Excerpted from Pilgrimage to Auschwitz article by Vishvapani published in the book Challenging Times: Stories of Buddhist Practice When Things Get Tough.

Some years ago I attended a Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz concentration camp. It as a sobering, but deeply stirring experience.

When I announced I was going to do a retreat at Auschwitz, I met many responses. Some people were shocked, as if uttering ‘Auschwitz’, was an intrusion or an assault. It is a harsh sound, which I, too, soon started to avoid. A look of pain crossed my father’s face when I told him, as if I had touched a wound. ‘What good can come of it? What will you do with that experience?’

One Buddhist friend asked, ‘It is bound to be traumatic, but what is the value of trauma? And what effect will it have on your state of mind?’ Jewish friends said, ‘I couldn’t go myself. I couldn’t bear it.’

But others were fascinated by the idea. Many people turned out to have family connections with Jews or Germans and felt fear, guilt or fascination with the Holocaust. For some it was a living presence in their lives, as it has been in mine: not a historical event; not a moral conundrum; not a metaphor for personal suffering, but a part of the world. A shadow. A possibility.

While I have left Judaism behind, I have never stopped feeling a sense of Jewishness – a cultural and historical association rather than a religious one. My Jewishness seems to manifest whether I like it or not, in the friends I make, my sense of humour, and my way of expressing myself. I have never known what to do with that connection, but in the US a movement has started, inspired by Bernie Glassman and others, of Jewish Buddhists exploring their identities.

I was also attracted by Glassman’s philosophy of ‘bearing witness’, which means facing the truth, and seeing one’s response to it without any desire to fix things. That seemed the right way – the only way – to approach Auschwitz.

The most moving part of each day for me was reciting the Kaddish. Standing by the gas chambers, we chanted in Hebrew, and read the verses in many languages.

The words of the Kaddish continued to echo when I returned to Britain.

‘Oseh shalom
bim’romav,
hu ya’se shalom,
alenu v’alkol Yisrael,
v’imru amen.’

(The one who has given a universe of peace gives peace to us, to all that is Israel, to all humanity. And say, yes. Amen.)

We lit candles for the dead.

‘Fourteen thousand a day,’ Rabbi Singer said. ‘A vast stream of humanity, men, women and children, all jostled together.

And they knew.
Some at least knew what was happening.

“What’s that coming out of the chimney”, one woman asked.
“That’s us,” came the reply.’

Primo Levi writes that the SS guards taunted the prisoners by saying that not only would they be killed, but that all evidence of their fates would be obliterated.

And, if by some chance, word of the camps got out, it would not be believed.

That threat of oblivion was the worst humiliation.

One thing I could do was bear witness.

~ VISHVAPANI

Join us in Bearing Witness this November

This year, Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau to bear witness together. We invite you to join us.

Scholarships are available, and guidance for Raising a Mala to support travel and retreat costs.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Learn more and register here

Attend an Information Session:
Wednesday, September 2nd
12:00 - 1:30 pm US Eastern
Online - Open Q&A - All are Welcome
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Vishvapani is a writer, mindfulness teacher, broadcaster, and contributor to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ His work centers on Buddhism and the modern world — what the tradition offers when we bring it into genuine contact with contemporary life. With four decades of Buddhist practice, he has been involved in many of the organizations and initiatives that have shaped Buddhism’s presence in Britain — working across traditions, with policymakers, and in the broader mindfulness movement. His books include Gautama Buddha: The Life and Teachings of the Awakened One and Reimagining Buddhism: Understanding Sangharakshita’s Life and Teachings.

Excerpted from “What Shall I Sing to You” A Conversation with Krishna Das and Bernie Glassman on the Peacemaker Podcast

Bernie asked me to sing in the barracks, - the women’s barracks. I was a little uncomfortable, but I had my harmonium so I said “Ok, I’ll do it.”

