can be seen as close. The same goes – in the power dynamics involved – for the fate of the members of the Resistance to Hitler. Contemporary ‘Judas’ reference is provided by Carl Schmitt, brilliant jurist, with his legal justification of murder. On June 30, 1934, Hitler ordered and led the action, in which the allegedly high treasonous leadership group of the SA around Ernst Röhm, and with them, quite a number of those in opposition to Hitler who had nothing to do with Röhm, were murdered without any legal proceeding. Instead of a unanimous protest, the exact opposite arose from the German justice system. Carl Schmitt, the leading and world-­famous authority on national law, quickly wrote in the Deutsche Juristenzeitung [German Jurists’ newspaper], on the occasion of the murders, his infamous article, ‘The Führer Protects the Law’ [Der Führer schützt das Recht]. Schmitt maintained that Hitler in the hour of danger, by virtue of his leadership, had also been the supreme lord of justice. ‘The true Führer is always judge as well.’ The surrender of law and justice system to Hitler’s arbitrariness was thereby legitimised.144

In this we have an image of what Matthew calls Pontius Pilate’s ‘washing of his hands’ of the Jesus affair (27:24) in the drive of the ‘power’-full to have him killed. The Passover with the Disciples: Mark 14:12–21. This, surely, is something that Jesus as Jew and victim must have in common with Jews of other times and places. The picture in Mark’s Gospel is of a clandestine meeting of Jesus and his disciples. Their purpose is to celebrate the Passover, remembrance of slavery in Egypt and exodus to freedom. This celebration of the powerless with their leader, Jesus, is strongly reminiscent of Moses who, similarly, has been described as a leader, raised up by God, of the ‘organising poor’. The description fits Jesus; and shows, among other things, that, even in the heart of darkness, a celebration of the liberating truth is always possible and called for.

144 Ibid., pp. 270–1. 

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One thinks here of the countless occasions, fraught with danger, when rabbis and groups of Jews celebrated the Passover and other Jewish festivals in the death or concentration camps. In the last chapter, I wrote: Halvini’s account of prayer begins with himself as a sixteen-­year-old boy in the Wolfsberg Labour Camp attending a Rosh Hoshannah service led by another Jewish inmates. He calls this ‘prayer from the heart’. Yet for all its human content in heartbreak or enthusiasm, this prayer is set in the form of prayer canonised by sages of earlier generations – hence the mention of Rosh Hoshannah. The fact that such prayer took place in the context of the Shoah leads Halvini to state: There is no society without worshippers, There is no time without someone who prays, There is no place that cannot be transformed into a place of prayer And there is no human being who does not, in the privacy of his heart, embrace a silent prayer, offered up to the hidden powers, to redeem him from his distress, to improve his condition and better his lot. The human being is a being who prays.

One might also call to mind the many resistance groups in Germany from the start of the Hitler era, either trying to plot his downfall or to envisage a future Germany beyond the Nazi nightmare. An example of the former would be the Bonhoeffer–­Donanyi circle meeting in Berlin or, of the latter, the so-­called ‘Kreisauer Kreis’ around Helmut James von Moltke.145 The Institution of the Lord’s Supper: Mark 14:22–25. To continue our power analysis of the text: we have here Jesus, fully aware of the danger of the struggle he was engaged in, gathering his immediate circle to confront what was to come. The Passover theology of exodus/liberation is everywhere presupposed. Central to it has always been the ability to re-­live the past events of deliverance through memory and re-­presentation enshrined in ritual actions and scriptural texts. In this way, Passover means living memory. The difference, however, to what is traditional to Judaism is that here Jesus, as a Jew about to become victim at the hands of the powerful, personalises all of the above to himself. Was this, we may ask, supposed to be exclusive to his person? Or was it more of the nature of a brilliant insight into the cost of freedom, a cost to be born in the currency of suffering by 145 Ibid., pp. 184–5.

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the very person at the centre of this life and death struggle? As such, was it offered to others in similar situations? The latter seems overwhelmingly more probable. This is supported by Mark 10:45 which states: For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom [or offering] for many [‘for many’ here meaning ‘for all’].

A foretaste of this ‘many’ in history is the circle of disciples and the crowd of supporters who accompanied him as he entered Jerusalem, the so-­called ‘triumphal entry’ prior to his arrest and crucifixion (Mark 11:1–11). Be this as it may, his ‘body’ language – ‘this is my body’ – is supposed, I suggest, to convey three things. First, by talking of ‘body’ in the sense of ‘body-­self’, Jesus invokes the whole of his amazing life devoted to freeing individuals from bondage to sin or sickness, to re-­building shattered communities, and to challenging the power structures that got in the way of this project to maximise life amongst all his fellow citizens. ‘The thief [here, Rome] comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly’ (John 10:10). Next, ‘body’ has the further meaning of ‘suffering body’, the very body-­self that is about to be subject to Roman trial, torture and cruel execution. Like his life, this action, entered into freely and deliberately, is ‘for you’, i.e. done on behalf of the people, the majority, the Jewish peasant population, whom Jesus had worked with during his life and on whose behalf he was now prepared to challenge the death-­dealing ‘powers that be’, both secular and religious. If ‘blood’ in the first instance refers to the ‘wine of life’ that was so manifestly his gift, now it takes on overtones of blood shed in the suffering involved in righteous action. The third set of meanings is both widely inclusive and projected into the future. It is done ‘for many’; which, as we have seen, could be read as meaning ‘for all’. This inclusive dimension of what Jesus intended comes out in his invocation of the Covenant. ‘This is my blood of the covenant.’ This has all sorts of scriptural resonances. For example, in Exodus 24:1–8, Moses dashes sacrificial blood over both people and against the altar to ratify the covenant entered into by them in response to the call of God. In this instance – Jesus’ personalising of the Passover to himself – he himself is the sacrifice, his the blood that ratifies the prophetic way of righteousness in the face of murderous evil. In his righteous deeds, the ways of God, the covenant righteousness of his people, stand out with extraordinary clarity. 

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His actions, however, are not just for ‘now’. They belong to the future. Like all actions from the heart of God, actions of moral and spiritual integrity, they have an ‘afterlife’ that belongs to the well-­being of humankind. The final saying is therefore cast in the mode of hope. ‘Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’ As contemporary reference, consider Arthur Cohen’s evocation of the tenacity with which Judaism celebrates life. I call the death-­camps the tremendum, for it is the monument of a meaningless inversion of life, to an orgiastic celebration of death, to a psycho-­sexual and pathological degeneracy unparalleled and unfathomable to any […] bonded to life. And of the nations and cultures of the West, is there any so totally committed to life, to the choice of life and its enlargement as a system of conduct and behaviour, as that of the Jews? The Jew may be the ideal victim because his mere persistence, his sheer endurance, his refusal to die throughout four millennia until the tremendum, was a celebration of the tenacity of life.146

If this throws light on Jesus’ standing for life with his ‘body and blood’, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Jesus as ‘the man for others’ and his discernment of the key ethical question as ‘how the coming generation is going to live’ may assist us as we strive to arrive at a common understanding of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. Reflecting on the motivations of those who, like himself, had embarked on a plot to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer wrote: Those who refuse to be relieved of the responsibility they share for the course of history by whatever might happen, because they know this responsibility to be imposed on them by God, will win fruitful relation with events in history beyond fruitless criticism and equally fruitless opportunism […] The ultimate responsible question is not how I might heroically back out of the affair, but how a coming generation’s life will go on.147

This, surely, is in the spirit of the Passover Jesus. Further, is not this concern for coming generations close to the living, beating heart of the Judaism that prays ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at the close of the Passover Sederin ? Jesus Prays in Gethsemane/Mark 14:32–42. For all his being called or marked by God for his particular mission, Jesus does not thereby es146 Arthur A. Cohen, ‘Thinking the Tremendum: Some Theological Implications of the Death-Camps’, Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 18, Leo Baeck Institute, New York, 1974, p. 17. 147 As quoted in Tödt, Authentic Faith, p. 163.

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cape the inner agonies of the condemned man. ‘Distressed and agitated […] he said to them “I am deeply grieved, even to death ”’ – with which we should compare the ‘loud cries and tears’ recorded in Hebrews 5:7. Jesus then admonishes his companions, Peter, James and John, to ‘stay awake’. In their failure to do so we may see not only human weakness, but also the fatal ability of ‘persons of conscience’ to rationalise and conform to situations that they know to be wrong but which have become personally threatening. Jesus, by contrast, is the person who knows that ‘the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom’; that only an ethic that is grounded in obedience to God will survive the threat of murder at the hands of a corrupted justice system. ‘Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.’ Of the disciples, by contrast, Mark tells us, ‘All of them deserted him and fled’ (14:50). On the one hand, the dilemmas and weaknesses of ‘persons of conscience’ are acutely analysed by Bonhoeffer. The person of conscience is troubled by exigencies that demand decision. Exigency [Zwangslage] means that any of my options for how to act will offend my conscience. I choose the less evil option and forget, because I avoid what is more evil, that it is evil as well. This was the great temptation for those who stayed in responsible positions during the Hitler regime, increasingly collaborated with it contrary to their convictions, and subjectively quieted their consciences with their good intentions. But objectively they became accomplices to unprecedented crimes, to which they shut their eyes.

On the other hand, the theological core of the sustained resistance of the Bonhoeffer–­Dohnanyi circle was founded on something like this: Reconciliation with God through Christ annuls our human state of being curved inward upon ourselves, and opens us to community with God and our surroundings. It helps to find a new self that understands itself to be a gift of grace. Conscience goes along with this renewal of the human being. The other’s concrete need becomes weightier than the human being’s allegedly guiltless accord with an isolated self of its own.148

If we read the word ‘Christ’ in its original meaning of ‘Messiah’, then Jesus, as Jew and victim, and as central to his new Exodus-­like project, could give Jews and Christians much to ponder on what it means to be a person of full human integrity in today’s world, the risk and costly action it involves; an integrity, that is, based on faith in and faithfulness to God. 148 Ibid., pp. 157–8,163. 

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Peter’s Denial of Jesus; Flight of the Disciples/Mark 14:26–31; 50; 66–72. The sleep of Peter, James and John in ‘the place called Gethsemane’ warns us what to expect. In the person of Peter, and with the other disciples, it only gets worse. This can be read as a study in how the best can be capable of the worst. It is also a commentary on human weakness in face of mortal danger. In response to Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s denial, Peter swears ‘vehemently’, ‘even though I must die with you, I will not deny you’. In the event, faced only with a servant-­girl and a motley collection of bystanders, Peter caves in. ‘I do not know this man you are talking about.’ The crowing of the cock in the early morning brings home to him the enormity of what he has just said. Peter broke down and wept. These tears have been interpreted as tears of repentance – met by forgiveness from Jesus – core meaning of the resurrection for Peter. For Peter is to emerge as witness to the resurrection and leader of the future church. ‘First, Simon, also known as Peter’ (Matthew 10:2). The other disciples, as we have seen, ‘all […] deserted him and fled’. As at other times in history, the reign of terror unleashed by the powerful against the leaders of resistance by the powerless is as terrifying as it is real: enough to make cowards of even the very best. For our theme – Jewish–­Christian dialogue around resonances between Golgotha and Auschwitz – many painful questions emerge. How far did the German churches in the Third Reich resemble Peter and the disciples? There were exceptions to this rule; but they were always a brave minority. One historian, John S. Conway, puts the percentage of pastors in the Evangelical Church who joined the Confessing Church in its resistance to Hitler at no more than 10 per cent.149 The number of those who did it out of concern for their Jewish brothers and sisters, baptised or not, was even smaller. For followers of the real Jesus, Jew and victim, this is an excruciating and shameful fact to have to face. Like Jesus on his way to Golgotha, Jews on the way to Auschwitz were abandoned, left terribly alone. For Christians, then, there can only be one valid response: repentance. Similarly, the lesson learned, hopefully, once and for all from the realities of the death camps must be humility – even though Jesus’ own kenotic, self-­humbling example should already have been more than sufficient for that. Integral to this must be the way Christians have frequently co-­ opted Jesus to be one of the powerful, wielder of an ideology oppressive of Jews as of others. For Jews – dare one say? – any talk of forgiveness 149 J.S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–45. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1968, p. xxiv.

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will be contingent on a repentance that meets two stringent conditions: that it is enacted in full awareness of the facts of ‘what happened’; and that, further, it is lived out in accordance with the wisdom of Jesus: ‘You will know them by their fruits’ and, ‘not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven’ (Matthew 7:20: 21). This a question, not a statement; and while it also implies an invitation, it also fully accepts the fact that forgiveness (and the reconciliation bound up with it) can be withheld. Just how deep all this goes comes out in Heinz Eduard Tödt’s words: After the undisguised pogrom of 1938, every Protestant in Germany could become aware of being burdened with guilt through not standing up for the persecuted Jews. Everyone knew Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10:30–37, about the failure of those who are called to be helpers, and the help given by the religiously despised stranger to the victim of the robbers. But many factors hindered the rise of an awareness of guilt. How strong these factors were can be approximately gathered from watching how slowly and with how much difficulty guilt was acknowledged after 1945. Even now, contemporaries of the events, and many of those who were born afterward, still avoid acknowledging guilt. This makes us see that the church’s silence cannot be explained by the fear of the régime’s persecution measures alone.150

This contrasts starkly with the ‘Confession of Guilt’ from the manuscript of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. It was written in 1941 when Bonhoeffer was already a member of the gathering resistance to Hitler. Kristallnacht (November, 1938) was what in the first place provoked it. It reads: The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred, and murder, without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them. It has become guilty of the lives of the weakest and most defenceless brothers of Jesus Christ.151

150 Tödt, Authentic Faith, p. 255. 151 Quoted in Tödt, Authentic Faith, pp. 255-6. Here I should like to put on record a 1987 conversation I had at the AAR/SBL Conference in Boston with Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s friend and biographer, in which he told me (over lunch) that Bonhoeffer’s full commitment to the plot to assassinate Hitler dated from the time when he had obtained certain knowledge of atrocities being committed against Jews in Eastern Europe. Operation Barbarossa, the German offensive against Russia, let us recall, was launched on 22 June 1941. 

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He meant, of course, the Jewish People; and, in our interpretation, the Jesus so named is the Jesus who is fellow Jew and fellow victim. If Bonhoeffer’s prime ethical question was ‘how coming generations are going to live’, this would surely have been inclusive of the Jewish people; just as, we may confidently surmise, his reply to his theological question ‘who is Jesus Christ for us today?’, might have been ‘the Jewish people caught in the Shoah’, ‘today’ meaning November 1938, Kristallnacht. Jesus Before the Council/Sanhedrin: Mark 14:53–65. This presents us with the religious side of the capital charge against Jesus: that he was a threat to the Temple. Some of the testimony against him was, ‘We heard him say, “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands”’ (14:58). Much more, however, was at stake than his well-­known opposition to rigid enforcement of the law of the Sabbath and other Temple-­centred interpretations of the Torah. Rather, it was his perception of the compromised and corrupt state of the Temple as an institution. Was this Temple the beating heart of Israel, the people of God? Or was it, like the Herodian dynasty, in effect a client of Rome, the pagan occupying power? Archaeologists have recently uncovered evidence of the corrupting effect of the Temple’s ill-­gotten power. The Upper City precinct in Jerusalem where the Chief Priests lived has been revealed to contain splendid spacious houses the construction of which was only made possible by the wealth of the Temple levied through taxation of the largely peasant population. One quotation must suffice to substantiate the point I am making. The Upper City was inextricably linked to the Temple – architecturally by a causeway to what archaeologists call Wilson’s Arch, and socio-­politically by the many priestly families who ran the Temple and lived in the Upper City […] The Upper City’s homes are the most affluent of Roman Palestine, exceeding by far those found in Sepphoris and rivalling those at Pompeii. One house covered six thousand square feet, about five times the size of houses at Sepphoris.152

Jesus’ prophetic critique of the moral and spiritual authority of the Temple explains why at his trial he was accused of being its ‘destroyer’. His critique bore on the Temple’s compromised relationship with Rome as it did on the Torah interpretation that it sponsored and enforced – via the Scribes and perhaps the Pharisees – on the majority of the population, including, of course, Galilee. An example of this critique would be his cleansing of the 152 See Reed, The Harper Collins Visual Guide to the New Testament, n. 4, pp. 90, 91.

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Temple (14:15–19), which targeted the Temple as a centre of commercialised religion. In all of this he enjoyed widespread popular support. In this connection we should recall that when the Romans destroyed the Temple at the end of the Jewish Revolt (65–70 CE) – as simmering resistance became open rebellion – the mob rushed into the ruins and destroyed all debt records (of unpaid tax) standing against them. Many of the details of Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin have a contemporary ring: the shifting charges, the perjury, the lack of credible witnesses. Also the silence of Jesus (14:61). Not only was there nobody to represent him, his silence betokened a total rejection of the Temple in its current state, a refusal to get entrammelled in details that might justify its existence. Like Ezekiel, Jesus had the same sense that ‘the glory of the Lord’ had departed (Ezekiel 10:18; compare Jeremiah 7:1–15). Was the implication that ‘the glory’ now somehow resided in his person? In any event his claim as Son of Man to sit in judgement on the Temple was received as blasphemy. For this he was now putting his life at risk – the latest in a long line of prophets destined to perish at the hand of the Jerusalem authorities. ‘It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside Jerusalem’ (Luke 13:33; compare, Matthew 23:35). In summary we could say: in the cause he stood for – the coming of the Rule or Kingdom of God now and in the future – he was righteous; in the weak, confused nature of the charges brought against him, he was innocent; in his willingness to stand in the name of God with his people, he was willing to suffer. It is thus, I would argue, that we see him as represen­ tative of his people, the Jewish people, throughout their history: in relation to persecutions and pogroms over thousands of years, righteous, innocent, suffering. Prescinding from the question of whether or not Christians have overlaid (or obscured) scriptural expressions of the Covenant with expressions like ‘Old’ or ‘New’, the Covenant, precisely, is what Jesus stood for. In this he was a true prophet. More of what is at stake in contemporary terms comes out in this further quotation from Tödt. After August 10, 1932, when five National Socialists had trampled a Communist to death in his own apartment and Hitler had approved of the cowardly deed with unrestrained cynicism and covered the perpetrators, no doubts remained with Hans Donanyi, the personal information officer to the Reich Minister of Justice, and with the Bonhoeffers, about Hitler’s brutal conception of justice. This was revealed a mere month after Hitler’s ‘seizure of power’, in the lawless persecution of delegates and



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functionaries of the Communist Party of Germany, in the introduction of ‘protective custody’ [Schutzhaft], arbitrary arrest without judicial checks (by the middle of March, 1933, already more than 10,000 individuals were in this kind ‘custody’ in Prussia), in the establishment of concentration camps and in many other measures.153

This was the time of the building of the concentration camps at Dachau and in Emsland (Börgamoor, Esterwegen), the opening of the way to the arbitrary imprisonment and brutalisation of Jews and resisters of Hitler’s régime throughout Germany which, although it began in a small way, engulfed 10,000 people in the Kristallnacht Pogrom of November 1933, a large number, but small in comparison with what was still to come. One further aspect of Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin requires comment: his reply to the High Priest’s question, ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?’ In his reply, Jesus states, ‘I am; and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven’ (14:62). Our analysis of the Passion Narrative as analogue of Auschwitz has presented Jesus as representative of the powerless in face of the powerful. This is basic to the political and social dynamics of what took place as well as to the religious conflict involved. The words of 14:61, however, invite us to look more deeply into the theology involved in Jesus’ words and actions. Here the expression ‘Son of Man’ is essential commentary on the kind of power wielded by Jesus in the name of God in the context of his arrest, trial and crucifixion. In Mark’s gospel, ‘Son of Man’ has three meanings: a flesh and blood human being, yet one who has authority to heal on the Sabbath (see 2:10, 28); a person born or destined to suffer and die (see 8:31; 9:31; 10:33); and the one who, in the name of God – here referred to as ‘the Power’ – will judge what is good or evil in human actions (see 8:38; 13:24–27). Jesus is on trial; but something much more fundamental is at stake: the trial of the powerful by the powerless. This, according to Matthew 25:31–45, is focused in the person of Jesus. As Son of Man, as judge, his solidarity is thus with those we have called ‘the powerless’: the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, those in prison. This is reinforced by Luke 6:20 where Jesus declares as ‘blessed’, the poor, the hungry, those in mourning. Something similar is said in John’s Gospel. ‘For just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself; and has given him authority to execute judgement, because he 153 Ibid., p. 187.

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is the Son of Man’ (5:26–27) – meaning that being in solidarity with the powerless coincides with being filled with the life of God, this being what qualifies him as judge. Jesus’ ‘I am’ (Mark 14:62a; compare, 6:50. ‘It is I’) can thus be seen as echoing and affirming in his person the ‘I am who I am’ of the God of the Exodus, the God who has ‘heard the cry’ of his suffering people (Exodus 3:7). Jesus, in other words, like God, is the one who hears the cries of the victims; and more than that, in his person is himself one of the victims, one of the powerless. In the narrative we are considering, this has an undisguised irony or reverse effect. The one who is being judged by the Sanhedrin and by Pontius Pilate, the Roman Procurator, is in fact their judge. His silence is more eloquent than words could be of his solidarity with the people, the powerless. It was also his faithful acting out of the very co-­passionate love of God. ‘People’ here, let us recall, means the Jewish people. Auschwitz, similarly, represents a profound reverse judgement on the ethical bankruptcy of a whole civilisation, including its religion. That being so, do we not have in Jesus, as Jew and as victim, and as representative of the powerless, a resonating image, eloquent far beyond his own life, of the utterly powerless Jew in the Third Reich: the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, those in prison, those in mourning?

II. Jesus before Pilate; the flogging and mockery by Roman soldiers; his crucifixion and death/Mark 15:1–41. This last long section can be looked at as a whole. In terms of the dynamics we have been observing, we now see the naked exercise of power by Rome in the trial, condemnation and execution of Jesus. Jesus is interrogated by Pontius Pilate, fifth Roman Procurator of Judaea (26–36 CE). His question, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ is echoed in the mockery of the soldiers, ‘Hail, King of the Jews’; by the inscription on his cross, ‘The King of the Jews’; and in the taunting of the Chief Priests and bystanders, ‘Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross’ (15:2; 18; 26; 32; see also, 15:9,12). The text thus gives clear evidence that the charge against Jesus – so far as the Romans were con

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cerned – was political. Whereas the Sanhedrin had focused on the religious implications of Jesus’ messiahship – what was the source of his authority? was he a rival or threat to the Temple? – the Romans were persuaded that the aura of kingship around Jesus – whether he claimed it for himself or not – constituted a threat to their hegemony over Judaea and the other local territories under their rule. That the Romans viewed him in this way is understandable in light of the fact – brought to light by Richard Horsley and others – that Palestine in the time of Jesus was a hotbed of banditry, of prophetic and messianic movements (Acts 5:35–37, Gamaliel’s speech), all in one way or another people’s movements bent on liberation, armed or otherwise, from the yoke of Roman colonalization and its on-­the-ground Herodian enforcers.154 The Roman authorities must have asked whether Jesus and his following were one of these. Any claim to kingship therefore had dangerous political overtones. This, I suggest, was the substance of the charge laid against him. In fact the title ‘king’ was given to Jesus by popular acclaim. It was his proclamation (in word and deed) of the Kingdom that, in the eyes of his contemporaries, linked his particular mission with God – hence the Kingdom of God. The substance of this, as we have seen, was that he and his followers stood for healing and life in the villages and towns of Galilee; and, moving out from there, for the kingship or sovereignty or rule of God over the national life, centred in Jerusalem. The actual title ‘king’, however, seems to have been one that Jesus himself repudiated (see John 6:15; compare Mark 15:2, ‘You say so’, not ‘I say so’). Rather, it was this exodus-­defined rule or kingship of the true co-­passionate God of Israel that was at stake for Jesus, the cause for which he was willing to give his life. In relation to this, any claims he may or may not have made for himself were secondary. True to his native Judaism, it was for life in this sense that Jesus stood and was crucified. The remainder of Jesus’ story as it unfolds has many parallels with the suffering of Jews in history up to and including Auschwitz. In being unfavourably compared with Barabbas, insurrectionist and murderer, Jesus is treated – by Rome and by the Temple authorities – as worse than vermin.

154 Richard A. Horsley and John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus. Winston Press, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, 1985.

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Liberation for Barabbas meant execution for Jesus (15:6–15), a power that lay with Rome alone.155 The flogging he experienced (15:15), despite his innocence, can be compared to the beatings to which Jews and others were subjected in the camps of the Third Reich, starting in 1933. The mockery and taunting of Jesus by the soldiers and by bystanders around his cross (15:16–20; 25–32), reflecting both the religious and political aspects of his trial, parallel the vicious mockery of Jews by the Nazis. Incidents of this kind could fill volumes: things like forcing Jews to scrub the streets of Vienna or the mockery of rabbis by shaving off their locks or pulling out their beards. Mention could also be made of the way Jesus was stripped of his garments. This left him naked in preparation for his execution (15:24). Is not this reminiscent of Jews going naked into the gas chambers, the piles of discarded clothing and other possessions collected by the Nazis for various purposes? In all this, the scale is different, but the pattern is similar.

III. We now come to the crucifixion itself (15:33–39). Here the complete absence of the miraculous should be noted. In contrast to the rest of the Gospel of Mark, nothing miraculous occurs, everything is as it is. Out of the utter bleakness of reality comes his terrible cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’. This, I suggest, is the heart of the analogy between Golgotha and Auschwitz. If we attend to its meaning, we may see more of what this implies. Betrayed by one of his disciples, handed over on a capital charge to Rome by the religious authorities of his own people, tried and condemned, and now nailed to the cross-­piece of the instrument of his execution, Jesus feels the full horror of his situation. And so, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’, his words given in the original Aramaic, the language he spoke, preserved as integral to the memory of his suffering. Whether these were his actual

155 On this see A.N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963. 

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words or, alternatively, represent the reality of what he was undergoing, they are the opening words of Psalm 22. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning (or, roaring)?’ Not only, however, does Jesus give vent to his feelings of abandonment, he is, at the same time, making a prayer to God in the form of a passionate question: ‘My God, my God, why […]?’. The words also echo his ‘Abba, Father’ – again in Aramaic, his mother tongue, his heart language – that are an expression of faith that, against all appearances, re-­affirms his trust in God. These words parallel his agonised prayer in Gethsemane, ‘Abba, Father […] not what I want, but what you want’ – a prayer forever echoed in the hearts of believers (as in Galatians 4:4; or Romans 8:15). ‘My God, my God’ – these words from the heart, expressing both suffering and faith, were for him the acting out of the co-­passionate God who shares the sufferings of his people and, in an equal or even greater passion, desires their liberation from every kind of evil. Was not this in essence the prayer of many of the Jewish victims of Auschwitz, deriving, as it does, from the Psalms, their time-­honoured prayer book? Jesus’ cry on his cross of faith-­in-abandonment, his agonised prayer from the heart, can thus be, I would urge, the heart of the analogy between Auschwitz and Golgotha. Even though we cannot presume to know what utterances people made in the gas chambers – any more than we are privy to the innermost thoughts or feelings of Jesus – the prayers made by people, Jews and victims, in extremis and de profundis, whether in gas chambers or execution sites, must at this point bear, both in language and in substance, a striking resemblance. They would, I believe, have recognised each other. Can we therefore discern in this mutual recognition the presence – the face in all the faces – of Jesus as ‘the fellow sufferer who understands’? If we answer ‘yes’, then our concepts of ‘holy’ and ‘unholy’ are overtaken by the mystery of God in his representative. We also see in Jesus and those like him, the revelation of the sons and daughters of the living God in full maturity of faith, a faith that could not and cannot be broken.156

156 There is one further incident in John: the burial of Jesus (19:38–42). In John’s account, not only is Joseph of Arimathea mentioned, member of the Sanhedrin and secret disciple of Jesus, so also is Nicodemus, the benighted leader (or teacher) of Israel. Both, it seems, representatives (respectively) of power and of learning, had seen the light. They dared to be associated with Jesus.

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11. Auschwitz and Golgotha (2) Impulses for a Shared Covenantal Ethic

Our reading of the Passion according to Mark had two aims. The first, to make Christians aware of the full horror the Holocaust: the telling of the story of the crucified, kenotic Christ having the power to illuminate in this way. And, by the same token, the second, to make Jews aware of the light Jesus as Jew and as victim can throw on possible theological meanings of the Holocaust. What I have written is only a preliminary sketch. My hope is that others will deepen and take it further. We now move on to the final leg of this section on Jewish–­Christian dialogue: to see if Auschwitz, in conjunction with Golgotha, the Passion of Jesus, can throw light on what might be basic impulses of shared covenant-­ based ethic that Jews and Christians could hold and practice in common – the pre-­supposition of this being that Jesus was a man of the Covenant that both Jews and Christians share. By this I mean – not only the on-­going body of Rabbinic Law built on the Pentateuch, the Halakah (stemming from Aggadah, narrative), also known as Torah, but also Christian Ethics – the ethical structuring and spiritual grounding of sustainable freedom, whether this be of individuals or society. It’s traditional name is ‘Covenant’, whether this be seen as flowing from the Exodus or from the person of Jesus. The question is, do these two streams belong together? My proposal – that they do – centres on the concept of Engführung. More than just a ‘No Exit’ road (Sackgasse; cul-­de-sac), an Engführung narrows down to nothing as it reaches the end of the impasse. Master concept of the architecture of David Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, it symbolises the situation of a person in a gas chamber or a man on a cross: the cruelly enforced narrowing of all possibilities of life down to the ‘dead end’ of death. Golgotha for Jesus, and Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek… for millions of Jews, were Engführungen in this sense. To make this fully real, we know that the inside of a gas chamber after hundreds of people had been gassed was not a pretty sight: people in heaps where they had tried to scramble over each other for one last gasp of air; urine, blood and faeces all over the floor… Nevertheless, there is hard evidence that 

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even in this hell, this Engführung, some people retained their ability to care for others or to pray or both. The watchword of these victims was something like, ‘So long as my heart beats, I care. As long as I breathe, I pray.’ The question that arises from this, both ethical and theological, is simply this. If people prayed de profundis – ‘out of the depths have I cried to thee, O Lord’ (Psalm 130) – and cared for others in extremis, in all the powerlessness of enforced death – how can we characterise the ethical behaviour of those who, in this Engführung, retained their human ability to pray and to care? Can we spell out in more detail some of what was involved? Immediately we face a difficulty. Gas chamber victims died behind locked doors. However, from ‘peep hole’ evidence of some SS guards we know, for instance, that mothers held their children high above their heads to escape the rising cloud of Zyklon B gas. In a later chapter on ‘Recognition’ we shall note well-­authenticated instances of people who, even in the Engführung of extermination, reached out in care to others or prayed to God or both. Names like Janusz Korczak, Mrs Zucker, Rabbi Berek Kofman, Sr. Elizabette Rivet come to mind. The arrest, trial and execution of Jesus, by contrast, were very public. Our Gospels testify to how it was observed, commented on and remembered by many. If, as I argued in the last chapter, there is a valid analogy between Auschwitz and Golgotha, the one illuminating the meaning of the other, then there is much to be learned ethically from the spontaneous moral hero­ ism of people trapped in these terrible situations of Engführung. I therefore propose to look at selected incidents from the Passion of Jesus – this time involving Luke and John as well as Mark – with a view once again to making Christians aware of the ethical resonances of the Holocaust and, at the same time, daring to invite Jews to see what light Jesus, ‘fellow sufferer who understands’, can throw on their history. Once again, this is a question, not a statement, an invitation to a dialogue between equals.

I. What follows is not systematic or exhaustive. Rather it is, as in the previous chapter, a sketch that invites the response of dialogue. Central to it, however, is the notion of ‘care’: care for others, care for self, and, ultimately, being in 294 

the care of God. In this way I am suggesting that ‘in the midst of death, we are in life’. Or, as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 6:9, ‘as dying, and behold, we live’. Given, then, the underlying theme of power and powerlessness of the previous chapter, how do care and Engführung go together? Mark’s narrative begins, as we have seen, with the anointing of Jesus by the unnamed woman in Bethany (14:3–9). This, I now suggest, is an act of caring marked by reciprocity: the deeply felt caring of the woman accepted by Jesus in all its resonances. In this it was truly memorable; her kindness contrasting with the ruthless cruelty of the powerful who were plotting to kill him (14:1–2). The woman’s action was the fruit of a creative human wisdom done in full knowledge of what was happening, the Engführung of the Passion now unfolding. Something similar could be said about the Passover and the Last Supper (14:12–25). The text underlines the dangerous, clandestine nature of this meeting of the powerless. The host, the person who offered a room to Jesus and his disciples, was clearly taking a considerable risk. This contrasts with the weakness and moral corruption of Judas as he moves to betray Jesus (14:10–11). The risk of hospitality gives us another image of care. By contrast, the betrayal of a powerless person into the hands of the powerful is an icon of uncaring cynicism. There are other contrasts in Mark’s narrative that are no less striking. The action of Simon of Cyrene, compelled to carry Jesus’ cross, stands out as a further example of care in contrast to the actions of the soldiers in flogging, mocking, crucifying Jesus. Jesus’ humanity, his kenosis, shows itself in his unreserved willingness to accept Simon’s gesture. The exchange between the two men is real and human. We should also, in Mark’s account, note the extraordinary fidelity of the women, possibly including his mother (15:40–41; see 6:3). In contrast to the mockery of the bystanders and disciples who run away, the women, who had cared for Jesus during his work in Galilee (see, Luke 8:1–3), and despite the danger of being associated with a criminal, continued to show public solidarity with him on the actual execution site itself. One could call this heroic, spontaneous, liberated and liberating. It was all of this and more. What I have called ‘care’, however, begins to describe the ethical heart of these women in the presence of the ultimate deed of the powerful, the death of a powerless man made as painful as possible. Such was the modus operandi of the Romans as of the SS, the ‘supermen’ of cruelty. Is it meaningful, I therefore ask, to draw parallels between the caring of the powerless in the situation of Engführung described by Mark with the 

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actions either of Righteous Gentiles – those non-­Jews who gave assistance to Jews in the Holocaust – or members of the resistance to Hitler, notably the plotters of 20 July 1944, who, as they became increasingly aware of what was happening to Jews and others sought, at the risk of their own lives, to assassinate Adolf Hitler? To complete this brief catalogue of incidents from Mark’s Gospel, there is the action of Joseph of Arimathea who, although as member of the Sanhedrin and therefore one of the powerful, moves in the opposite direction to Judas. His act of solidarity with Jesus takes the form of giving him a decent burial. It hardly needs stating that this is the polar opposite of the mass graves and the crematoria of the Holocaust. Total disrespect for the bodies of the victims continued the murderous and racially motivated hatred of the Nazis for the Jews, the powerful for the powerless, a vendetta pursued in life and, in the barbarous treatment of bodies and attempted erasure of all memory, beyond death itself. Material peculiar to Luke’s Gospel adds to the pattern we have been discerning. This falls into two groups: the actions of Jesus; and the reactions of people to him. If we take the latter first, we have the dispute among the disciples about greatness (22:24–30); the banning of ‘swords’ (22:35–38, 47–53); and Jesus’ appearance before Herod (23:6–12). The dispute about greatness can be read as a response to the question, ‘whose side are you on, that of the powerful or the powerless?’ The temptation of even those closest to Jesus – Judas the betrayer, being the extreme case – was to side with the powerful: the Emperor, and those who derived their power and the benefits that went with it from him. Jesus’ kingdom, on the other hand, is one in which service to others is valued above all else. With this goes a willingness to endure the trials of being in solidarity with the poor and defenceless – the powerless. Instead of the self-­regarding predictability of the established and wealthy, the powerful, we see the freshness of alternatives provided by outsiders and the poor, motivated and inspired by non-­material resources like the wellsprings of prayer. This new ‘upside down’ world is imaged as a festal meal to which all are invited. Jesus’ proven ability to care, drawn finally from God, the supreme non-­material resource or wellspring of life, is now being put to the test. But it will become the spirit that will pervade the hoped-for reconstituted Israel. I paraphrase; but the soundness of this reading of the text is supported by what follows about ‘swords’. Weapons and bloodshed were the means of establishing and maintaining the Pax Romana. Was this the way Jesus’ 296 

followers were to uphold his kingdom? The answer is an emphatic ‘no’: ‘Enough’, ‘No more of this’ (22:38, 51). Indeed it is Judas, sent by his new masters to arrest Jesus, who arrives with a company armed ‘with swords and clubs, as though he [Jesus] were a bandit’ (22:52). This happens at night, but it also epitomises, in the person of Judas, ‘the powers of darkness’ that he now serves – evoked by the ‘and it was night’ of John 13:30. Jesus’ appearance before Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of the northern regions of Galilee and Perea, has many similarities with his trial before Pilate: Jesus’ silence; the accusations by the Chief Priests; the mockery by the soldiers. In this incident we see with peculiar clarity the full extent of the alliance of the powerful against Jesus: Rome and their client rulers, the Herodian dynasty – beginning with Herod the Great, father of Herod Antipas, who had been named ‘King of the Jews’ by his colonial masters; and the Chief Priests or Temple authorities. Herod’s examination of Jesus tries to push him into the religious box of ‘miracle worker’. The ability of the powerful to recognise the true character of Jesus is thus at point null. Herod was ‘a friend of the Emperor’ (John 19:12), Jesus was not. So much the worse for him! The Nazis, blinded by their racism and total hold on power, could do nothing but demonise Jews. The result, as with Jesus, was a withdrawal by the powerful of even the right to exist of the powerless. The remaining three incidents in Luke’s telling of the Passion – the daughters of Jerusalem (22:27–31); Jesus and the criminals (22:39–43); and, perhaps most remarkably, his attitude to his executioners (22:34) – all tell of his unbroken, and even increasing, ability to care for those around him in the Engführung of his last hours. The poetic richness of the sayings attributed to him in each case can be seen as reflecting the richness of the interactions involved. ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and your children’ – and much more. ‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’; and, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ Each incident enriches further our notion of ‘care’. It is the expression of a self whose main characteristic is to be selfless. But more than that, a person able to reach out, though in extremis, to all: to those who, like the soldiers, were tools of the powerful; or who, like the women or the criminals, were in this situation and in their different ways powerless. If we turn finally to John’s Gospel, we find the themes of power and caring once more, but this time as part of a more reflected theology. Power: in Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus, we are given a more extended treatment 