So I went one day by myself to the women’s barracks and I sat down and I closed my eyes. And I felt surrounded. I can tell you, honestly, I’ve never been in a room with more people in it than at that moment.

It was full of these women.

I could barely move.

They were surrounding the whole place and I just was like, “Whoa…”

I said, “Well,”
“What should I sing for you?”
And I heard in my mind, “Sing to the children.”

Ah. Of course. All these women were separated from their children. They saw their children dragged away and thrown into the ovens.

And they want that love back.

And so, they asked me to sing to the children
and so I sang.

Join us in Bearing Witness this November

This year, Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau to read the names, hear the stories, and bear witness to the joy and suffering of life together. We invite you to join us.

Scholarships are available, and guidance for Raising a Mala to support travel and retreat costs.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Learn more and register here

Excerpted from Long, Long Ago: Reflections on How It All Started by Eve Marko

I first accompanied Bernie Glassman to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first days of December 1994, before anyone conceived of a bearing witness retreat at the site of the concentration camps.

In my family, two aunts and an uncle died at Auschwitz. Another uncle barely survived the hard labor and lived the rest of his life like an extinguished candle. My grandfather died in 1944 and my mother and her other siblings hid in cellars before getting caught and sent to the Terezin camp near Prague, Czechoslovakia. They were close to death when the Russian army liberated the camp in 1945.

“Don’t just go to see where they died,” my brother had told me on the phone, “also go to where they lived.” So I had indeed flown to Warsaw and taken the train south to Krakow, peering out the windows at dark, hushed houses and even darker twilights.

Other Westerners in the compartment talked eagerly and happily; they were not Jews. They didn’t listen to the clanging wheels or the shriek of brakes, they didn’t look out at bare, wintry farms and remember shtetl markets, they didn’t try to pierce through black beech and pine trees and wonder about unmarked graves in the forests. Is there an East European Jew who doesn’t dread the sound of trains in Poland?

I picked up Bernie at the airport and together we continued to Oswiecim, home to Auschwitz-Birkenau. We arrived in the late afternoon at the German Hostel and were greeted warmly, but almost instantly I felt like a stranger. Talks were being given in the main room by a variety of speakers [for an interfaith convention]: Buddhist monks in orange robes, Catholic priests wearing collars, rabbis wrapped in talises or wearing yarmulkes, whites and blacks, activists and saints. Maha Ghosananda was there from Cambodia and Russell Means from the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in South Dakota.

What am I doing here, I wondered in confusion. This is not my family, this is not my people. They talked about compassion, love, and making sure that Auschwitz never happens again; their words meant nothing to me.

To my ears they talked spiritual jargon, while in my body I could almost feel the children huddling against my legs as we walked together towards where the guards pointed, watched by knowing eyes full of dread.

Look at where we are! There are no words for a place like this.

The next day we walked into Birkenau down the tracks, under the famous guard tower. Like so many people before and after, I was stunned by the vastness of the camp, sharpened by its geometric flatness and precisely placed barracks. There were wood and brick structures, but more than anything there was the terrible bareness of it, the frosty air that whispered of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, a death city peopled by ghosts.

I shouldn’t be here with Buddhists or Christians or American Indians, I thought to myself. I blamed them for my eyes remaining dry, the lack of tears down my pinched cold cheeks. This is not yours, I wanted to tell them. It’s our place of death, destruction, and grief, not your peace pagoda. I should be here only with Jews.

Up ahead a crowd assembled around the remains of a crematorium. I didn’t want to join them, didn’t want to hear any talks, especially by a man who now slowly made his way to the center of the group and introduced himself as a Protestant minister. He began to talk in a low voice, faltered, tried again, stammered, and stopped. He looked around him, and quietly said that he hadn’t wished to speak but was persuaded by others.

And then he apologized.

Till he came here he had no idea, he said, how much his co-religionists had contributed to the mass murder at Auschwitz.