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of the meaning of kingship (18:33–38). Once again Jesus is asked, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ Jesus’ reply (according to John) presents his understanding of kingship. ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here’ (compare Matthew 26:53). ‘Jews’ here, as the passage itself makes clear, does not mean ‘all Jews’ – these, as we have seen, were mostly in support of Jesus – but the Temple authorities, the Chief Priests. The central thrust of what Jesus is saying, however, is that the source of his kingship and authority is not ‘this world’ [i.e. the existing world dominated by the ruthless self-­interest of the powerful], but ‘the truth’. The power given to him is ‘from on high’ (19:11). This can only mean ‘from God’, who is the only true or rightful king. That Jesus incarnates God’s Word, is ‘full of grace and truth’, stems from the fact that – morally and spiritually – he is ‘born of God’, not of any human agency (1:13–14). The full force of this becomes clear only in the light of what John means by ‘this world’. Although the world is the creation of God, the world that God loves (3:17; 5:24; 12:47), its dominant meaning in John’s Gospel is of the world that has rejected God and the one whom God has sent (1:10–11). It is the world organised in opposition to God, ruled over – or in the grip of – evil (or ‘the evil one’). This is the major counterpoint to John’s proclamation of the all-­prevailing love of God. It runs throughout his Gospel. We see it in texts like 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; 17:14–18. It is summed up in 1 John 5:19: ‘the whole world lies under the power of the evil one’. This is how Jesus now experiences the power of Rome; the parallel with ‘the most defenceless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ’, the Jews in the Third Reich, surely unforced and close. Both could – and did pray – the words of Psalm 31. ‘I am the scorn of all my adversaries […] I have passed out of mind like one who is dead […] For I hear the whispering of many – terror all around! – as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.’ When the ‘world’ acts like this, becomes a source of terror and death, as it did in Hitler’s Reich, it has become demonic, full of darkness and horror. No less telling is John 19:25–27, the mutual caring of Jesus, his mother, Mary, and the Beloved Disciple. Although the names are not identical to those given in Mark 15:41–42, the message of care is put over with even greater force. In the narrow way of death, the truth of Jesus, the true authority of his kingship, blazes forth in the simple act of caring for his mother and the beloved disciple. ‘When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple 298 

whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.’ This takes place on the execution site itself where any associated with Jesus were themselves in great danger. In the telling of this story, simple yet profound, John implies that in actions such as these God is glorified – or even that the glory of God becomes visible. We are also invited to reflect on the depth of the goodness of his man whose one concern in the Engführung of death is to care for others. This is ‘the kingdom, the power, and the glory’.157 How many times, we might ask, were family scenes like this played out in all their terrible poignancy in and around the Holocaust itself ?

II. Two reflections, one theological, the other ethical, can, in conclusion, serve to pull the foregoing together and bring out its full significance. As we reflect on the core meaning of our own identity and life, we do well to consider the identity of Jesus as this is disclosed in the Engführung of the Passion. Here it is not his self-­humiliation or suffering in itself that is important, so much as what this reveals about the identity of this person, Jesus, as his kenosis unfolds. At every turn in the story, what we have called his ‘co-­passionate love’ is acted out in a powerlessness akin to the powerlessness of all victims; but also in an unfailing depth of caring that has the welfare of all ‘at heart’. In this it is both ‘active’ and ‘passive’ at the same time. For all that was done to Jesus as passive, suffering victim, he was, we could say, ‘hyperactive’ in caring and being cared for, in reaching out to others. The narrower the Engführung, the more intense became his ability to care and to pray. This co-­passionate love, unconditional and proactive, is pre-­eminent in that it corresponds to a love ‘greater than which cannot be conceived’ (Anselm, ‘id quod maior non posse cogitari’). In this type of argumentation, God corresponds to an unlimited love of this nature or kind. The problem 157 These, according to some manuscripts, are the closing words of Jesus’ own prayer, ‘the Lord’s prayer’, in Matthew 6:13. 

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with it has always been how to move from what we can think or imagine to what exists in reality. In the co-­passionate Jesus, I suggest, what might only exist in inspired imagination came to pass in reality and in fact. We could call this a sense of identity that transcends ‘self ’ in acts of ‘selfless love’ in which one’s whole being declares – in response to each new challenge – ‘I love, therefore I am.’ At once we recall texts like, ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’ (John 15:26); with which we should compare the even more radical statement in Romans 5:6–11 where Christ dies for his enemies, for sinners and the ungodly. These theological statements reflect, as we have seen, the historical reality of the Passion. In Christian reflection, this goes one step further. If the co-­passionate God ‘for others’ of the Exodus is the one whose ‘I am who I am’ of self-­ identity is primordial or basic for any sense of identity whatsoever, Jesus, in the acted-­out co-­passionate love in the Engführung (or kenosis) of his Passion, is the one entitled to say and without reserve – to paraphrase Galatians 2:20 – ‘It is no longer I who live, but God who lives in me.’ At a deep and perhaps fundamental level, Jesus shares the identity of God. In a similar way, Christians are said by Paul to share the identity of Christ: ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’ We could call this ‘the displaced ego’ or ‘replaced ego’, or, better, the ‘transformed’ or ‘transfigured’ ego. Essential to it is that any self-­transcendence in acts of love leads to a heightened sense of self, a new awareness of identity as anchored in Christ. As the Christian ‘ascends’ in this way to Christ, so Christ ‘ascends’ to the Father. No higher – we could equally say ‘deeper’– sense of identity is possible. And if in the foregoing, we translate ‘Christ’ as Messiah, or better, ‘Messianic Person’, we can begin to see how closely Jewish and Christian senses of identity approximate to one another: ‘It is no longer I who live, but a messianic person who lives in me’; ‘It is no longer I who live, but the God of the Exodus who lives in me – and makes of me a person-­inprocess-­of-liberation.’ The point of this first reflection, then, is simply that with co-­passionate love as criterion, those who get their sense of identity either from the Exodus or from Golgotha or from Auschwitz need not see themselves as having separate and incompatible identities. Rather, they have a great deal more in common than they perhaps realise. This dialogue around our sense of who we are is all the more urgent as our world, always threatened with disintegration and futility, ‘waits with eager longing for the revelation of the sons and daughters of God’ (Romans 8:19). 300 

III. The second reflection is ethical. It links to the first, the theological reflection, via the concepts of Engführung and kenosis. The former, Engführung, I am suggesting, is the best modern interpretation of the latter, kenosis; and both are ways of understanding Golgotha and Auschwitz as analogues, not as antagonistic. Ethically, then, Engführung means how the person whose sense of identity is truly grounded in God responds when nailed to a cross with no hope of reprieve (Golgotha) or when the doors to the gas chamber are locked shut (Auschwitz). This is the ultimate test of love in reality. From our observation of Jews in both situations, that is, Jesus as Jew and victim on Golgotha, and Jews in the Shoah, we have discerned a pattern. It consists in an ability to retain an essential humanity – or core sense of identity – in a totally inhuman and cruelly destructive situation. Not only did people retain the faith to pray, they also, connectedly, retained the ability to express love through care of others; or, in the extreme case, to give themselves for others. Prayer is where they got their God-­given sense of identity, the source of their inspiration; the other in need is where they met the ethical imperative in the concrete situation. I have used the word ‘care’ to describe this kind of selfless action to make clear that it is an action, not a pious feeling. The paradox of Jesus, and all who share his God-­derived identity, is that the narrower the Engführung – or the deeper the kenosis – the stronger, the more concentrated and all-­embracing does the love become. This holds whether or not it is reciprocated. In this revelation of the ‘breadth and length and height and depth’ (Ephesians 3:18) of the love of God in human action, we have, I suggest, the basic impulse of an ethic, or a New Torah, that Jews and Christians could hold in common. If one route to the present is from Exodus/Sinai via Golgotha, and the other (from the same starting point) via Auschwitz, the resulting ethical imperative is the same. Its shared purpose is the mending or reconstruction of a broken world in desperate need of healing. Various routes from the historical particular – Golgotha, Auschwitz – to the ethical universal are on hand. In Christian reflection, resurrection can mean the vindication of a pattern of behaviour hitherto despised. If the humiliation of Jesus and that of the Jewish people bear a certain resemblance, then so can the ethical authority – and therefore ultimate vindication – of what they have to offer be seen as convergent. We might liken the 

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humiliation–­vindication pattern here to the way white light, invisible to the human eye, and when passed through the ‘prism’ of death, crosses over and reaches a point theoretically of no magnitude – only then to flood out in all the colours of the spectrum. This is the rainbow of the Covenant, both Old and New, the gift of shalom/peace that we, Jews and Christians, can offer the world. Not only does this gather up the past, no matter horrific, in a refusal of forgetting, it also carries with it the ethical gift of a sustainable future. This ethic, then, with love expressed as care and with faith at its heart, is cast in the mode of hope – ‘the future in the memory of suffering’ (Metz). The image of the rainbow is the biblical symbol of just how rich and variegated this promise of a future can be. “God said, ‘this is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth”’ (Genesis 9:12–13). We move here from Flood and destruction to life and flourishing. Just so Paul, in his telling of the story of the self-­chosen humiliation of Christ, sees, in this man and his history, the God-­given future of humankind. ‘Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’ (Philippians 2:9–11). The image of the rainbow should also alert us to the fact that to arrive at an ethic through the telling of a story – of the Exodus, of Golgotha, of the Shoah – is to give it both depth and richness. Just how rich this can be has, I hope, emerged in our telling of the story of the Passion in conjunction with that of Auschwitz. In summary fashion we could draw attention to the following: *the uses and misuses of power; *care, and the beauty of caring by the powerless; *betrayal and other corruptions of power; *hospitality and prayer as the celebration of life in the face of death; *costly obedience to a call or vision; *denial, cowardice and repentance; *the overwhelming of justice by corrupt power; innocence; *attitudes to cruelty, punishment, torture, execution; *the facing of reality with love, with forgiveness; *the possibility of power motivated by love, as accountable to the powerless, those in need of care; *the involuntary ‘uprightness’ of people nailed to a cross or jammed together in a gas chamber, the supreme icon, ancient or modern, of ethical ‘rightness’ or righteousness – and of course much more. By this route, I am suggesting, we arrive at moral categories – the power of powerlessness expressed through care (love) disciplined by reality, yet animated by 302 

prayer – which could form the basis of a Judaeo–­Christian ethic in the modern world; one that – in a spirit of Engführung, Co-­passion and Recognition (see below) – does justice to the fourfold impulses of revelation of the true God (Burning Bush), of liberation (Exodus), of ethics (Sinai, Covenant), and of testing (Wilderness) acted out in our own times – fire-­tested – in the context of the Holocaust and uncannily anticipated in the life and Passion of Jesus.

IV. Mention of the ‘modern world’ gives the opportunity to add one further dimension to what has been said. Alistair MacIntyre has brilliantly summarised Max Weber’s diagnosis of what is meant by ‘modernity’. According to Weber, what was salient about the culture of modernity was the large and increasing extent to which its values were those of instrumental rationality. Certain ends are taken as given and rationality is taken to consist in calculation as to the most efficient means to achieve those ends. Instrumental rationality is socially embodied in the bureaucratic structures both of private corporations and of governments. And the public social world increasingly becomes one in which there is no place for any other values, in which the domination of nature and the remaking of society through the exercise of technical intelligence provide the taken for granted ends to be achieved by bureaucratic and technological means. Within such a culture little place is left for what Weber called ‘sacred values’, for that which had given to life in premodern cultures a magical or enchanted quality. The world of modernity is a disenchanted world in which only in certain limited areas of the private lives of individuals does there remain any place for the values that escape disenchantment, whether values surviving from traditional religion or, increasingly for those educated into modernity, the values of art.158

Now, a century later, the limitations of this are clearly apparent. Governments have not turned out to be embodiments of instrumental rationality devoted to the common good. Rather they have proven to be open to takeovers by dictators, political ideologies and wild swings of public opinion. Instrumental rationality in the form of science and technology has all too often been co-­ opted to produce weapons or, as in Weber’s own country, Germany, to provide the technology for genocide. Industrial corporations, public or private, driven 158 Edith Stein, A Philosophical Prologue 1913–1922. Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland, 2006, p.156. 

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by the profit motive and aided by the all-­pervasive propaganda of advertising, have created a profligate, consumption-­oriented lifestyle. This requires not only endless exploitation of the environment, but also the burning of fossil fuels that causes the global warming (climate change) that now threatens humankind. Why, we may ask, is the world – so driven by its quest for freedom and the fullness of life – also so out of control, so self-­destructive, in all these ways? From the standpoint of what I am advocating in this chapter, two possible answers present themselves. The first centres on idolatry; the second on possession. According to the first, once something less than God is put at the centre of human life as its governing principle – in this case ‘instrumental rationality’ – that which people have ‘to fall down and worship’, which becomes the taken-­for-granted core of their sense of identity – then this lack of any humane or ethical values creates a dangerous ethical vacuum at the heart of the human community. Jesus warns us why such vacuums are dangerous. They invite takeover, invasion – traditionally, possession – by demonic powers or persons possessed by demons (Luke 11:24–26; compare 8:2). In a society where, according to Nietzsche, God had died in the soul, this took the form of Adolf Hitler with a demonic brew of racism, absolute power, lies and murder. In this way, to account for Hitler’s success as a failure of democratic institutions – or some other purely societal or procedural explanation – does not go to the ethical root of the problem. It puts the cart before the horse. Faced with things of this kind, it is not enough to cry ‘never again’. Nor will art, for all its undoubted power to illuminate life and its meanings, suffice to provide the values that need to be built into the norms and institutions of a sustainable society devoted to human flourishing. Post-­modern art, for example, with its celebration of pluralism and difference, is by its nature unable to produce any sort of consensus, let alone one informed by an ethical or spiritual vision of life. And while democracy, the rule of law and the guarantee of individual liberty may best describe the institutions and processes of a free society, they still leave unanswered the vital question of what ethical and spiritual substance is to give life to the bare bones of necessary institutions. The question remains: how is the void – the vacuum, the absence – that many have sensed at the heart of modern life to be filled?159 159 On this sense of ‘emptiness’, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard University Press, 2007, Chapter 19, ‘Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity’.

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My suggestion is that the Weberian characterisation of religion as pre-­ modern, folkloric and the concern of individuals, not society, is tragically and radically mistaken. Recall the values that have emerged in this chapter: how the ethical imperative of care has been acted out – in this sense, revealed – in key historical moments of the struggle of the powerless with the powerful (Exodus, Sinai, Golgotha, Auschwitz); how care of the powerless for each other and for the powerful – inviting the powerful to reciprocate that care with all the means at their disposal – can be seen as the true God-­given identity of people whether they are at the centre or on the margins of society. In this, I believe, we see laid bare the vision that could inform individual and social life as well as international relations in any sustainable future. Because these values were wrought out, lived and died for in the name of God, in the heart of reality, whether ancient or modern – in slavery, in wilderness, on crosses, in gas chambers – they belong not to the margins of human community, but, as I say, to its very heart or centre. It is here that they are indispensable. [The contrast I am making, in case this is lost on the reader, is between an ethic of care in which the carer bears the cost of the caring; and a non- or counter-­ethic of pure self-­interest, whether of powerful nations or individuals, where the agent gets what it/he/she wants whether this be natural resources, wealth, sex etcetera at some other’s expense. The first way, the way of caring, is the way of shared freedom and sustainable peace; the second is the way of exploitation and enslavement and, inevitably, revolt and conflict.] To touch on a few contemporary issues may give more of an idea of what is at stake. Care of the environment, in itself powerless, is an imperative for the powers of government as of business. Or, does the world community care sufficiently to take effective action against genocide or ethnic cleansing? The same question applies to poverty, disease, starvation, lack of education or the damage caused by natural disasters. All this and more constitute the Engführungen that threaten our global world in all its parts, whether modern, pre- or post-­modern. Throughout we can see the imperative of care, a caring that reaches its full potential when grounded in vision of God. The concept of care here deployed extends naturally to the need for effective justice for all, especially the powerless, in a world where imprisonment and torture without trial are rife. Part of the world’s caring for itself, the upholding of its ethical self-­respect, we might add, must be a way of bringing perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice. This applies whether the perpetrators are powerful nations, institutions or individuals. 

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The same questions, of course, carry over into national life as into interpersonal relations. How can adequate care of people, especially the aged, the sick, the unemployed be upheld in such a way that we can speak of humane, caring societies? Or, in interpersonal relations, how can care be given – and, where possible, reciprocated – in a way that respects the integrity and freedom of the other person? All this, and much more, is what both Judaism and Christianity have at the heart of their respective historic traditions. To the quintessentially modern concepts of freedom and instrumental rationality, they provide the ethical grounding of Covenant, a spiritually based ethic, in ‘care’ and in vision – stemming from hard-­won, historic experience – of a co-­passionate God. This, I believe, is what could increasingly lead them to see themselves as one covenant people: a coming together that will have its own integrity. But the urgent mission of a responsible use of the ethical and spiritual good embedded in these convergent traditions lies in the way in which they can provide the much needed ethic – what I have called ‘a shared covenantal ethic’ – at the centres of all aspects of modern life. The task is as big as the need is great. What is at stake is the way our world (and the nations and societies within it) can be sustained as caring, open, free and unsullied by misuses of power. This ministry of giving life to the world will, it is hoped, be exercised from within positions of power. Powerlessness, however, may well belong to the integrity of the calling to servanthood of this covenant people of God in-­process-of-­becoming-one. In any event, it looks forward to a time when there are no more victims, when all are survivors. Two great texts, one from each tradition, illustrate just how much they have in common. The songs of Hannah and of Mary provide essentials of the covenantal agenda for our time. The Lord makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust; He lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit the seat of honour. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world. 1 Samuel 2:7–8 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. Luke 1:52–53

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D. Learning from the Shoah 12. God as Co-­Passionate Abyss of Love, Victim-­Survivor

I ended the chapter ‘Jewish Responses to the Holocaust’ by quoting from Melissa Raphael’s ‘The Female Face of God in Auschwitz’. My comment was: In Raphael’s perception of the female face of God in Auschwitz we see, I dare to suggest, not only more of the face of the co-­passionate God discernable in texts like Isaiah 63:9, but also the kind of co-­passionate response this calls forth in people, women or men, in what she calls ‘the broken heart of Auschwitz’: the passion to suffer with others and, where possible, to care for them.

In all their affliction, he was afflicted. Perhaps we should add, ‘she’. Now – under the general rubric of ‘Learning from the Shoah’ – I will try to clarify and expand on this conception of the co-­passionate nature of the divine agency as exercised in Auschwitz through people, i.e., in-­with-through human agency.

I. First and foremost, instead of talking of God as all-­powerful or omnipotent – Arthur Cohen’s ‘the interferer’ – we do better to talk of the pre-­eminence of God in love. Why? Basically because if we make God the direct cause of all that happens in history, we make ‘him’ into the author of Auschwitz, an all-­ powerful psychopathic monster devoid of love who imposes suffering in ways that are as unethical as they are irrational. This is the ‘god’ whose existence and supporting rationale began to be questioned in the eighteenth-­century Enlightenment and who finally – or so I should argue – hit the wall at Birkenau, 

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and lies dead and buried in Auschwitz, a death beyond all resurrection. To that ‘god’, often called the god of theism, we can frankly say ‘good riddance’! To grasp the alternative understanding of God that is being offered here, we need to attend to the distinction between omnipotence and pre-­ eminence in love. In barest outline we could say that if the agency of the former involves power alone, that of the latter acts with the power or causality of love, a power, that, moreover, respects human freedom. Thus, while an omnipotence of power can always by-­pass human agency and the laws of nature to achieve its ends, a divine agency that is pre-­eminent in co-­ passionate love is by its nature fully respectful of human freedom as of the laws of nature. It works, that is, through the nexus of the hearts and minds of people, their body-­selves – by which is meant all the realities of human life from birth to death in time and space. Collectively this space is what I call history – the very place between the beginning and end of earthly time where the dramas of human life are acted out. Here people are drawn into becoming co-­creators and co-­redeemers with God; the living God who, in all the pre-­eminence of co-­passionate love, is the one who takes the initiative in sharing suffering and energising liberation. This co-­passionate God, pre-­eminent and unsurpassable in love, is the faithful God of the Covenant. The language of co-­passion thus gathers up the ‘i am who i am’ of Exodus 3:14: not only that ‘God is’, but crucially ‘God is love’, a co-­passionate love that reveals itself both in ‘hearing the cry’ of a slave people and in ‘coming down to deliver them’ (3:7, 8). Empathy, we might say, and liberation, are key characteristics of God’s identity as this kind of love. The God thus revealed to responsive human insight by means of the ‘burning bush’ (3:1–6), is the very God who also gifted people with the courage to respond in the liberative and inspired ways needed to launch their exodus from Egypt. In this account of the divine agency, we are talking about the God, what’s more, who has the patience to wait for the human response even when it is not forthcoming; or, to go one step further, to wait even if the divine initiative is outright rejected, the divine presence ignored or ridiculed. In this way love imposes limits or boundaries on divine power. Yet it belongs to the unsurpassable greatness or pre-­eminence of this divine co-­passionate love that it faithfully sustains people in their capacity to respond to God: in rejection, with patience; in acceptance, with empowerment through the sheer attractiveness and necessity of the gift that is offered. In this way, response and revelation, while notionally distinct, are in practice – in em308 

pathetic, liberative praxis – inseparably linked. We discover God, that is, in actu, in responsive and responsible action. This understanding of the divine–­human nexus is close to Irving Greenberg’s plea for a voluntary understanding of the covenant between God and his people. Perceptively he writes: In a voluntary covenant, there is a deeper dependence – that of relationship, love, self-­ expectations based on the model of the other – but it is a dependence out of strength. The ultimate logic of parenting is to raise children to meet life’s challenges, but to sustain them with a continuing presence and model, not with continual interference or rescue from problems.160

Greenberg’s analogy of the strong, loving, non-­interfering parent could be complemented by another: that of the wise and loving person who, because deeply respected, profoundly influences all those who come in contact with him or her, but who always leaves them free – for good or ill – to make their own decisions. This person cares passionately about people and comes to them with an infectious vision and personal practice of the fullness of life. This person, further, is pre-­eminent in love in the sense of never exercising ‘power over’ others, but rather by being endlessly generative – no doubt on the basis of the track record of their own life – of a ‘power to’ love, to hope, to care – or whatever it may be – in others. People are thus profoundly affected, but always through inspiration, influence, example, love, accumulated wisdom, and sometimes through a guidance and persuasion that always stops short of dictating. In this way we arrive at a notion of the agency of love that can be seen as free, full of life, proactive yet restrained, powerful yet never domineering. We could extend this picture of a wise and loving person with the more impersonal one of a ‘force field’ of love – meaning the kind of atmosphere or ethos or sphere of influence such a person creates around them. This force field, though invisible, is nevertheless palpable and real to those who tune into it – either in a personal flourishing enabled by being nourished by it, or, at the opposite extreme, in mindless rejection of it in self-­destructive behaviour – all the while kidding ourselves that we are ‘free’. The one creates and enhances relationships, the other is endlessly corrosive of them – the pre-­supposition here being that authentic love – whether in God or in us – creates the ‘I am’ of identity, the ‘I–­Thou’ of relationship and the ‘We 160 Irving Greenberg, ‘Voluntary Covenant’, in Stephen T. Katz (ed.), Wrestling with God. Oxford University Press, 2007, p.549. 

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are’ of community. All, in different but related ways, are spheres for the exercise of caring love. To ground this in the subject matter: in our chapter on Unholy Places we saw how the demonic energies of Adolf Hitler pervaded the death camps. Now we are talking about how the personal energies of God as co-­ passionate love are present and available even in the darkest places. Do we thus arrive at a conception of God, personal and impersonal, that can provide us with insight into how God might be present in Auschwitz? This is a genuine question, not a statement. We shall return to consider it in greater depth. For now let us simply note that of this co-­passionate God, pre-­eminent in love, it could be said: • that this God is the very antithesis of the God who is indifferent to the suffering of the victims. The passionate love of this God is touched by and shares in their sufferings; is passionate in all the causality of love for their liberation, be this in life or death. ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you’ (Jeremiah 31:3). • that this God is dipolar only in a qualified sense. Why? Because God is one in that it is the same passionate love that animates God’s agency whether this be in the sharing of suffering or in the initiation and sustaining of liberation. This picks up the Credo of Deuteronomy 6:4 where God is one and can only be one: ‘Hear O Israel: the Lord your God is one.’ According to my interpretation, the sheer depth or abyss of the love of God – far out-­ riding the abyss of evil revealed in the Shoah – is more than sufficient to protect or uphold the wholeness of the being or mystery of God – without, that is, having to resort to the desperate expedient of blocking off the core of God’s being from alleged contamination from the side of the human. If God’s love is infinite and living, it cannot, by its nature, be diminished or damaged by any kind of human wickedness no matter how great. It can be wounded or pained, but that is another story. • that if we adhere to Stephen Katz’s distinction between the divine Speaker and the human Hearer in revelation, it is not as though in Auschwitz God fell unaccountably silent. Rather, God never ceases to communicate God-­self in co-­passionate love. That is the given. The problem therefore lies with the total inability of the perpetrators to hear the voice of God; and, in a way that doesn’t incur culpability, with the understandable impairment of the ability to hear the divine communication on the part

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of the victims. In this way, the perpetrators have much to answer for. They tried to make God unbelievable, and almost succeeded. • that if God acts out of a love that can variously be described as pre-­ eminent, co-­passionate and infinite, then the kind of causality involved – acting in partnership with people in a way that respects their freedom in the meeting of the two freedoms, the divine and the human – dictates that God will achieve God’s ends by God’s own means and in God’s good time. We are talking here about divine providence. More than that we cannot say. We can, however, add that this love, because it is God’s love, is unlimited, never-­ending, infinite. Or, to get a handle on the word ‘everlasting’, we could say that it is of the nature of God’s love that it ‘outlasts’ or ‘outlives’ any event whatsoever in human history no matter how terrible. And because this love is real – revealed in the historical, biblical Christ, not a figment of the human imagination – it can give us real hope in the real world. Even in Auschwitz, that is. Put another way, God will always have the last word. • that if God’s way of acting or of agency is synergistic – working ‘in, with, through’ people as historically ‘in, with, through’ Christ – we can begin to grasp what is meant by the ‘miraculous’ or the ‘supernatural’. When and if people are seized or inspired by the energies of the co-­ passionate God, they surpass or transcend themselves in acts of love which, in their extra-­ordinary character as spontaneous and heroic, not only reveal some of the true glory of God, but also exhibit the greatness of which flawed human beings are capable. At the same time, these acts are visible to others as actions that are awesome in the sheer moral grandeur of what is done. In such acts, no law of nature is broken; yet we are talking about actions that involve God: that are more than just ‘normal’ or ‘natural’; extra-­ordinary – beyond or more than the ordinary – in this double sense of both being rooted in divine love and becoming visible in the self-­transcendence of the person involved. We can thus glimpse the depth of St Teresa of Avila’s words, ‘Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours’; or St Irenaeus, ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’ and therefore fully alive to the needs of others. He adds, ‘The life of humanity consists in the vision of God.’ • that to alter the co-­ordinates of our understanding of God from power to love radically undercuts the hubris of those whose lust for power leads them to mimic or reach for the image/idol of the psychopathic/ egomaniac god embedded in their culture. The fact that this idol is es

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sentially dead, a hangover from an earlier age – the literal meaning of super-­stitio – constitutes not a deterrent to political maniacs so much as their inspiration to exercise unfettered power in the interests of creating a comprehensive culture of death. Could this be part of the explanation, the ready script, of an Adolf Hitler? Are people who worship – or re-­ enact the script of – a dead god fated to create a culture of death around themselves? Out-­of-date, bad theology becomes a death-­dealing idolatry that soon descends into horror, a dangerous god replete with unchristlikeness.

II. We move on now to give substance to what has so far only been sketched as the grammar or ground rules of belief in God as co-­passionate love. To achieve this I will introduce two metaphors: God as abyss of love; and God as victim-­survivor of the twentieth century and all other centuries. Metaphor is here understood as our prime means of exploring the reality of God as of the human condition (see Appendix). Let us look at these two metaphors in turn and in their relationship to each other. First we’ll consider God as abyss of love, a force field of divine energies. I came by this image via the perception of Auschwitz as an abyss of horror. To visit the place, to read about it or talk with survivors, is to be struck by the fact that no matter how horrific a given incident may be – for example, the burning or bayoneting of live babies – we cannot be confident that some other atrocity even more shocking may not come to light. ‘Abyss’ in this sense therefore means ‘bottomless’, something we can never ‘get to the bottom of’. When ‘darkness becomes visible’, we can never be sure how much darkness this particular darkness can lead onto in further darkness. In this way, evil is taken with full seriousness. In our earlier ‘Site-­specific Reckoning with Evil’ we traced the unfettered acting out of evil in the death camps to the character of Hitler himself: the ‘screaming, racially motivated homicidal maniac’, possessed by the daemon or anti-­charisma of a would-­be psychopathic egomaniac god who multiplies evil in all directions – with the willing complicity of his underlings. In this way, we saw the psyche of Adolf Hitler as bottomless, insondable. 312 

Is the image of God as abyss of love simply the mirror image of this? In answering ‘no’ to that question, I want to refer again to Anselm’s well-­ known criterion for thinking about God: id quod nihil maior cogitari potest, ‘that which a greater cannot be thought’. Does this principle fit Hitler as the ne plus ultra of evil? Obviously not, simply because we can well imagine a person with more power to destroy than Hitler and Nazism. Imagine, for example, a nuclear-­armed maniac determined to act out the role of a destructive, de-­creative demi-­god. There is also the matter of historical contingency: Hitler was mortal, mentally and physically sick, a man whose hubris eventually called forth the nemesis of defeat; his suicide and the little heap of burnt ash all that remained of him. ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ In this sense Hitler was relative, historical. The ‘excess’ of evil he represented was the expression of nothingness – from nowhere, going nowhere – that was therefore only capable of creating a culture of death limited to a particular period of history – whatever its ‘after-­life’ in future history. These are the salient points of his multiple limitations. If, however, we apply the same Anselmian principle to God as abyss of love, we get a very different result. Now ‘abyss’ doesn’t just mean ‘bottomless’ in a psychological sense, but rather refers to the capacity of the living God to inspire and multiply love – and all its ancillaries: justice, truth, beauty – in every generation. This has been the track record of God in the past; and it is a fair projection that this will continue in ages to come. Instead of saying as a matter of principle ‘God is not’, we now have an open-­ended sentence that ever and anew invites completion. ‘God is […]’ – ‘God is […] what?’ ‘God is love’, we have answered. But this statement of principle – our metaphysic of how things are – invites further completion. For example, God is love in leading a people out of slavery and in giving them an ethic to make their freedom sustainable. Or, God is love in remaining present to all the horrors of Auschwitz – in ways we shall explore further shortly – empathetic and vulnerable, but always on the side of life, of freedom, of caring; in the situation itself, but also as inspiring the moral and spiritual fortitude necessary to drive a recovery from this particular lapse into barbarism at the heart of the human community. This co-­passionate love, I would therefore argue, is an abyss of love in the sense of being the very ground of all moral and spiritual being. ‘Ground’ here means the ‘root and driving force’ behind all human striving to re-­create on earth the goodness of God, the truth of God, the beauty of God. Like the glory of God in Isaiah 6:3, it fills ‘the whole earth’ and therefore keeps ap

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pearing in places where it is least expected – sites of horror, for example. The main characteristic of this abyss of love is therefore that it – on the analogy of a force field – inexhaustibly inspires and resources all those who ‘answer the call’ in costly acts of love. As we recite these acts, we can constantly be amazed at how one act echoes and perhaps surpasses another. In this way, love, because it is spontaneous and frequently heroic, will always surprise us, shock us into acknowledging that we are in the presence of the authentically sacred, the holy. ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory’ (Isaiah 6:3). Such acts fill us with hope and are therefore eminently worth celebrating, this with a view to their future re-­enactments. The root of this – the inference from what we observe – is that God as abyss of love, is the very God who, in Anselmian fashion, is the ground and inspiration of those acts of love that prove equal to address each new historical circumstance no matter how horrific. In the living God we thus have the wellspring of the ethical imagination. And yet this account of God is still incomplete. Second, we’ll consider God as victim-­survivor. The image of God as abyss or force field of love, however, runs the risk of making God impersonal. An abyss or energy field cannot per se have a human face. The controlling metaphor of an abyss therefore needs to be counterbalanced by another that is personal, rich in meaning and acted out in history. The image of God as ‘victim-­survivor’ – recalling the account of Christ as Priest and Victim in the Epistle to the Hebrews (2:14–18; 4:14–16) – is, I suggest, just such an image. Consider some of its advantages. First, the latter, the victim-­survivor metaphor, can be seen as the instantiation or incarnation of the former, the abyss of love, as personal as the other is impersonal. Victims and survivors are people – without prejudice to the way they can be inspired or touched by something beyond or more than themselves – a greater love, say, than that of which they are personally – or were formerly – capable. Next, the image of the victim signals the drive at the heart of God to share and be present to the suffering of the victims. Here we might recall Bonhoeffer’s warning to the effect that ‘only a suffering God can help’ and have credibility in the twentieth century – and, we might add, in any other century. ‘Victim’ on its own, however, might only evoke the linguistic field of death, evoke only hopelessness and defeat. To yoke it together with the image of the survivor therefore introduces a different dynamic: that of the rare person who emerges from the hell of Auschwitz–­Treblinka–Sobibor–­Belzec with their humanity somehow intact, able to bear witness to what happened in those places, and blest – 314 

where not driven crazy – with a wisdom about the sheer wonder and preciousness of life and how it can be sustained. We can thus see the twin images of God as abyss of love and as victim-­ survivor as the two ends of a continuum that stretches all the way from the impersonal and the cosmic to the personal, the historical, the concrete. This is the further or additional sense in which God is dipolar. But what binds all this together as one God is the quality of the love in question: the co-­ passionate love that is present in agonised immediacy to all human suffering and that, with an equal or even greater passion, wills the freedom and fullest flourishing of each human life. In this latter role of caring for and nurturing life, it is characteristic of this co-­passionate God to care as much for the failures as for the success stories. In saying this, I am signalling awareness that many survivors of the Shoah and all it engendered subsequently committed suicide – Primo Levi, Paul Celan and others.

III. We are now, I suggest, in a position to talk about Jesus Christ who in his person can be seen as – and indeed, experienced as – the human instantiation of God as abyss of co-­passionate love in history; who, in the fullness of his given life, his willingness to die a victim’s death and his survival in vindication/resurrection, is the victim-­survivor par excellence, the one who is at one with and yet presides over all the victims and victim-­survivors of history. We thus arrive at something like Paul’s vision as expressed in Romans 14:7–9. We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.

To explicate this more fully is the agenda of the next chapter, ‘Christ and Horrors: Engführung: Narrowing/Impasse’. For now, I simply want to fill out the present picture of God as the co-­passionate abyss of love that is revealed in the co-­passionate victim-­survivor with some brief notes on how such a love might impact on the various actors in the Shoah: perpetrators, bystanders, 

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victims and victim-­survivors. In laying this out, I have borne two things in mind: that ‘God’ is a relational concept, i.e. has to be seen – for all his nature as love – through the prism of the various actors in the drama; and that for God to be the God of love in the fullest sense must mean that God is the God of all represented in the history with which we are concerned. Thus, in relation to the perpetrators as murderers we might say that God is the burning heart of wrath, whose heart is on fire with outrage at what has been done. This is the God with an ethic (or Torah) who cannot overlook such radical transgression of God-­given life; the God whose love insists that people be made accountable for their actions, that they be brought to justice, and this not just at the bar of human history, but in the very presence of God. This, surely, is entailed in our account of God as co-­passionate: the empathetic sharing of suffering contrasting with the callous brutality of the perpetrators; the insatiable drive for freedom the polar opposite of the demonic impulse to imprison and destroy. The statement ‘God is wrath’ in relation to the perpetrators depends, however, on the prior, and for us credal or more basic statement, ‘God is love’. In this perspective, wrath is one necessary form of a love that is real through being engaged, a love that refuses to remain indifferent or unmoved by horrific human deeds. Yet this must always be said with a proviso: that however necessary passionate wrath may be in our understanding of God, it is not the final truth about God – something like the outer court of the Temple, not the holy of holies. Whether or not the perpetrators are permanently expelled from the Presence is a question we cannot enter into here. Suffice it to ask: are there some actions – the wanton burning of babies, for instance – that have to be classed as unforgiveable, damnable? Moving on to the bystanders – and assuming we are talking about guilty bystanders – we might say God is purifying, purgatorial fire. In modern language, this would be ‘tough love’, but a very tough love. For if we consider the bystanders, they are the ones who had to live with the hell the Nazis – and in so far as they were complicit – created. There may have been some innocent bystanders, but large swathes of the German population were guilty in that they knew about and contributed to what was happening. These, the guilty, are those who, in the aftermath, have to suffer the pain of self-­knowledge, the agonies of self-­recognition in the recall of what they, in part, were responsible for: the death or ruination of millions of innocent lives. Theirs, furthermore, was the option chosen by many of denial or falsification, of continuing the pattern so typical of Nazism of lies, deception and concealment. The inner erosion of a bad conscience, 316 

the evasion of reality, can thus become the horrible, claustrophobic cocoon in which they chose to live. If, on the other hand, they decide to repent, to move from cowardice to courage, they open for themselves the possibility of recovery of their humanity. The condition of this recovery, however, is that they ‘get real’ about the past; and, at the same time, encounter the God who is purifying, purgatorial fire. Painful though this experience will be, its redeeming feature is that it is real in its encounter with a love whose basic intention is to redeem and restore. In this context, ‘to recover’ means not only an encounter with the true and living God, but equally and connectedly to recover the ability to tell the truth as to care for others. New horizons as the gift of God thus begin to open up. For there is a sense in which God as love never ceases to be gracious. As regards the victims and victim-­survivors, we could say that in them we see (or glimpse) the face of God – and this by virtue of the fact that they correspond most nearly to the co-­passionate nature of God. Theirs is the suffering; and theirs the passionate desire for liberation – fulfilled in the case of survivors, and unfulfilled in those who perished. In either case, God is present and active in all the passion of divine love. ‘What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life’ (1 John 1:1) – this can be read as referring to the flesh and blood actuality of how the co-­passionate Christ as Jew and as victim-­survivor, and as such acting out the co-­passionate nature of God, becomes visible/palpable as ‘the fellow-­sufferer who understands’ (Alfred North Whitehead) in the actual victims themselves – especially in those who care for others – as in the few who survived to carry on that tradition. In either case, living or dead, fulfilled or unfulfilled, theirs is the potential for open access to the presence of the living God, the God who heals and gives life now, then or in eternity. The watchword of victims and victim-­survivors could therefore be: Be strong and bold: have no fear or dread of them, because it is the Lord your God who goes with you […] [whose] word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. (Deuteronomy 31:6; 30:14)

To gain insight into how this might be, we shall in the next chapter, ‘Christ and Horrors’, place Christ, victim, victim-­survivor and Jew, in the narrowing/impasse (Engführung) of an execution site, whether this be Auschwitz or Golgotha; and this in the knowledge that he, in his person, is the instantiation of the co-­passionate abyss of love that God is and as such the victim and victim-­survivor par excellence.