He collapsed and people hurried to help him up, but he remained on his knees and apologized for the words and messages of his religious tradition, for the subtle and not-so-subtle ways his religion had demeaned mine, his people had persecuted my people, and his participation in oblivion and denial. Here there were no good deeds to evoke, no partial expiation. All he could do was express his deepest sorrow and guilt, as a Protestant minister and as a human being.

And that, finally, was when my tears came.

I sobbed like I hadn’t sobbed in my entire life, before or after.

Something opened that had never opened in 45 years of life, something was touched that no previous memorial service, story, or Jewish prayer had ever touched.

And it came through the words of a Protestant minister who’d looked hard and deep at the spiritual abyss of Auschwitz and made no excuses. He didn’t open up his Bible to find justifications or beatific quotes we could all find refuge in, he simply collapsed in horror and then apologized.

What unlocks us?

What opens up deep traumas that I believe go way back before our parents’ stories, before our childhood, even before our birth? How do we finally confront streams of fear and hate that seem as old as time?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, only that my own turning came that afternoon when I encountered the tears of a Protestant minister whose name I don’t know to this very day standing on the remains of Crematorium 1.

That, too, was the day I heard Bernie speak out his resolution to do a retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau and bring others with him. It would be an opportunity for people to engage with others about their relationship to this place. And not just with others, but also with Others, with those who personified their fears and hatreds.

He jotted down a draft schedule on a cocktail napkin he had in his pocket: small groups in the mornings, walks to Birkenau, sitting by the Selection Site, chanting names, and in the evenings meeting all together, in one big circle of diversity.

Join Zen Peacemakers in Bearing Witness this November

This year, Jews and Poles and Germans, Palestinians and Israelis, Buddhists and Christians and Atheists, descendants of victims and descendants of perpetrators will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau to bear witness. We will sit at the Selection Site, read the names aloud, share silence and council, and come together each evening in one great circle. We invite you to join us.

Scholarships are available, and guidance for Raising a Mala to support travel and retreat costs.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Learn more and register here

Eve Myonen Marko is a Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and Green River Zen Center in Massachusetts. She has served as a Spiritholder at bearing witness retreats in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rwanda, and at programs with Lakota elders in the Black Hills, and is also a writer and editor. Her latest book, The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up In the Land of Attachments, in collaboration with Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, was published in February 2020.

READ EVE’S FULL ARTICLE IN THE PEACEMAKER JOURNAL:

Excerpts from Love Letter from Auschwitz by Peter Kuhn, originally published in The Mindfulness Bell.

My wife Jackie and I joined the Zen Peacemakers for a five-day Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz, followed soon after with a trip to the European Institute of Applied Buddhism (EIAB) where we joined the Living Happily Together Retreat with Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) and the Dutch Sangha.

Bearing witness is an attempt to see all sides with equanimity, surrender attachment and aversion, and embrace the seamless nature of all that is.

On most days there was a period of silent meditation and chanting the names of the dead, but other than that, the idea was to be fully present, to “listen” to the voices of the camp and to be open to whatever arose.

Walking through rooms filled with artifacts, I tried to remain mindful of my breath and grounded on my feet. In truth, I was often numb as we passed through rooms full of suitcases, razors, hair brushes, shoes, and children’s clothing. These exhibits are stored behind glass and felt impersonal to me — until I saw the mountain of human hair. Confronted with the relics of the countless dead, I broke down sobbing. Here were the remains of actual living beings, many of whom were my Jewish ancestors

The deep reality penetrated the walls of my defenses. Suddenly it was all very personal.

I wondered how “they” could do this. How could people ever perpetrate a Holocaust like this or allow it to happen? I heard the soft voice of our guide say, “All of this is because somebody thought they were better than somebody else.”

His words chilled me. I realized I am guilty of that, too.