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13. Christ and Horrors Engführung: Narrowing / Impasse For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things to himself, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. Colossians 1:19–20

The purpose of this chapter is to explore in greater theological depth what is meant by Christ as the instantiation – as victim and victim-­survivor par excellence – of the co-­passionate abyss of love that God is. What is going on in the heart-­mind-body of a person whose ability to love and care for others blazes forth in all its glory in the Engführung, the narrowing and impasse of cross or gas chamber? What potential for good, for healing, does the active caring – ultimately of God for all people – thus revealed have for victims and victim-­survivors in time and, perhaps also, out of time? As we address this question, let us recall what we learned from our earlier, extended consideration of the self-­limiting (kenotic) Christ of Philippians 2:5–8, what Michael J. Gorman calls the ‘master narrative’ of Paul’s theology of the cross.161 The passage taught us that in so far as we learn to hear the voice of the self-­emptying Christ, so shall we be enabled to hear the cries of the victims. Equally, in so far as the pilgrim gets to hear the cries of the victims in site-­specific ways, so will he or she be enabled to hear the voice of the authentic, self-­emptying Christ. This double movement of recognition – from Christ to victim and victim to Christ – then becomes the Godly matrix in which we, as pilgrims and in so far as we enter the self-­limiting way of Christ, recognise and enter into co-­passionate solidarity with all those ‘who bear human form’, especially those who suffer. In this Christ-­engendered matrix or space, compounded of the victims, the victim-­survivors and the questing pilgrim, it may become possible (as stated earlier) to glimpse the face of God – the One 161 See, Chapter 1, ‘Hearing the Cries’; and Gorman, Cruciformity, especially, pp.165–6. Also Gorman’s sequel, Inhabiting the Cruciform God. 

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Face in all the many faces. At the same time, the pilgrim, by the grace of God, can be drawn into ‘a becoming like God’ (theosis) that will show itself in ever-­greater awareness of others, especially those who suffer.

I. Maybe that’s all that needs to be said. We can, however, go a step further: by reflecting theologically to illuminate the raw biblical data and the immediacy of our own intuitions and experience. Large claims are being made, for instance, in the previous paragraph. How do we justify them? Helpful in this regard is Marilyn McCord Adams’ book, Christ and Horrors.162 Adams starts from the premise that while sin as moral culpability stubbornly persists as ingrained in the human condition, a more important part of modern experience is what she calls ‘horror-­participation’ – another way of stating the victim-­experience that is basic to the ‘pilgrim’ theology of this book. She writes: ‘My own wrestling with evil convinced me that, while sin and horror are both problems, horrors are the more fundamental problem.’163 If we ask why this is so, her answer is that the evil inherent in being a victim – what she calls ‘horror-­participation’ – lies in its capacity to ruin or devastate innocent human lives so that they become meaningless – and this, we could add, together with a universe itself perceived as meaningless, impersonal and cruel per se. ‘I have’ she writes, ‘defined horrors as evils participation which make positive meaning prima facie impossible for the participant.’164 From the ‘pilgrim’ perspective, this applies above all to people who perished in the gas chambers, but also to those who survived, the victim-­ survivors, whose experience of horror made it difficult or impossible for some to give meaning to their subsequent lives. The memories that haunted them became the ‘meaning destroyers’, the demons that assailed them in and out of time. If, then, horror-­participation and its consequences are a central but unforseen – or better, unavoidable – effect of the radical experiment in human freedom called creation, the corresponding task for 162 The full reference is: Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology. Cambridge University Press, 2006. 163 Ibid., p.ix. 164 Ibid., p.205.

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the doctrine of redemption is how to restore meaning to the meaningless, horror-­ridden existence of victims and victim-­survivors alike, both of the living, that is, and of the dead. Here we break new ground. For the problem persists as much in time as out of time.

II. In addressing this fundamental problem, Adams sets out the workings of redemption – the meaning-­restoring process, what she calls ‘horror defeat’ – as a three-­stage operation. Its pre-­supposition is that the only ‘salve’/ salvation (or balm) for ruinous horrors is intimacy with God ‘in time’ and/ or ‘out of time’ (eternity). Why is this? Simply because for all the abyss of horror opened up by horror-­participation, God is an incommensurably or pre-­eminently greater good – what I have called ‘an abyss of love’ – thus ‘radically outclassing any created good or evils’.165 Echoing Anselm, she writes, ‘God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived, infinite being and goodness […] Goodness itself inclines to share […] wealth. Moreover, God can afford to be generous. Divine resources are limitless.’166 This, then, is the standpoint from which she sets out a three-­stage process of redemption that involves the following: incarnation; resurrection ‘in time’; and eternal life, or resurrection ‘out of time’. First, incarnation. According to Adams, the full humanity of Jesus consists in his full and unreserved horror-­participation in cross and passion. We could therefore say that his life qua human life was ruined, devastated or rendered meaningless by his death (aged circa 30) by crucifixion. But because, or so the argument runs, this horror-­participation was also the self-­ emptying, love-­motivated act of one from the heart of God, he is also, in the act of being crucified, ‘God with us’, the human means, that is, by which God establishes a potentially meaning-­giving intimacy or solidarity with all those whose lives have been rendered meaningless by horrors. Incarnation therefore includes what has traditionally been called a descent into hell. Adams writes of how ‘within the context of the horror-­participant’s own 165 Ibid., p.47. 166 Ibid., p.280. 

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life’ – of Christ’s and ours – ‘the miracle of incarnation’ establishes ‘a relation of organic unity between the person’s horror-­participation and his/ her intimate, personal, and overall beatific relation with God’.167 In other words, God with us, even in hell. Second, resurrection ‘in time’ or Christ as Inner Teacher. Resurrection here is not only the means whereby Christ’s meaningless cross became meaningful, but also how the horrors suffered by others can also become meaningful when touched by this supremely inclusive meaning-­giving event. In this ‘resurrection’ perspective we’re talking now about the living, the victim-­survivors. It says that because Christ was fully human in being fully subject to horrors, he can, like other humans, be the victim of a ruined or devastated life. Yet as motivated and filled by the love and re-­ creative energies of God in his life as finally in his resurrection, he has the capacity – as capax Dei – to be the ‘inner teacher’, meaning-­restorer, healer of all those whose lives have similarly been broken by tragedies, horrors or atrocities. Minimally we could say that in virtue of his thoroughly human participation in horror, Christ gains the moral authority to address the problem of meaninglessness. More than that: in virtue of his divine provenance and intimacy with both God and humankind, he becomes the context or space – as the Risen One – in which rescue from meaninglessness can actually take place. As commentary on this, we could say that ‘the Risen One’ stands for the way in which the whole of Christ’s divinely informed and motivated experience of giving meaning to meaninglessness in time is gathered up and made available – whether ‘in time’ or ‘out of time’ – to all those, living or dead, at all times and in all places, whose lives were or are afflicted with the meaninglessness, ruination or devastation brought about by victimhood understood as horror participation. At this juncture we are therefore talking about divine participation in human horrors, which, because it is ex coram Dei, has the potential to be redemptive of any horrors whatsoever that are shared in this way. This, we should note, is the essence of what is meant by the co-­passionate self-­ emptying love of Christ. But whereas our lives can be ruined or devastated by such experiences of horror, God – or what Adams calls ‘the divine mind’ – cannot be ‘blown’ or ‘blown away’ by them. She writes: ‘Even in the midst of horrors, Divine imagination sees a way around them, Divine power is mobilising ways and means to make good on them, not only glob167 Ibid., p.66.

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ally but within the framework of each and every horror-­participant’s life.’168 Besides being a thoroughly human mind, then, the mind of Christ is capax Dei in the sense of being fully receptive to the Divine mind, imagination or power, again, be this ‘in’ or ‘out’ of time. Thirdly, Eternal Life or Resurrection ‘out of time’. Here several factors are at work. For God, creating embodied personal life in a material creation – gifted with freedom in its natural processes as in the human exercise of freedom – has turned out to involve horror-­participation. Is there a God-­given context, then, Adams asks, where both individual lives and the whole material creation can be re-­created in such a way as to be the space in which both cosmic and personal meaninglessness can be healed and made safe from future horrors? In putting it like this, Adams takes seriously not only the persisting meaninglessness of the victim-­survivor’s life, but also the fact of death whereby lives were cut off at the point of maximum pain and meaninglessness – for example, by gassing. This third stage, she writes, concerns ‘recreating our relation to the material world so that we are no longer radically vulnerable to horrors’.169 There is thus a ‘later’ within which horror-­participants can ‘reverse the degradation’ and ‘resolve the plots of their lives’.170 In this way God is what Adams calls the ‘maximally well-­organized lover’ who, faced with the prima facie fact of horror in created, human life, provides – in the resurrection of the body as of the whole material, created order – the way in which prima facie horror can be turned into ultima facie blessing. Given, then, that creation contains the promise of embodied human life in harmony with God, God – as a matter of natural justice – makes good, in the resurrection of the body and matter in general, on the original divine promise or blessing. We might call this ‘freedom in a new key’: a freedom ‘out of time’ akin to ‘freedom in time’, but with the crucial difference that, once in the care of God, it is freed from all threat of horror. Redemption in Adams’ vision is thus a fully inclusive and interconnected process that involves three stages: that of divine horror-­participation in a fully human way; the consequent divine creation of meaning in the midst of human meaninglessness; and, lastly, a facing of the problem of death whereby God becomes the final re-­creator of human lives – as of their natural environment – in all their incomplete or frustrated search for meaning. An analogy 168 Ibid., p.142. 169 Ibid., p.66. 170 Ibid., p.211. 

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in our pilgrim perspective for what Adams lays out might be our exploration of how an ‘unholy’ place can become or be ‘seen as’ a ‘holy’ place or space. Underlying all this we might sense Paul’s teaching in Romans 8:20–21: how the creation, subjected to ‘futility’ and ‘bondage to decay’, ‘will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’.

III. To take this one step further: if Adams’ three-­stage process is her narrative of how God in Christ participates in and thereby redeems and re-­creates horror-­prone, horror-­ridden human life, she then searches for a Christology – in the sense of a substantive, reflective understanding of the person of Jesus – that explicates her redemption narrative and makes it credible. It could be summarised in two key propositions: kenosis and assumptio – and here she is saying something close to what I have been trying to convey via the notions of co-­passion and Engführung. Central to her terminology is the notion of the dynamic interrelationship in the one Christ of the self-­emptying divine love, on the one hand, and the ruined or devastated full humanity of the man Jesus crying out for redemption, on the other. The former is the kenosis, the ‘downward’ movement; the latter the assumption, the ‘taking up into’ – assumptio here understood in terms of a fully human person crying out to God de profundis and in extremis – both impulses, the ‘up’ of assumptio and the ‘down’ of kenosis betokening a radical openness to God (here at the point of crisis) that belonged fully to the being of Christ. In the traditional language of early church Christology, we’re talking about the communicatio idiomatum or exchange of properties: how the full horror-­participation of authentic incarnation interpenetrates or ‘inter-­ communicates’ in the persona, identity or sense of self of a humanity which, while done to death in the meaninglessness of crucifixion, nevertheless remained radically open and receptive to the abyss of divine love that alone rendered it meaningful. The same approach has traditionally been expressed by the Greek word perichoresis, meaning the circulation, interpenetration or exchange of energies, divine and human, in the one Christ. Once again, something close to our understanding of Christ as victim and 324 

victim-­survivor is being said. It could also be set out as an atonement theology: that in acting out fully (i.e. kenotically) the role of being ‘the man for others’ on the Cross (paradigm for his whole life), Jesus Christ was fully at one with the God who is/was/will be – ‘in’ or ‘out’ of time – ‘the God for others’ as previously historically revealed (Exodus 3!) – thus creating an infinitely fecund space – Christ space! – involving inter alia forgiveness and healing for all those excluded from this overflowing life– a space for them to be at one with – or to approximate to! – this same God. Adams’ thinking, then, can be set out in two steps. The starting-­point for her Christology lies in a frank acknowledgment of the existence of two distinct wills, minds or centres of consciousness in the one Christ. This gathers up the ‘perfectly distinct’ part of the paradox of the Chalcedonian Definition. It also argues for the full and integral humanity of the man Jesus. According to Adams, this enables us to say that Christ as human is fully human, a creature, without reserve. This includes the possession of a human mind or outlook as well as a body – and indeed any other faculties that are adjudged integral to the human condition. Human in all respects, then, he is able to be subject to horror-­participation in a thoroughly human way. Is not this what we see in his ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’ on the cross? Equally, in virtue of his incarnation of the divine mind, the Word, we can say that Christ is fully divine, fully at one with God. This can be explicated by means of what I have called a ‘dynamic interrelationship’ – traditionally a communicatio idiomatum or exchange of properties – in which the human mind of the one and undivided Christ is fully open to and receptive of the self-­emptying love of the divine mind – and of course vice versa. This can enable us to glimpse how, in the person of the one, undivided Christ, we can recognise a thoroughgoing coming together or interpenetration of divine initiative in self-­emptying love – grace – and radical human receptivity or openness – what we have called ‘a crying out to God’. Christian orthodoxy sees this as true of the whole life of Christ. For our purposes we have highlighted how this takes place at the point of maximum need, the cross, and, by analogy, Auschwitz, the helplessness of a person nailed to a cross not unlike the helplessness of people trapped in a gas chamber. At this crucial – or cameral – point, the divine has the potential to transform the human mind in so far as it is open to the divine mind in the same way that the human condition of Christ – in horror participation – was also fully open to and transformed by the divine mind. Or, following Adams, we could speak of two complementary potentialities: 

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‘One Who out of love identifies with us by sharing our nature and radical vulnerability to horrors’; and a divine indwelling as ‘the very environment that enables us to stand up to our full stature in Christ’.171 While this can be read as saying what I have just laid out, it has the merit of putting the stress on the divine ‘for others’ or initiative of grace as constituting the final ground of unity in the person of the one Christ. The Christ we encounter, then, shows his oneness with ‘the God for others’ in the costly integrity of his own historic actions ‘for others’, these in solidarity with the powerless and the victims of the Shoah, as of all other times and places. Lest this reading of communicatio idiomatum/perichoresis sound static and therefore unreal, Adams deploys – as I have already sketched – the twin notions of kenosis (self-­emptying) and assumptio (assumption, taking up into) to illuminate what is meant by this sharing of properties within the one person of Christ. It is not merely a matter of a divine consciousness ‘squeezed down to human size’ or ‘a human one stretched up towards heaven’, she says.172 Rather, we’re talking about a dynamic process – an exchange of properties – in which the two centres of consciousness (mind and will) have become one – or just are one – in on-­going willingness, or better, ability to do the will of God through being transformed or transfigured by divine life as this was lived out day by day, especially in moments of crisis, in the historic life of the one Christ. Here we should remind ourselves that we are talking about horror-­participation and its divine redemption. Or, to add a nuance, we could say, alternatively, that the will/mind of God and the will/mind of Christ were one from the start, but that this became progressively manifest step by step in tune with Christ’s developing human maturity. Oneness with God will be spelled out in different ways in the child as compared with the adult. But at bottom we’re talking about the same thing. As we know, children experience horrors every bit as much as adults. One only has to think of the Shoah. There is thus a divine kenosis whereby God-­in-Christ experiences a God-­sized grief – which then becomes a permanent part of the mind or consciousness of God as eternally one with Christ. In this we have a thoroughgoing assumption – or taking up into – of this horror participation into the pre-­eminent goodness of the divine mind, a mind that, as we have seen, cannot be ‘blown’ by any degree of human horror-­participation whatsoever. Horror is thereby healed, the human consciousness that suffered it in ruina­ 171 Ibid., p.162. 172 Ibid., p.85.

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tion, devastation and meaninglessness is given a future – the future! – because now we have meaning-­in-God. In other words, we could say that there is acted out in Christ the fact that God both takes full responsibility for the human condition – however botched it may be – by becoming fully subject to it – and, at the same time, by having the resources to cope with it, heals it, gives it meaning, no matter what – a limitless evil set in an abyss of love. We thus arrive at a model of the fully human person not only crying out in the de profundis and in extremis of meaningless horror, but in so doing becoming open to the greater, co-­passionate love of God which in the first instance literally means life for others, but which also, in risking the void of death, plunges the caring person – the martyr, the hero – into a darkness that turns out to be the face of the God whose love outrides the immediate darkness of human wickedness. As is so tellingly stated in Psalm 139:12, ‘darkness is as light to you’. Lest all this should sound like Christian triumphalism to the Jewish reader, I would simply ask whether some such account of the divine–­human nexus is what gives meaning to the heroic love of those to be considered or ‘recognised’ in the chapter that follows: Rabbi Berek Kofman, Janusz Korczak, Mrs Zucker. If, alternatively, our approach is via Christian heroes or martyrs, we might be thinking of people like Sr Elizabeth Rivet, Fr Maximilian Kolbe (both Franciscans), Edith Stein (Jewish person, Carmelite), Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And of course many others, both Jewish and Christian, to go no further. This chapter, and the ones that precede and follow it, are an invitation to think ecumenically and in dialogue.

IV. The ‘pilgrim’ analogy for this would be the way in which the pilgrim takes upon himself or herself some small part of the horror of unholy places; but, at the same time, through prayer and faith in the faithfulness of the kenotic Christ, offers this horror in the presence of God as a prayer – or better, gut-­cry – for healing and the gift of a meaningful future. Does this describe some of the process whereby the evil of unholy places can turn (or be transfigured) into the sacredness or potential for life of ‘unholy places’ qua holy places? I believe so. For here we see on a small and limited scale 

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the divine–­human exchange or at-­one-ment that happened (and happens) in its fullness and finality in the communicatio idiomatum (or perichoresis) of the kenosis and assumptio at the heart of the living, co-­passionate Christ, the victim and victim-­survivor par excellence: in our terminology, how the victim is drawn into the abyss of the divine love and thereby offered the means to become a victim-­survivor in hope rather than defeat and despair. This confluence of divine and human shows itself, we only need to add, in a proven ability to care – heroically and spontaneously – in the ‘narrowing’ of cross or gas chamber: the ability to assume responsibility, that is, for the horror of the moment in response to the call (or presence) of God: and this in an offering of self that, instead of turning in on itself, in fact reached out to others. We could say, further, that while this can happen in a small, fragmented way in pilgrimage to unholy places as in open-­hearted encounters along the way, it happens in a more sustained – although always partial – way in communities of prayer in the vicinity of unholy places. That they are not located ‘in’ unholy places (i.e. not on the site of) – but adjacent to or at one remove from them – symbolises the fact that the horrors perpetrated in each place are in a real sense beyond human redemption. In God, however, there may be meaning, new life all round – the praying person or the praying community being in some way the means or conduit of this God-­given life, the context or space where it can emerge. That at any rate is my experience, my perception, and therefore my contention here.

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14. Recognition, Thanksgiving Honour, Gratitude He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might be pre-­eminent in all things. Colossians 1:18 To be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he may be the firstborn of many brothers and sisters. Romans 8:29

In the last chapter we worked with the concepts of kenosis, assumptio and then communicatio idiomatum (or, perichoresis). In the former we operated with what might be called an ‘up-­down’ or vertical perspective: the ‘coming down’ of God and the ‘lifting up’ of the human. In the latter we explored a more lateral model centred on the concept of exchange. We now move on to consider a further set of concepts, that of recognition, sacrifice and gift where we seek to fill out what can be learned from the second, exchange, perspective, one that is lateral, relational or horizontal. This shift of perspective, I would claim, throws further light on how the ‘vertical’ concept of kenosis can be validly and fruitfully translated into the ‘lateral’ concept of Engführung. In ‘pilgrim’ idiom, we could put it like this. To hear the cry of the victim in-­with-through the self-­emptying Christ – and thereby to enter more fully into solidarity with all who bear human form – now appears as the task of recognition or, better, mutual recognition between victim and victim, and, to a lesser extent, between victim and the open-­hearted pilgrim. Here the recognition in question happens in the context of an exchange of gifts, an exchange involving sacrificial self-­giving in all the open-­heartedness of co-­passionate love. Could we say, that is, that in the exchange of such gifts we have the common ground or meeting place whereby victims, both Jewish and Christian, can recognise and respond to one another? Or, if we are speaking of recognition between the living and the dead, what we could call one of the supreme human acts of charity, may it be that the traffic is not all one way? May it be that the dead have gifts to offer that far exceed



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anything we have to give in return? In this we may have a lateral human analogue to complement the conceptualities, whether lateral or horizontal, deployed in the last chapter to understand the divine-­human person of the self-­giving, self-­emptying Christ.

I. To gain insight into this approach we can, initially, learn from Paul Ricoeur’s exploration of the phenomenon of recognition.173 Ricoeur sees this taking place in an exchange of gifts. This is how giver and receiver recognise or, we could say, honour each other. The gift-­giving involved is sacrificial inasmuch as the gifts are costly, in the limit case, where gifts as objects fall out of the picture altogether, and all that remains is the gift of the very self of one person to another. To emphasise the non-­commercial nature of the gift-­giving involved in mutual recognition, Ricoeur quotes Matthew 10:8, ‘You have received without payment, give without payment.’ This gift-­giving, moreover, is one in which giver and receiver are revealed for who they are. In mutual recognition their true identities are revealed and this in ways that can be wonderfully spontaneous and sometimes heroic. We are not, in other words, in the realm of a procedure that has been routinised into a code of community expectations or a principle of reciprocity. Rather we are in the realm of ‘gift’, what Ricoeur calls ‘mutuality’, in which the value of the gift qua object is always exceeded by the quality of the relationship thereby engendered. The ‘coinage’ here is not one of commercial or monetary value, but, over and above the gift itself, one of love or heartfelt intimacy. When it is put like this we can glimpse an exchange of gifts in which the value of the gift as object is minimised or eliminated altogether in favour of the fully inter-­personal gift of self. Ricoeur then expands on the nature of this self-­giving by means of the notions of sacrifice or agape as meaning pure, disinterested, other-­focused love. Of sacrifice he writes: ‘The emergence of “someone killed who has not killed”, at the source of

173 Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition.

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the violence of sacrifice, is always an event.’174 Such an event cries out to be celebrated – nous avons quoi célèbrer! It enters the realm of ‘gift’ or grace by breaking the circle of vengeance: we are not here in the presence of warfare or retaliation or scape-­goating or violence of any kind, but rather of an ‘overflow’ or ‘excess’ of peace that can be shared through being celebrated. Out of respect for – or in recognition of – the victims, this applies, we should add, whether the gift of self in sacrifice was voluntary or involuntary. The common ‘coinage’ in either case, the gift, consists in such things as innocence, righteousness, selfless giving, undeserved suffering, the ability in extremis to pray and to care – all the things, in other words, that belong to victimhood and by means of which it can be recognised in its positive and therefore meaningful aspects. Moreover, while this account of sacrifice is ‘bloody’ in that it recognises both the heroics of martyrdom and the horror suffered by actual victims – the two not wholly distinct – it can have expressions or resonances in any act of charity involving disinterested, other-­focused, self-­giving love. In its own way this latter type of action invites people into the realm of ‘gift’, of excess, of peace, in which giving and receiving bear fruit in the mutuality of an on-­going relationship of love. In this way it may be possible to see how the kind of relationship that acts out an economy of gift can create an energy-­field or space into which others can be drawn – the places where the gift of life can be found. Ricoeur now tries to describe the dynamics of this exchange further. He suggests the following model. The initial gift of self, sacrificial or agapeistic, reveals the sheer generosity of the giver and involves him or her in risk. Here the greater the gift the greater the corresponding risk of rejection. Integral to this type of giving therefore is its spontaneity: not only in risk of rejection, but also in absence of any obligation to reciprocate on the part of the recipient or expectation of reciprocity by the giver. The gift is what it is, just as – because we are talking of self-­giving – the giver is who he or she is, or, better, becomes, in self-­transcendence, in the very act of giving itself. Another way of talking about the spontaneity and sheer generosity of the gift would be ‘surprise’. It is something – like the gift of love – that the recipient was not expecting, that he or she could not have imagined until the gift was actually given. Ricoeur continues: if risk, initiative, generos174 Ibid., p.228. 

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ity, surprise characterise the giver (via the gift), then the response of the recipient is felt like a call stemming from the gift itself. Another word for this is ‘gratitude’, a heartfelt thankfulness that issues in the giving of a gift in return commensurate with or in excess of the original gift. If the gift in question is the gift of self, then it is possible to see what is meant by recognition: how the nature or character of a person is revealed or expressed in a mutuality of exchange – a giving and receiving – marked by generosity, risk, surprise, initiative, on the one hand, and gratitude in response to the ‘call’ of the gift, on the other. This gratitude or sense of call can lift the recipient into the economy of gift, characterised, as we have seen, by generosity, risk, initiative, surprise. In the mutuality of giving – say, the giving and receiving of love – we see both the meaning of truthful recognition – recognised, that is, as veridical by both parties – which then releases untold energies (‘peace, shalom’) in the ensuing relationship. The double meaning of reconnaissance in French to mean both ‘gratitude’ and ‘recognition’ re-­enforces the link between thanksgiving and recognition that Ricoeur is arguing for. For do we not ‘recognise’ a person for who he or she is – after a life-­time of service, for example – by the gratitude/ recognition expressed by a suitable gift? In this way, says Ricoeur, we introduce transcendence into a disenchanted world. For do not people transcend themselves in this their capacity for giving and receiving in gratitude and recognition?175 Ricoeur further emphasises the transcendence of this economy of gift by saying that it is sumptuous or festive in character.176 Whether or not gifts as objects are involved, we could say, for example, in relation to the self-­giving of the crucified Christ, that liturgically, i.e. in a celebratory, festive sense – whether this be in proclamation or the sacramentality of bread and wine – the self-­revelation of God in the gift of Christ can evoke the true identity of the believer in overflowing gratitude and praise. This experience is essentially liberating. Why? Because in the event of mutual recognition in an encounter of mutual self-­giving, a new energy is released or space created, what we have called ‘an economy of gift’ or, alternatively, of peace/shalom that liberates the full humanity of all concerned. This is the space in which people transcend themselves, the space in which all that is truly life-­giving can find its place, become real. This is the ‘spirit’ in which gifts are given and received, the spirit of initiative, generosity, surprise, risk, 175 Ibid., p.229. 176 Ibid., p.244.

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gratitude; the atmosphere in which people, in being their truest and best selves – i.e. their most giving – can truly recognise and valorise each other.

II. Ricoeur’s account of mutual recognition as self-­giving in exchange of gifts can, or so I would suggest, provide the space or context in which the cries of the victims can be heard, treasured as gift and responded to appropriately. We are talking here, let us remind ourselves, of the victims making themselves known to the pilgrim as he or she endeavours to hear their cries; a ‘hearing’ which, in grief and memory, attempts to recognise the victims for who they truly were. Is there a Gestalt (or profile) of the victims – in the sense of their identity and characteristic pattern of activity – that we can discern; that, in being spontaneous and heroic, is not only memorable, but also unforgettable; that belongs to the future as much as to the past? In response to that question, here are three stories – among many that could be told – of Jewish victims of the Shoah. The first is of the Paris Rabbi, Berek Kofman, as recorded by his daughter, Sarah. My father, a rabbi, was killed because he tried to observe the Sabbath in the death camps; buried alive with a shovel for having – or so the witnesses reported – refused to work on that day, in order to celebrate the Sabbath, to pray to God for them all, victims and executioners, re-­establishing in this situation of extreme powerlessness and violence, a relation beyond all power. And they could not bear that a Jew, that vermin, even in the camps, did not lose faith in God.

Sarah Kofman then continues: As he did not lose faith in God on that afternoon of July 16, 1942, when a French policeman came to round him up with a pained smile on his lips, almost as if he, too, were excusing himself. Having gone to warn the Jews of the synagogue to go and hide because he knew there would be a raid, he had returned to the house to pray to God that he be taken, so long as his wife and his children were spared. And instead of hiding, he left with the policeman; so that we would not be taken in his place, as hostages, he suffered, like millions of others, the infinite of violence: death in Auschwitz.177 177 See her book: Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words. Northwestern University Press, E­vans­ ton, Illinois, 1998, p.34. 

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Faced with this story, comment is hard. Suffice it to say that here was a man who kept the Torah – for him binding – to love and obey God; to love and care for others in a full, courageous and radical way. Not only can we say that his Gestalt was that of a believing, praying man, it was also that of one whose prayer entailed an active and very costly caring for others. Is human community sustainable, we ask, without people like Rabbi Kofman? Not only that, in a self or sense of identity that was essentially selfless, he uncannily resembles the One whose Gestalt and characteristic pattern of activity consisted in not exploiting his status as man ‘in the form of God’ for his own advantage, but who (rather) ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave […] and became obedient to the point of death’. Both men, both Jews, both victims, the one at Auschwitz, the other at Golgotha, would, I feel certain, have recognised each other had they ever met. Did they not share a common language and a way of life? This provides us, Jews and Christians, with a double challenge. Can we at this the deepest point of overlap in our respective covenantal traditions recognise each other with all the joy and thanksgiving of a reunion of long-­lost friends? Can we, further, as modern inheritors of the great gifts of prayer and active love, celebrate and offer these very gifts in a blood- and tear-­stained world which has lost sight of or suppressed them, but without which no true freedom or flourishing of human life can be sustained? The second story is similar. Janusz Korczak was a Jewish educator who, although he had been offered work elsewhere, chose to remain director of an orphanage in Warsaw that was situated in Sienna Street, a post he had held for thirty years. When the Nazis invaded Warsaw, the orphanage was forced to move into the Warsaw Ghetto and Korczak moved with them. In 1942 the Nazis set about clearing the ghetto of Jews, killing 10,380 in the ghetto itself and deporting the rest, 265,040 people, to the newly completed Aktion Reinhard killing centre at Treblinka. The victims were first driven to the Umschlagplatz (assembly point), little more than a dirt field adjacent to the railway line, before being loaded into cattle cars bound for the extermination camp. On the morning of 6 August it was the turn of the ghetto orphanages. Without warning, the staff and nearly two hundred children of Korczak’s orphanage were ordered out onto the street. Korczak and his co-­director, Stefa Wilczynska, then marched at the head of this pathetic little column as it made its way through the streets of Warsaw to the Umschlagplatz and certain death at Treblinka. Nahum Remba, a member 334 

of the Jewish Council (Judenrat) who had set up a first-­aid station at the Umschlagplatz, urged Korczak to go with him to the Judenrat to see if a reprieve for the children could be negotiated. Korczak refused, afraid that the children might panic in his absence. That’s the last we hear of him. The present-­day pilgrim/visitor to Treblinka will see a sizeable memorial stone. On it is inscribed: JANUSZ KORCZAK (HENRYK GOLDSZMIT) AND THE CHILDREN

On the big stone are many small stones, expressions of the Jewish custom of placing stones on tombstones in a gesture of memory, recognition and respect. In line with this, Korczak is revered in some Jewish circles as one of the Thirty-­six or Hidden Just Men (Lamed-­vav Tzadikim /Tzadikim Nistarim) whose pure souls in every generation make the world’s salvation possible. In his unequivocal stand for the fullness of life as an educator, in his sustained compassion for orphaned children, in his spontaneous and heroic gesture in choosing to go with them to the crude gas chambers of Treblinka, one can see why. But now we can play the cynic. What difference does it make that Korczak shared the fate of his charges? They would have died anyway. Answer: put yourself in the position of a child in mortal danger. Wouldn’t it make all the difference to have a trusted adult around, who stuck with you, calmed your fears, whose hand you could hold? Or, did Korczak’s action in any way diminish the number of Jewish children who the Nazis burned, gassed, shot, starved, bayoneted and etc.? Answer: no. But what is at stake is the whole way we treat children in our world, and with them, other vulnerable, despised, defenceless people. Korczak and those like him show that there is a better way. Or, if we take the view that beliefs, values, convictions and the like are mere human constructions that can be deconstructed when people are put under sufficient pressure – for example, by torture – the Korczaks of our world prove that this is not so. It is therefore surely not straining credulity to see Korczak as made of the same moral and spiritual stuff as Jesus, as exhibiting a similar Gestalt. The two men, Jesus and Janusz, would surely have recognised (and celebrated) each other in their shared and lifelong concern for others, in their final via dolorosa to Golgotha or Treblinka. Both understood that status – whether as child of God or as respected and educated member of society – was not something to be exploited for their own gain or advantage, but rather is an invitation to remain human, to see themselves as the servant 

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of others, to be concerned with children, and, when push came to shove, to be obedient to their vision to the point of death. This is the pattern, as we have seen, of the kenotic Christ laid out in Philippians 2:5–8. Korczak was like that too. The third story, perhaps less well-­known, concerns a certain Mrs Zucker who arrived at Auschwitz-­Birkenau from the Lódz Ghetto on 22 August 1944. Her survivor daughter, Esther Geizhals-­Zucker, nearly fifteen at the time, tells the story of what happened. I came to Auschwitz August 22, 1944. I came with my mother, my brother, my father, my aunt and uncle, and my cousin. A neighbour of ours was with us in the same wagon. He had a four-­year-old child with him; he had lost his wife in the ghetto. We got off the train in Auschwitz and they [the Germans] separated the men right away. The women and children were on one side and the men on the other. When we got off the train and they separated the men, this little girl, the neighbour’s child, was left alone. My mother (she was a saint) walked over to him [the father] and she said, ‘Don’t worry, I will take care of the child.’ She took this child by the hand and she kept her, wouldn’t let go of her. The child was alone and my mother wouldn’t let this child stand alone. Everything happened very rapidly. When Mengele came, he started this segregation. My aunt was with her little boy in the front and my mother with this little girl by the hand and my brother, and I was the last one. My aunt and her little boy he motioned to the left, and when he asked my mother if this was her child and she nodded yes, he sent her to the left. My brother being only twelve at the time, he sent to the left, and me he motioned to the right. I realized my mother was on the other side and I wanted to run to my mother, I wanted to be with her. A Jewish woman who worked there caught me in the middle and said, in Polish, ‘Don’t you dare move from here!’ Because she knew that if I was on the other side I would go to the gas chamber. And she wouldn’t let me move. I stood there with this woman holding me and she wouldn’t let me move. This was the last time I saw my mother. She went with that neighbour’s child. So when we talk about heroes, mind you, this was a hero: a woman who would not let a four-­year-old child go by herself.178

In Mrs Zucker we see a kenotic person of comparable Gestalt to Jesus. In the terrible Engführung of the selection process on the arrival ramp at Birkenau, she showed the extraordinary ethical and spiritual vitality of the truly co-­passionate person. She reached out in love to share the pain of a 178 This account is in Debórah Dwork, Children With a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1991, pp.209–10. It is the transcript of an interview by Debórah Dwork with Esther Geizhals-­Zucker, done in November 1985.