We spent the next four days at Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau. I was surprised by the lush green beauty surrounding the countless rows of ruined barracks. I expected bare, fallow ground, but instead, noticed birds, grass, flowers, and even deer in the ruins of the gas chambers and incinerators. How could there be such beauty in a place of such horror? In a moment of penetration that reached to my bones, it struck me that nothing is either all “this” or all “that.”

Meditating on the railroad tracks where incoming prisoners were unloaded and sorted for work or immediate death, I heard an ancient train whistle blow. I touched the part of me that is the Nazi officer, pumped up with arrogance and discrimination, lusting for power and domination, waiting for the next trainload of “sub-humans” to arrive.

I also saw myself as a Nazi camp guard, waiting for the same train with sadness and dread. I realized the Nazis were victims as well. Those who refused to serve were executed; many lived in fear for their lives and the safety of their families. Others were victims of ignorance, or were swept away in the collective consciousness of their time. The quiet voice of humanity was often drowned by blind obedience or the rationalized safety of conformity.

Seeing myself as a prisoner in a boxcar, I thought I would commit suicide rather than endure the degradation of the camp.Then I realized that if I killed myself, I would destroy my capacity to help others and offer even the slightest comfort.

I saw my potential as a bodhisattva prisoner, sharing a crust of bread while starving, saying a kind word or extending a comforting hand, and offering dignity in the face of demoralizing degradation as so many reportedly did at that time.

Deep in the shadow, I came to understand how exquisitely precious even the smallest act of kindness can be.

Unfathomable Love

The last day at Auschwitz, as we walked across the consecrated ground of the camp, where every inch had been kissed by the ashes of cremated prisoners, I felt myself walking with all of you, my Sangha, at my side. I felt myself walking with Thay’s footsteps, and the Buddha breathed with my lungs, bringing peace in the midst of grief and sorrow. I walked with all my ancestors, with Poles, Germans, Gypsies, and Jews, with my spiritual ancestors, and with all of my descendants. Each step was a blossom of unfathomable love and forgiveness.

A week later, in a Dharma sharing group in Germany, someone asked, “Why would you go to Auschwitz?” I didn’t know how to answer.

It became evident to me over the next few days: I went to heal.

Looking deeply into other, I saw self. If my compassion could arise at Auschwitz, I could certainly offer the same grace at home, in the community, or to myself.

We live in the shadow of World War II. I see the war’s continuation in Vietnam, Bat Nha, Darfur, Tibet, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Arizona, and in each of us. I aspire to hear with soft ears of compassion instead of fear or arrogance.

May I remember that in the diversity of the all is oneness and in the one is all.

Join us in Bearing Witness this November

This year, Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau to read the names, hear the stories, and bear witness to the joy and suffering of life together.

Scholarships are available to support those from a wide range of backgrounds and means in attending.

We invite you to join us.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Learn more and register here

Peter Kuhn, ‘True Ocean of Joy’, is a musician, writer, and lay Dharma teacher living in San Diego, CA. He was ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2011and received Dharma Lamp Transmission in 2025, marking his appointment as a Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition. Peter volunteered with the Prison Meditation Project of San Diego for nearly a decade and with Compassion In Action, sitting bedside with the dying at the local VA for years. He is the co-founder of Open Heart Sangha, a Buddhist Sangha in San Diego, and founder of 12 Step Zen.

> Read the full ‘Love Letter from Auschwitz’ by Peter Kuhn

From Why Bernie Kept Going Back to Auschwitz-Birkenau article adapted from writing by Zen Peacemakers founder Bernie Glassman about his returning to Auschwitz-Birkenau year-after-year, and the purpose it has served for both him and other peacemakers.

Every year since 1994, Zen Peacemakers have traveled to Auschwitz-Birkenau for a Bearing Witness Retreat. We spend a week sitting by the train tracks in the death camp, meditating and reciting the names of people who died there.

There, we practice three Core Tenets: letting go of our fixed ideas; bearing witness to joy and suffering, and loving actions.