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defenceless child, offering what gift of life it was hers to give in that place. We could also speak of the recognition that flashed between Mrs Zucker and the child: in the girl, gratitude and relief that somebody cared for her personally even in that non-­place of maximum uncaring; in Mrs Zucker, the spontaneous act of love that was heroic in its eventual cost – whether foreseen or not – of extermination in a gas chamber, in recognition of a child in need. She was the one who cared. In this we see, surely, the person whose human decency could not be broken even in the worst possible scenario. We might, further, recall Jürgen Habermas’ diagnosis of Auschwitz as having impaired or broken the deepest taken-­for-granted human solidarity. It is surely not fanciful to see Mrs Zucker and the child as holding that solidarity in place. Or, if it is deemed to have been broken, to have started the indispensable task of redemption, the mending of the world. But here once again we could play the cynic. Isn’t Mrs Zucker’s action an example of what has been called ‘a choiceless choice’, i.e. one that didn’t make a difference to whether or not she and the child were gassed? In reply we could say we don’t know whether Mrs Zucker understood the consequence of being identified with a child – destined for the gas chambers because of no use as slave labour – in the selection process. Very likely she did. However, the strength of the ‘choiceless choice’ argument lies in the ethical theory it pre-­supposes. Suppose we judge the rightness of an action by its consequences, we should have to say that Mrs Zucker’s action did not contribute to the survival of her daughter Esther and that, furthermore, her choice to go with the neighbour’s child was self-­destructive. If, alternatively, we take a utilitarian view – ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ – Mrs Zucker’s action scores 0 out of 10: no happiness for no people was its immediate flow-­on effect. If, however, we take a deontological view – one that evaluates her decision for its own inherent quality and not for its consequences – then the spontaneous and heroic nature of her action comes to the fore. Now her choice to go with the little girl must be evaluated as an act of love, in disregard of self, and in a not-­knowing of the next five minutes let alone ‘the future’. Seen in this light, her action constitutes what I have been calling a ‘caring in affliction’ that transcends the limitations of time and place and by that very fact belongs to the future. I am thus pleading for a recognition of her heroic goodness as a gift to subsequent generations or, put another way, part of the ethical good or inspiration that make any human community sustainable as a flourishing culture of life. For where 

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would we be if in our sense of personal identity, our intimate relationships or our contributions to the community were we not able to go beyond calculation to acts of spontaneous, selfless and perhaps heroic goodness, justice-­making or love? To expand on this: in the figure of the pilgrim ‘intent on “reaching a deeper level of solidarity with those bearing human form” ’, we might see some faint echo of what has just been related, a small fragment of the afterlife of the action of a Mrs Zucker. This happens, I have been arguing, in so far as we hear the particular cry of each particular victim – in this case, Mrs Zucker; and with her, Janusz Korczak, Rabbi Berek Kofman, and all those like them. To understand them more fully, we could invoke the figure of the suffering servant of 2nd Isaiah, the one whose righteous action purifies the besmirched moral universe of ‘the many’. ‘The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous’ (Isaiah 53:11). In this connection I would recall the Maori concept of ‘aroha’, loosely translated as ‘love’, but in its meaning of ‘any personally costly action that builds the community’, a concept that helps us understand what Mrs Zucker (and others) did. In her death she may be deemed to have failed; but in the awesome moral integrity of what she accomplished, an action whose address is the future as much as the past or present, the values she acted out remain indispensible to any sustained human flourishing. Any family or community without the selflessness, of at least of some of its members rapidly becomes unliveable and self-­destructive.

III. Had we the time or space, there are many other stories that could be told. What we have already related, however, discloses values such as: a sense of reality grounded in pilgrimage – a recognition of the sheer facticity and finality of the horrors the victims actually suffered, their utter destructiveness; but also such things as innocence – the racially motivated death penalty of the Shoah in no way corresponding to any conceivable crime; an innocence not reckoned in personal terms, but rooted in the utterly undeserved nature of what was imposed on European Jewry. We could also speak of the unmasking of racially motivated power and violence; of camp guards as ‘limbs’ or 338 

extensions of a screaming homicidal maniac, Adolf Hitler; of resistance – evoking everything from the Warsaw Uprising to the camp revolts at Sobibor and Treblinka; of sacrifice – the voluntary self-­giving of the people we have mentioned (Rabbi Kofman, Janusz Korczak, Mrs Zucker) and many others whose agape took them to the gas chambers with and out of love for orphaned children or other victims drawn into this vortex of hell. Nor should we forget the sheer fullness of life or humanity of the lives of the victims – all the surviving accounts of Jewish communities and families pre-­Shoah testify to this. From this feeling for the gamut of the experiences involved in the Shoah stems the full poignancy and horror of people in terror of death crying out for life. For they surely represent a culture of life our present-­day world cannot do without.There is, further, the theme of witness or testimony – accounts by victims and victim-­survivors of what actually went on in death-­camps so that the truth might be known by posterity. As already noted – perhaps the taproot of all of the above – we should point to unbroken faith and caring, as exemplified in the ones who blindly prayed in extremis whether or not their faith could flow out in actions; a cry de profundis which was a cry for liberation, for justice – the yearning depth of the cry for freedom that wells up within the heart of the condemned man or woman – sometimes linked to a caring for others trapped in the Engführung of the same plight. And of course much more. But already – in narrative and memory – we are in the presence of gifts that define the identity of the victims and by which we can recognise them. Basically we’re talking about a richness of humanity which expressed itself in self-­giving irrespective of whether this was voluntary or involuntary. These, then, are some of the gifts inherent in the cries of the victims: and to ‘hear’ them consists (as per Ricoeur) in recognition and gratitude. In these very cries we can discern the ‘new life’ or self-­transcendence to which we are called by the victims. It might consist in some of the following: • Remembrance – by approaching the dead as an act of charity (agape) and in solidarity with who they actually were, the pilgrim refuses the easy way out of forgetting. He or she, rather, is opened to a remembrance that includes the mourning that is willing to work through the real grief that anyone touched by the spirit and passion of Jesus must surely feel at the enormity of what was done. This remembrance includes calling to mind the fact that the victims were living, breathing, loving, struggling human beings – just like ourselves!



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• Meaning – part of the recognition/gratitude felt by the pilgrim as theologian is to feel called to work at the ‘impossible’ task of providing a wider context of meaning for the apparent meaninglessness of what the victims suffered. The place, or so we have argued, to ask these very questions is in solidarity with the self-­emptying kenotic Christ who, because of the particularity of his own historic sufferings, will never allow us to balk at the particularities of the Shoah or retreat into comforting generalities. • Co-­passion – in being aware of and moved by the suffering of the victims  – their ‘passion’  – to be passionate about what they were passionate about: innocence, especially the innocence of children; the desire for liberation, for freedom; the unmasking of evil by testimony or witness; the celebration of life in all its fullness. And again, much else. Consistent, further, with the overall argument of this book, these impulses – remembrance, meaning, co-­passion – are the very ones that define our solidarity with ‘all who bear human form’. Once again we have a multi-­ dimensional approach to human life, especially human suffering; one that encompasses realism about past, present and future; a realism, however, which is not a cynicism or a despair, but through and through hopeful because grounded in the life, passion and raising to life of Jesus Christ. The concept of Engführung is what knits all this together: the narrowing or impasse of the unholy places visited by the Christian pilgrim can put him or her in mind of Golgotha, the site, both holy and unholy, where, for all the horror of what was acted out, the full and inclusive extent of the abyss of the divine love was once and for all disclosed. In this way, Golgotha interprets Auschwitz and is, in turn, interpreted by it. In the act of recognition and gratitude, then, the pilgrim ‘hears’ the cries of the victims and, equally, hears the call to enter into solidarity with all who bear human form. In openness and receptivity to gifts thus given, the pilgrim finds his or her own identity challenged and yet offered the gifts that turn out to be central to the fullness of human life. The sacrificial nature of this reception comes out in the way the pilgrim bears the cost of recognition in exposure to the dead or suffering in the present. In either case the recognition consists in a hearing of the cries. The best commentary on this account of recognition might be the words with which Paul

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Ricoeur ended his discussion of mutual recognition – and indeed his own long writing career. The struggle for recognition perhaps remains endless. At the very least, the experience of recognition in the exchange of gifts, principally in their festive aspect, confer on this struggle for recognition the assurance that the motivation which distinguishes it from the lust for power and shelters it from the fascination of violence is neither illusory nor vain.179

IV. My hope is that in this process of mutual recognition we may find grounds for fruitful Jewish–­Christian dialogue; furthermore, that the net of recognition may be spread more widely. For who would pretend that Judaism and Christianity have a monopoly on access to the sacred, the holy, through acts of heroic love? My prayer or larger hope, then, is that in God we may all discover that we belong together in the bundle of the living. With that, we are also asking, as I have insisted all along: what it will take in moral and spiritual terms to give the human community a future, a human flourishing that is sustainable? We thus arrive at a question similar to that raised by Abraham in his questioning dialogue with God over the future of Sodom in Genesis 18:22–33. Put it like this: how many righteous people do there have to be in our broken human community for it to be healed and made safe for human habitation?

179 Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, p.246. 

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E. Last word 15. Real Hope in the Real World? Historians note that the period 1945–1967 was a period of Jewish rebirth, restoration, regeneration of life. One wonders if the motif of resurrection would have been used if it had not been so central to Christianity, but the major response to overwhelming death was the fervent re-­creation of Jewish life. Michael Berenbaum, Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, p.616.

If the reader has followed my pilgrimage to Hitler’s death and other camps, they will, I trust, have got an impression not only of what they were in themselves but also of the problems they pose for theology, for civilisation and for culture. What are the convictions and ethical values that sustain our lives personally or politically? The constant recurrence of genocides and ethnic cleansings since the end of the Second World War in 1945 is proof – if any were needed – that these are questions that will not go away. ‘Surely’, wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘there has never been a generation in the course of history with so little ground under its feet as our own.’ To be a pilgrim to the unholy places of Nazi genocide and the reign of terror is above all, however, an act of homage to the Jewish victims. Its purpose is to hear their cries as near first hand as possible, to recognise who the victims were and what they suffered. The pilgrim also seeks to learn from them. What is it that they alone can teach us? In the unfolding of this book, therefore, the definition of what it means to be a ‘pilgrim to unholy places’ gives onto theological reflection in which I try to sketch what I have learned from them and what they suffered. This learning for a Christian like myself is done, as I have said all along, hand in hand with the self-­limiting, self-­humbling Christ of Philippians 2:5–8. It is also done, indispensably, and as I have laboured to make clear, in dialogue with Judaism. More precisely, in dialogue with Jewish thinkers who have addressed the theological and ethical problems posed by the Shoah; and this in the knowledge that in the nature of the subject matter, there can be no easy answers. In this



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way, both dialogue partners start from a common position of not knowing and the humility that goes with acknowledgement of so basic a limitation. That aside, there is, I am aware, a vast and growing literature that tries to respond to Auschwitz in all its aspects. Since I am an Anglican priest and theologian, I would like to recall just two books, both also by Anglicans. In 1980, Alan Ecclestone, Marxist, teacher of literature, outstanding parish priest, published The Night Sky of the Lord.180 In an act of profound repentance for a Christendom that lost touch with its roots in the First Covenant and which, in consequence, became other-­worldly and anti-­Semitic, Ecclestone enters a passionate plea for a re-­birth of a faith that will ‘disenthrall’ itself from all this and re-­discover, if possible in partnership with Judaism, a concern for the Kingdom of God on earth. This will involve critiquing the idols humankind tries to substitute for God and, at the same time, witnessing prophetically to the meaning of justice and the fullness of life. Struggle and suffering are part of this God-­given calling. While my thinking is close to Ecclestone’s – and builds on it – I hope to have taken it further. The other book is Ulrich Simon’s A Theology of Auschwitz, published in 1967. Simon, who died in 1997, was German and Jewish. He had been to school with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His father, a non-­practising Jew, was murdered in Auschwitz, his brother in Russia. After emigrating to Britain in 1933 – Simon very quickly saw ‘the writing on the wall’ after Hitler’s seizure of power – he eventually became an Anglican priest and subsequently taught at King’s College, London, first as Professor of Old Testament and then as Professor of Christian Literature. Approaching the problem from the standpoint of Karl Barth’s theology, Simon looked for ‘patterns’ of divine activity in atonement and regeneration that, by divine grace, reproduce themselves in the lives and deaths of heroic individuals in Auschwitz. He writes, for example: We ventured to examine the misery of Auschwitz as a reflection of an eternal reality. We used the awesome norms of sacrifice, atonement, and reconciliation in connection with suffering and murder. In this process of comparing and contrasting historical reality with theological terms we found the germ of freedom in self-­giving and self-­ transcending.

180 Alan Ecclestone, The Night Sky of the Lord. Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1980.

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The question of what kind of pattern or script, theological or ethical, the victims and victim-­survivors of Auschwitz acted out is surely of central importance, and not sufficiently treated in Ecclestone’s book. Further, in a citation printed in an obituary, Simon expresses his belief that the questions of death and ultimate destiny, … dominate the evaluation of our period as that of any other. If the dead are not raised, Auschwitz stands for the essence of man’s hopeless case. But if the gassed are not slain forever, but rise as a mighty army, we are not only consoled for our loss but confront the collectivist tyrannies with the total reversal. The one word Resurrexit interprets history as no other.181

This is a statement of faith in the power of God and one, moreover, that looks at history through the eyes of the victims. In this sense I applaud Simon’s outburst. I wonder, though, whether it isn’t too easy a solution to the corrosive evils of Auschwitz? Does it depend on a conception of God as ‘interferer’, albeit at the end of time? And, even if resurrection is the final truth only revealed at the end of history, where does that leave us now?

I. As the reader will be aware, the route taken – in respect of hope – in this book has been different. Taking my cue from the way victims cared for each other, I have dared to say that they are in their turn ‘in the care of God’. To this I have added something about justice; or, to be more precise, the proactive saving justice of the God of biblical faith. How does God ‘do justice’ to the victims who, through no deserts of their own, were tricked and herded into gas chambers? Again I have taken my cue from something human and real: how the pilgrim can get to recognise, if possible from individual to individual, who the victims actually were in themselves. What did life mean to them in their pre-­Holocaust lives? What would the fullness of life have meant to them if they had lived? 181 Ulrich Simon, A Theology of Auschwitz. SPCK, London, 1978, p.156. Cp. pp.124, 140, 142, 153, 157. The book was first published by Victor Gollancz in 1967. The obituary in question was by Christopher Driver, printed in the Guardian for Tuesday, 7 October 1997. Another full obituary appeared in the Daily Telegraph the following day. 

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These, I dare to suggest, are proper questions for God. How can God, the God of love, of justice, who cares for the victims and powerless, do justice to those whose lives were brutally cut short? At this point, mourning and sympathy are not enough. Humans can do that. But God? Here in the spirit of the theology laid out in this book, I simply suggest that our co-­ passionate God is the One who in death and beyond death continues – as in life – to invite people into nearness with God-­self. This invitation – never to be withdrawn – is one we are free, as in life, to accept or reject. Yet in its acceptance lies the fullness of life: in encounter with the God who alone can do justice to the victims; in whose loving presence human life reaches its full potential. God is the One who raises people to life in death, yes; but who also raises people to life in the ‘deadness’ of pain, suffering and hopelessness. These, I realise, are no less faith statements than Simon’s Resurrexit. Their integrity – and I dare to say, their cogency – lies in the way analogies for God’s way of acting are garnered from the experience of the victims themselves and from that of people who cared and care for them. While remaining fully respectful of the transcendence of God – something Simon learned from the Bible as interpreted by Karl Barth – I have sought categories for speaking about God from the ways in which people cared or prayed or both in the Engführung of Auschwitz or Golgotha. From this, I suggest, we may gain insight into God’s own inner liveliness, freedom and ability to care, no matter what human obstacles are put in God’s way. We are talking here about a stone rolled over the entrance to a tomb or doors to gas chambers slammed shut and locked. These, we could say, were as much God’s Engführungen as ours. Whether the reader goes along with this or not, I want to end this book with some thoughts on resurrection as a project or process within history. Prescinding from questions about the ultimate destiny of the victims, the final phase of my reflections is to look at ‘resurrection’ as something we can and must do now. Not only is this our best way of doing justice to the memory of the victims, it is also our best insurance against any recurrence of what rightly troubles us about Auschwitz. If ‘never again’ is our watchword, what hope-­giving strategies do we have to make it real?

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II. First, though, a word of caution about how this should be read. I need to signal that the form of what follows is that of the posing of questions. If, then, the form of what follows is that of the question – even if the questions yield no easy answer – the mood or voice of what follows is that of the optative, the future-­seeking desire, that is, of the human community. ‘Would that x, y, z were so’ is its typical statement, a desire that must always be grounded in reality if it is not to be written off as fantasy. Paul Ricoeur, to whom I owe this insight, writes, ‘The most appropriate grammatical mood is that of the optative of desire, at equal distance from the indicative of description and the imperative of prescription.’182 The concreteness of the pilgrim’s approach to resurrection comes out in the fact that it is done amongst the ruins of Auschwitz itself – empty spaces; ashes; abandoned, roofless red-­brick cellars; collapsed concrete bunkers – all of what remains of the paraphernalia of the Shoah: in Ricoeur’s words, ‘the indicative of description’. Yet for the believer, in biblical perspective, there is always ‘more’. Specifically, might not the empty tomb of Jesus be the primordial place/space of new life that can provide us with the clue or key analogy we need to begin exploring how Auschwitz as human abyss of horror can be touched or invaded by the God who is the proactive abyss of co-­passionate love? Respect for the victims, I am therefore saying, the hearing of their cries, is usually construed in the perspective of death. What happens if we shift the perspective to that of life? Suppose the cry of the victims is fundamentally for life, what then? That is our question here.

III. For the reader to understand what follows fully, I need to draw attention to certain features of the resurrection narratives in the Gospels.183 Very early 182 Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, p.494. 183 These are: Matthew 28:1–8; Mark 16:1–8; Luke 24:1–10; John 20:1–10, and the rest of the chapter. 

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in the morning, at first light we are told, the women who were the prime witnesses to the resurrection, made their way to the tomb. The timing of what happened tells us two crucial things about the living Christ who met them there. The encounter took place, first, after the ‘hard day’s night’ of Jesus trial, mocking, scourging, way to the cross and crucifixion. Without these, the life-­giving encounter of Jesus as new life, as a new and living way, risks becoming anodyne, without guts or content. Life, furthermore, seen in this perspective of victory over suffering and death, can be compared to the labour pains of a woman in travail. Without the travail there can be no birth. Then, secondly, because it happened so early, it occurred before the human community was awake and functioning. In other words, we are talking about something, like the Incarnation itself, which is ‘more than’ or ‘beyond’ human agency.184 Once again the way a woman’s body is taken over by the birth process – again in the interests of life – can give us an image of the more than human agency involved in resurrection, the gift-­like characteristic of God’s way of acting. The texts also contain an element that, in the opinion of many scholars, is a ‘pilgrim’ dimension.185 From earliest times, the empty tomb or gravesite of Jesus became a place of pilgrimage. In this way, it may have been customary to exchange in situ what later became the customary Easter proclamation. The leader (or celebrant) would say, ‘The Lord is Risen’, with the answering response, ‘He is Risen Indeed’ – thus echoing the dialogue in the Gospel narratives between the white-­robed figure(s), the angel(s) or messenger(s), who announce the good news, and the bewildered grieving women, the first witnesses, on the first Easter morning. Is the pilgrim, attuned to the cries of the victims, further attuned to hearing the new and prophetic word of life? The resultant prophecy, set in the mode of hope, is what evokes the praise with which the pilgrim, like the Psalmist, dares ‘to awaken the dawn’ (Psalms 108:2; 57:7–11), the ‘dawn’ in biblical language being the time of ‘rescue’, a further key element in the meaning of resurrection.186

184 Of the ‘children of God’, believers, John says that they were ‘born not from human stock, of human desire, or human will but from God himself’ (1:12–13). 185 See Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology. Collins, London, 1979, pp.332, 334–5. 186 See, for example, Psalm 17:15 where the dawn is the time of vision, of rescue. In Job 3:9, 38:12, 41:10 ‘dawn’ is personified.