At Auschwitz, it is not hard to let go of fixed ideas

The place itself, with its endless gray skies overlooking miles of barbed wire and crumbling extermination compounds, is so terrifying that no matter how much we prepare for the visit, no matter how much we’ve read about it or pondered, it overwhelms us.

Even if you’ve seen the exhibits more than once and have even walked several times down the endless railroad tracks that once brought so many to their end, there’s one thing you can still count on:

Your expectations, your preconceptions, your most basic belief systems concerning love and hate, good and evil, will be annihilated in the face of Auschwitz.

In fact, after seeing the endless photographs of dying camp inmates and the high piles of their belongings pillaged by the Nazis, and after visiting Birkenau and viewing the remains of that meticulous technology developed for the purpose of mass extermination and genocide, we stop thinking altogether.

As writers and philosophers have already said, there’s no language for Auschwitz.

I can only add, there are no thoughts, either. We are in a place of unknowing.

After walking through Auschwitz and Birkenau, there is an end to thought. We are numbed. All we can do is see the endless train tracks on the snow, feel the icy cold of a Polish winter on our bare hands, smell the rotting wood in the few remaining barracks, and listen to the names of the dead.

At Birkenau we don’t sit in silence, we chant names. First, we sit in a large circle around the railroad tracks, at what was once the Selection Site, directly opposite the crematoriums. A shofar blows to start the meditation period, and then four different people, each sitting at a different point on the rim of the circle, begin to chant the names of those who’d died at Auschwitz. The names come from official lists compiled by the SS. They’re also provided to us by various retreat participants, obtained from memory, family, and friends.

We are a global group, so the names are chanted by American, Irish, Dutch, Italian, German, Swiss, Israeli, Polish, and French voices. The names themselves are also from a multitude of languages. Everyone gets their turn.

Across the large circle, we hear the names. Sometimes one resembles the name of a co-worker back home, or of a friend. Sometimes the chanter pauses. She’s come across a name that’s exactly like her own. For telling names is like telling stories.

When we recite the name out loud, dead bones come to life, the bones of men, women, and children from all over Europe. They lived, some grew up, some married, some had children, and all died.

Their names become our names, their stories, our stories.

That is what happens when we bear witness.

~ Bernie Tetsugen Glassman

Join us in Bearing Witness this November

This year, Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all walks of life - Jews and Poles and Germans, Palestinians and Israelis, Buddhists and Christians and Atheists, descendants of victims and descendants of perpetrators - will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau to read the names, hear the stories, and bear witness to the joy and suffering of life together.

Scholarships are available to support those from a wide range of backgrounds and means in attending.

We invite you to join us.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Learn more and register here

READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE PEACEMAKER JOURNAL:

From Letter to Bernie Glassman about Auschwitz Retreat ~ from Natalie Goldberg

In June 2011 Bernie Glassman brought another group to Auschwitz to Bear Witness. A hundred and fifty of us traveled from all over the world to attend.

Six months before the trip great terror haunted me in the night. Unnamed, unconscious fears.

When I taught in Houston I went to the Holocaust Museum there. As I walked along the aisles of the exhibit I was concentrated, analytic. Good information, I thought, for my trip. And when it was done, I burst out the front door, literally ran to a chocolate shop and ate three ice creams right in a row. There was no way I could wrap my head around the material. I had taught it. But I had always kept it at a distance.

Three months before the retreat I was giving a keynote at a conference in Washington, D.C. I spent six hours at the grand Holocaust museum there. I went alone. Again, I was concentrated, took in every detail in the way I can as a writer, even-minded. The moment I left, the experience left me. I did not think of it once during the conference.

Home, six days later, I woke up trembling, full of anxiety.

Finally, by three in the afternoon, I surrendered, not trying just to get through my day, I turned on the computer and turned to the pain. My hands ran across the keys, my eyes closed, I shook and sobbed.