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IV. That said, I now venture some of the ‘resurrection’ meanings or insights, which, like the ‘vehicle’ of a metaphor, can invade, and perhaps change, the meaning, and with it the truth, of the ‘tenor’, in this case, of Auschwitz (or the Shoah). This ‘truth’, I contend, is bound up with the perspective in which we see the facts, the sum total of the facts about the Holocaust so far as these can be known. Seen in a new perspective, that of life, ultimately the life of God, may not these facts be open to fresh interpretation? May they not disclose meanings for the future that are fresh and surprising? Or, put another way, they could become the Holocaust-­related prophecies of life for the victim-­survivors and coming generations. As I have already said, the form of resurrection discourse post-­Shoah is the posing of questions in the optative of desire. Our hope is that they may contain the authentic imperatives for action.187 The five meanings of resurrection that I wish to offer – standing, touching, communicating, remembering, prophesying – are all ones that, in the New Testament, arise directly out of the vision-­event of the resurrection of Christ itself. They can also be seen as corresponding to – or interacting with – key or salient features of the Shoah itself, here given in italics: standing – defeat, emptiness; touching – mutilated body, dust; communicating – silence, absence; remembering – forgetting; prophesying – hopelessness. ‘STANDING’, first of all, is the standing of Christ with the victims. Here the reader needs to recall what has been said above about ‘co-­passion’. Much is implied. ‘Standing’ or ‘standing up again’ is the direct English translation of the Greek anastasis, which, usually translated ‘resurrection’, derives from a verb meaning to ‘stand up’ or ‘to stand again’. If there is validity to this notion of ‘standing with’, then 187 For a fuller discussion of the semantics of metaphor, see Appendix. In pursuing the question of metaphor as our best linguistic model for gaining new insights into the Holocaust, I am aware of how this approach can – and has been – misused. In his discussion of the ‘debasement of language’ in Nazi Germany, Arthur Cohen writes, ‘It will help us to explain a kind of cauterisation of conscience by the use of metaphor and euphemism; to understand that in official Nazi language the extermination of Jews was precisely that – the disinfection of lice, the burning of garbage, the incineration of trash, and hence language never had to say exactly what the words commanded: kill, burn, murder that old Jew, that middle-­aged Jew, that child Jew’: The Tremendum, pp.7–8. 

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many questions press forward to be voiced. Who does the pilgrim, and any willing to stand with Christ in the world, stand with concretely, here and now? Is it with Christ and our contemporary victims? Or, moving on from there, what do we stand for? In whose name are the values involved grounded, in Christ’s or that of some other? Or, we could ask, how does the pilgrim, or any other person, withstand evil? We might further compare resurrection to the uncanny ability of a mother to hear the cry of her child in need and to bring succour him or her. The empty space of defeat and death thus begins to be filled with life, life, moreover, that is ethically and spiritually grounded in the overcoming of evil, in selflessness and respect for the other. Second, ‘TOUCHING’. In the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion, as the story of Thomas reveals (John 20:24–29), there was the question of who dared touch the mutilated, ‘untouchable’ body of Jesus – given that he had been criminalised and executed by the Romans and declared ‘accursed’ by the Jewish authorities – ‘cursed be he who hangs on a tree’ (Deuteronomy 21:22–23; Galatians 3:13–14). Like Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy, drawn irresistibly to care for her slain brother Polynices, the disciples and the women in the Gospel narrative risk falling victim to the ‘Creons’ of the time. In resurrection (or life) perspective, we can talk about ‘touching’ in a double sense: our daring to touch or be ‘in touch’ with the mutilated–­ cremated bodies of the victims of the Shoah; and, equally, our touching or being touched by the crucified body of Christ. In the mutilated and incinerated bodies of the victims we may thus find the authentically modern sense of the sacred, the holy. In the body of Christ, all of that and more: a force-­field of life that draws believers – those who has been ‘touched’ in their heart of hearts by the cries, the mutilated and now absent bodies, of the victims – into the very life of God. We could say that this has to do with ‘living memory’, of the victims, and of Christ; the two always needing to be ‘in touch’, in communion or communication or connection, with each other. The remembrance of the victims can thus be done in the context of the living memory of ‘a living one’, of Christ. In Christian art we could see this theme of touching in the Pietà. Mary is the living, flesh-­and-blood icon of the love of God. In holding and cherishing the newly crucified/mutilated body of her beloved Son she is an image of the way God cares for all, especially the victims. Lest this should sound sentimental to the Jewish reader, the Pietà image needs to be balanced by that of the statue at Sobibór in which the Jewish mother, soon to be gassed, 350 

has her child ripped from her arms. The lessons in these competing images for us hardly need spelling out. Third, COMMUNICATING. Resurrection here means recovering a sense of the living God, the God whose gracious self-­communication is in speech and act, and finally, in Christian perspective, in the person of Christ, his life, death and resurrection. The negative side of this lies in the Nazi attempt not only to obliterate all evidence or memory of Judaism as a living faith – even the cemeteries were bulldozed and flattened – but also, in the process, to silence and obliterate God. ‘Living’ now stands for the fact that, for all the proper mystery of God, God communicates actively. This shows itself, in resurrection perspective, in the way in which the cries of the victims are heard in living memory, that in-­with-through Christ we are all in the ‘bundle of the living’ together – standing, touching, communicating, remembering, prophesying – in defiance of the Nazi death-­cult and in favour of all that is truly human, and therefore ‘of God’. Resurrection in the interrogative, optative mood of this chapter, therefore, is the suggestion that the hub (or centre) of all this inter-­communicating network is in fact the living God. Christ and all those like him – and this is inclusive of Judaism, as I have laboured to make clear – are resurrection people in the sense that they are in communion with this ever-­living and communicating God. If there is promise in the Shoah, could this be it? For is not communication arising from communion central to any healthy creative relationship? Is not an ability to communicate richly with God and with each other in all the vulnerability of real life a vital and central part of what it means to be human? Fourth, REMEMBERING. We could call this ‘interceding in the dark night of western civilization’. In some Carmelite communities there is a Night Office, a time around 2:00 am when the sisters, in all the charity of the vowed life, bring before God the sufferings of our blood- and tear-­stained world – in a way that invites comparison with Jews praying and remembering annually at Yom haShoah. Few have the stomach for such a thing. But, at the heart of the human community, at a time when human life is at its lowest ebb, and with no other agenda than that of love, the sisters hold and uphold all those who are in pain, who are sick or dying, starving, or who, for whatever reason, have lost all hope. Like washerwomen with mops and buckets – and again, in-­with-through Christ as source of the ‘excessive’ life essential to so onerous a task – they undertake the nightly assignment of cleansing the moral and spiritual 

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atmosphere of the world in which we live – the destructive ‘space’ we have made of the place so graciously given to us – of becoming in some way conduits of a love that is of God. Theirs is the never-­ending task of enwombing the world in an ‘envelope’ of care; of ‘remembering’ in the ‘night’ of weeping and suffering with a view to the ‘breaking of the day’, and this in the spirit of the Christ who, on the first Easter morning, was ‘up and gone with the Father in the breaking of the day’, the dawn. The Shoah, as Yom haShoah attests, is, and needs to remain, an ever-­present part of the world that is prayed for, cared for and cared about. Once again in the person of Miriam/Mary, we, Jews and Christians (dare we say?), might see an icon of the intercessor – the one who remembers and invites others to remember – as one who, in radical perspective of life, treasures in her pierced heart all that should be remembered or which is in need of healing (Luke 2:35, 51). Fifth, PROPHESYING. This is the birth-­yell of the new humankind coming to life. ‘To prophesy’, like other resurrection-­words, is an active verb, one that conveys continuous or continuing action. If this book recalls John Henry Newman’s description of theology as prophecy, we can now see what this means. Once again, ‘dawn’ or the early morning is key. In the post-­Easter church, the Resurrection was likened to cock-­crow, the time of resurrection thus associated with the early glimmerings of dawn, when after an appalling night of betrayal and death, something new and unheard of emerges and is proclaimed.188 The true prophetic voice, in other words, is heard in the ‘time’ of the resurrection; that is, not only before the world has woken up to begin another day’s work, but also at a time when the general assumption is that ‘today’ will be basically the same as ‘yesterday’, that there is nothing new under the sun or moon, that ‘as things are’ so they will remain. If for us moderns Auschwitz is the root of that assumption, one can see how dangerous it can be. Like the plague bacillus in Albert Camus’ The Plague, it – the plague of death, of genocide – is always lurking unseen, concealed, undetected, waiting to break out once again. The resurrection-­ inspired prophetic imagination, by contrast, points the way forward for the human community as for the material creation with unheard of, surprising suggestions, shocking in their newness. May not Auschwitz and the whole ‘covenant with death’(Isaiah 28:15) allied with it have the potential to 188 The double meaning of the rooster’s loud and piercing cry is both that of the pro­ clamation itself and the cockcrow that signalled Peter’s denial (or betrayal) of Christ. See Mark 14:66–72, and the parallel passages in the other Gospels.

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open up – in the light of Christ – to a future of human life as humane and sustainable, open, that is, to ever new resurrection-­like transformations? I dare to ask the question.

V. It would, of course, be easy to brush aside this talk of resurrection. The positive in that impulse would be to remain faithful to the dead, to be mindful of the fact that they are dead, absent, never to return. For the victims there was nothing redemptive whatsoever about being ‘clawed together’ in a gas chamber (Paul Celan). That is true, a witness I fully and unreservedly respect. Equally, though, perhaps we all need to ponder St. Paul’s words, ‘If Christ be not risen, you are still in your sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:17), the sins in question being those of the Shoah. Is there no way out? Hence my question: could we not now be, six or seven decades later, in a significantly different situation? Might this be the final meaning of our pilgrimage to unholy places? Might not, further, these radically life-­oriented categories of standing, touching, communicating, remembering, prophesying tell us something not only about the modalities of resurrection within history, but also about the very being of the co-­passionate God who is the ground and inspiration of all true life?189

189 Since writing this, I have come across Jeffrey C. Alexander’s book, Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate. Oxford University Press, 2009. Alexander acutely lays out the various interpretive constructions that have been put on the raw facts of the Holocaust since it occurred. At the risk of simplifying a careful and nuanced presentation, Alexander’s analysis revolves around two poles: that of the progressive, ‘never again’ myth, the heeding of a grim warning; and that of the Holocaust as the tragic narrative of the – insuperable? – evil of our times i.e. that now, post-­Auschwitz, we live in a time of genocides. The point of my theological presentation centred (as it is) on Christ (and all those like him) is to hold together the tragic and the redemptive, the horrific and the hopeful, but with the accent always on the latter – never, of course, pilgrim-­fashion losing sight of the former. I am reminded of the description of Christ in Colossians 1:17 as the one who ‘holds all things together’ and humankind (symbolised by the pilgrim) as ‘completing what is lacking in Christs’ afflictions’ (1:24). 

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Appendix: On De- and Reconstructing Root Metaphors The Analogy of the Sun

A book about Auschwitz is faced with a threefold challenge. There are questions of fact, what we might call the truth about Auschwitz; for example, how, and how many, people lost their lives, a number that exceeds the total population of New Zealand where I live. Then, inevitably, there arise questions of meaning, the explanations we suggest for the bare statistics of what happened. Finally, there are any lessons we might draw from the facts and their meaning for the way we live our lives now. Each of these questions is difficult, sometimes ferociously so; the second in particular, the question of meaning, always controversial and inevitably incomplete. For who, in their right mind, would have the gall to claim that they had ‘explained’ Auschwitz? To illustrate how all three levels of questioning interact – fact, meaning, consequence – I offer the illustration of the sun: what it is, what it means, and how fact and meaning invite us to live. We start with a statement, metaphorical in form, that encompasses scientific fact as well as generally accepted consequences of ozone-­layer depletion and global warming. ‘The kind old sun has, of late, gotten spiteful’. A lot is going on here. The metaphor of a kind old man turned spiteful is innovative because it signals a change in a taken-­for-granted worldview. Instead of the sun being experienced as benign, warming, life- giving, now another, less welcome, set of perceptions comes into play. Might not the sun be as implacably destructive, as vindictively inimical to life as to a traveller in a waterless desert? The facts, in other words, and the meaning of the facts, are changing. Closely allied to this is metaphor’s capacity to explore. Meanings are taken out of one semantic field or interrelated network of meanings – in this case the vocabulary of anything that is spiteful, destructive, life-­threatening – and transferred or carried across into another, that of all that is benign, nurturing, life-­giving, warming in all senses of the word, physically, emotionally, spiritually. The metaphor is also participatory in the



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sense that it poses the question of what it means for us to be creatures living on a planet warmed by the sun. Is this a positive or negative experience? Let us call the first ‘benign’ set of meanings M(i) and the second ‘malign’ set M(ii). These two sets of meaning, what I.A. Richards called the ‘vehicle’, compete for dominance in the ‘tenor’, the accepted or so-­called ‘literal’ meaning of habitual discourse about the sun – in this case, approximating to T for truth, connoting the received scientific account of the sun, its composition and life-­cycle.190 What happens, we are now asking, in the clash of meanings when M(ii), ‘spite’, is transferred (or ‘metaphored’, the Greek metapherein meaning to ‘carry across’ or, latinate, ‘to transfer’) into the other, original, semantic (or ‘meanings associated with’) area M(i) of ‘benignity? What is being challenged here – by M(ii) is the hitherto accepted virtual equation of M(i) and T. This, the problem of metaphors and how they function, is one that has exercised philosophers since the time of Aristotle.191 Or, we could look at the conflict of meanings in another way. It could be that the literal, scientific meaning of the sun, T, is shifting. New hypotheses about what constitutes the sun are being debated; and, in addition, depletions in the ozone layer and/or accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere change the way we experience and perceive the sun. So we don’t just have T, but also, let us say, T(i), T(ii), T(iii) and so forth. The truth about the sun is thus a polyvalent, shifting concept. At the very least we have to be clear which of these meanings – T(i) & etc. – we are invoking when we talk about ‘the sun’. Yet instead of debating the ‘T’ meanings of the sun (i, ii, iii…), we might be asking a different set of questions. What does the sun mean to us and the way we live our lives? Now the ‘M’ set of meanings come into play. Thus, would it be truer to say, in the sense of ‘more meaningful to us’, that the sun is more like a vengeful destroyer than a benign old man? At this level, then, that of the tussle between literal and metaphorical, between 190 I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford University Press, 1936. In the same tradition of the interpretation of metaphor we may place Max Black’s Models and Metaphors. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1962. Whereas Richards talks of ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’, Black speaks of ‘frame’ and ‘focus’. What both Richards and Black have in common is to see the meaning(s) of a given metaphor as complex in that they arise from the semantic interaction of tenor/frame and vehicle/focus. 191 De Rhetorica. See, on this (and the whole question of metaphor), Paul Ricoeur’s, The Rule of Metaphor, Multi-­disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978.

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‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’, there is both an ‘is’ and an ‘is not’. Planet earth is a carrier of meanings in relation to the sun (whether M(i), (ii), (iii) or other); just as, at the same time, the sun qua independent unrelated physical object is a carrier of truths – T (i), (ii), (iii) … – that are the generally accepted or literal meaning of ‘the sun’. Precisely at this point, we can become aware of how the ‘meaning metaphors’ we apply to the sun (benign, spiteful and etc.) can become exploratory and participatory. For metaphor, like symbol, can give rise to action as well as thought. We have to decide, in other words, and with some urgency, whether the sun ‘is’ or ‘is not’ benign, ‘is’ or ‘is not’ spiteful. Or, we might want to reject these metaphors of spitefulness and benignity and suggest others that are related – for example, compassionate, health-­giving, or indifferent and uncaring. M(iii), (iv), (v) (or some other set of meanings) can thus become part of the truth the sun represents for us now – in a universe where everything is relative to everything else. In this way, we are drawn into defining and re-­defining what the sun might mean for us. Far from being fantasy, this metaphor-­generated knowledge is, in its own way, real or truth telling. Just as in science, knowledge is advanced by the proposal of new hypotheses requiring the use of the informed imagination, so in the realm of meanings – understood here as the truth about life as experienced here and now – perception and insight are deepened and enhanced by the creation – in poetry, music, liturgy, prayer and other sorts of discourse – of unexpected or startling metaphors. In layman’s terms, this would be called ‘thinking outside the square’ or ‘laterally’. We can now see how this new, innovative, exploratory knowledge can be participatory. It involves disciplined imagination – i.e. starting from knowledge of what physicists or astronomers know about the sun, their latest hypotheses – yes; yet not to stop there but to go on to the imaginative construction of metaphors – here analogous to hypotheses – that, via the power of imagination, bring us into the realm of heart-­knowledge, the kind of knowledge that grips us in the core of ourselves and leads to action. What does the sun actually mean to us here and now? Instead of asking questions about a ball of super-­heated, self-­generating hydrogen, we’re talking but about things that are near at hand and of pressing concern – what I have called ‘the truth about life’. Is the piece of land I’m living on now likely to be a desert in fifty years time or, alternatively, under water? What would an eco-­friendly dwelling of the future be like? Should my child wear a sunhat 

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on the playground at school? Metaphor thus straddles the divide between worldview and action: what sort of a place we conceive the world to be and how we should live our lives in it. Finally, what kind of sun is the sun; what kind of place is the earth? In the process we get a semantic equation or torque, something like: T(i), (ii), (iii) …interacting with M(i), (ii), (iii) … in which the speaker/ write­r has to sort out the meaning(s) of T and M that are prioritised in a given utterance. If, in this process, one meaning of M, say M(iv) and another of T, say T (iii) become dominant and generally accepted, we could call these M and T, both now thought to coincide exactly with the truth of the tenor, in this case, the sun, and that of the vehicle, that of the ‘meanings for us now’ attributed to the sun. We thus get a semantic situation in which T and M are thought to be absolute. Thus, TM; until, that is, other meanings of M or new-­discovered truths about T come along to challenge the hegemony, always temporary, of M(iv) or T(iii). In the semantic interactions at the heart of such discourse, there will always be in tension between meaning and truth, between, that is, hitherto accepted meanings and what is thought to be literal truth. This approach leaves open the question of whether the way we experience the sun reflects changes in the physical composition of the sun or merely changes in human perception or, alternatively, changed experiences of the sun are actually caused by humanly generated factors such as climate change. The analogy of the sun  – benign or malign?  – poses the central question facing the Holocaust interpreter. If we take all the facts about Auschwitz – supposing these could ever be retrieved – to be the truth, T, about Auschwitz – what then are the basic or root metaphors – M (i), (ii), (iii) … the meanings of Auschwitz – that we bring to the interpretation of the factual truth, T, of Auschwitz? Once arrived at, are these, both T and M, susceptible to change? Can there, for example, be a plurality of truths about Auschwitz? The way we answer those questions then gives onto to the way we live our lives now. The whole of this present work, Pilgrim to Unholy Places, can be read as responding to these questions.

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About the author Raymond Pelly is an Anglican Priest living and working in New Zealand. The pilgrimages that form the basis of this book began in 1995. Raymond has an MA in Theology from Oxford University and a Doctorate in Ecumenical Theology from the University of Geneva. Besides serving in numerous parishes, he has taught at Westcott House, Cambridge; St John’s College, Auckland; and the University of Massachusetts (Boston Campus). He was also Visiting Scholar at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass., in 1982/3 and 1995/6. His most recent work, 2005–2014, has been as Honorary Priest Associate at the Cathedral of St Paul, Wellington, New Zealand, where he had a ministry of counselling, spiritual direction and education. He is twice married and the father of six children.



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