My adored grandfather escaped the pogrom in Russia by coming to America in the early Twentieth Century but they hadn’t stopped looking for us. I was sure now they knew where I was and were coming to my door in Santa Fe any minute. They were climbing over the fence, no place to escape; as I wrote I kept glancing out the window. Any minute now – my whole body felt this, I would be taken away. I completely believed it as fact.

My family never spoke about pogroms. I was born in 1948 when the horror of the German concentration camps was just coming out. None of it was ever mentioned in my family but like serum, the panic was injected straight into my veins, unconscious, undigested. Going to the museum in Washington made it come alive.

When I finally arrived at Auschwitz, I realized I knew this place.

I’d carried it in me all my life and though no known relatives had died there, all the murdered beings we could feel in the tall late spring grass were my people. And I, too, had died there.

I was not separate.

I kept repeating to myself, this is the darkest of the dark.

Unexplainable, inconceivable and yet it happened.

The bookstore at Auschwitz was full of memoirs, accounts of survivors, histories of World War II, what happened to Jews in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Denmark, Slovenia. We brought back piles of books, videos of what was seen when the camps were freed by the Russians. We wanted to know, to understand, to make sense – but there was no sense.

I thought reading about King Leopold [and his atrocities in the Congo], Rwanda, what the British did to the Mau Maus, had readied me. But the [Nazi] Germans had taken genocide to an industrial level. They used every part of the Jews. Even their ashes were shipped to Germany to fertilize their fields.

I came home and lived in the world of the camps. I gave talks about our experience. I told people that we need to also understand the guilt and shame of the Germans and the suffering of war.

And then one day as I was embroiled in thoughts, some daily controversy, I heard someone across the room mention Auschwitz. The word went through me and love spontaneously flooded my whole body, legs, chest, knees, arms, whole face lit up.

Auschwitz had become synonymous with love.

Dare I say that?

I no longer carried all the cremated Jews unconsciously around with me. I acknowledged them and gained strength from them. The Germans weren’t my enemy. I was free. No horror couldn’t be faced.

Everything Bernie said about going to Auschwitz is true. The words are not separate from the experience. It all bleeds together. I thank him for having such a large vision of what [life] can be.

Join us in Bearing Witness in Auschwitz this November

This year, Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau to bear witness. Jews and Poles and Germans, Palestinians and Israelis, Buddhists and Christians and Atheists, descendants of victims and descendants of perpetrators will all sit in the same silence, share the same meals, read the names aloud, and bear witness together.

Scholarships are available to support those from diverse backgrounds and means in attending.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat
Oświęcim, Poland
November 15-21, 2026

Learn more about the retreat, scholarships, and registration here.

Natalie Goldberg is a poet, teacher, writer, and painter. A student of Zen Buddhism for 24 years, she trained intensively with Katagiri Roshi for 12 years, and is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thich Nhat Hanh. Natalie teaches writing workshops nationally based on the methods presented in Writing Down the Bones. Her other books include Wild Mind; Long Quiet Highway; Banana Rose; and Living Color.

I accompanied Bernie Glassman to Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1994, before anyone conceived of a bearing witness retreat at the site of the concentration camps.

[During that first visit,] I experienced a profound act of letting go. Certain things changed radically afterwards, first of which was my relationship to German people and the German language. But that was only a beginning.

That, too, was the day I heard Bernie speak out his resolution to do a retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau and bring others with him. It would be an opportunity for people to engage with others about their relationship to this place. And not just with others, but also with Others, with those who personified their fears and hatreds.

Twenty years [now thirty] have come and gone, twenty years of personal narratives from many different people, including different narratives from the same people as they’ve come back again and again. Some are stories about being Jewish and losing members of your family in the camps; some are about being German or Polish, about being gay or Gypsy. Many participants have only a tangential relationship to what took place at Auschwitz, but they too have their stories about the things that have marked their lives.

German participants have talked about the secrets in their families; Poles talked about the silence in theirs. Palestinians and Native Americans have inveighed against the loss of their land, Rwandans wept about their own massacre. Who hasn’t had her story of loss—a son, a daughter, a parent, a future? Who hasn’t been blamed? Nazis, Germans, Poles, Israelis, Europeans, Americans, President Clinton, Saddam Hussein, and yes, even Jews. What hasn’t been expressed during these retreats? Anger, rage, self-righteousness, indignation. It’s so easy to be offended, especially by superficial opinions that barely seem to scratch the surface, or sudden laughter and giggly gossip by people who for the moment forget they’re standing in the middle of the world’s biggest cemetery.

Certain words came up often, like healing and transformation. You don’t come to a giant cemetery for healing, a participant raged one year. I agree, but nevertheless, it can find you.

What started out twenty years ago as mourning my own dead, grieving for what happened to the Jews of Europe, became over time something quite different.

Meeting this place is meeting my own self.

There is great power in the place where life and death come together.

How do you meet this place, I’ve asked myself each November, year in and year out. Each time the answer has been different. For meeting this place is meeting my own self in the form of Auschwitz.

Don’t do this work for yourselves or for the people who come, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement, said back in 1996 when Bernie talked to him about that first retreat. Do it for the souls that are there.

Right now it’s no longer just the past that calls out to me from the ruler-straight railway tracks and the remains of chimneys. Rather, the past has reached its tentacles to shadowy corners of our present and our future, too, giving Auschwitz, with its stones and rubble, a timeless quality. But it is no abstraction.

Something there is deeply present and continues to cry out, warn, remonstrate, implore, and summon forth our energies again and again.

Join us in Bearing Witness in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November

Zen Peacemakers will gather in Auschwitz once again this November to bear witness, sitting at the Selection Site, chanting the names of the dead, sharing in both silence and council. Together, we will meet ourselves in this place and listen to what it has to teach us.

Join us in Bearing Witness in Auschwitz. Learn more and register here.

For thirty years, each November, Zen Peacemakers have gone to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place that has become a monument to intolerance. We come to sit. To face what most of us spend our lives turning away from.

We call this bearing witness.

Shortly after the 20th anniversary of the first bearing witness retreat in Auschwitz, Roshi Bernie Glassman shared what…

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Late one authentic interior Alaska summer afternoon, our radios crackled with frantic communication. One of our helicopters had gone down. The helicopters were used during the summer months to shuttle equipment and crews to and from the even more remote exploratory drilling sites across the region. The calls were coming from one of those crews who had witnessed the crash near a landing site on the ridgeline high above the main camp. There were no other helicopters on-site. There were no roads, not even trails, beyond the main camp.

We gathered and shuttled personnel and gear up to the end of a tailings haul road. Fire and rescue teams made up of miners, millwrights, and other staff started up the steep, brush- and spruce-tangled slope on foot. Without bearings to an exact crash location, we spread out and followed the occasional shotgun blast from the crew at the scene—shotguns a necessity given the arctic grizzlies in the area. After twenty or thirty minutes, one of the responders radioed they were on scene. CPR in-progress. The rest of us followed their whistles and shouts to the scene.

I arrived with several others with some of the medical gear. The pilot had been pulled from the remnants of the helicopter by the crew he was picking up. Mangled wreckage was scattered through broken trees and brush. They had been doing CPR all that time. Given the extent of the trauma, I knew there was little we could do—but we did it anyway. I felt and listened for any signs of cardiac activity—the cardiac monitor lagging behind with whoever was carrying it up. There were none. I intubated and started an I.V. and rotated responders in and out of the CPR cycles—most of whom I had taught basic life support skills at the mine. A few rounds of I.V. epinephrine, a medication that can enhance CPR and, in some cases, prompt electrical activity in the heart. After some time, I called it. We stopped.

Without the focus and immediacy of the emergency care we’d been administering, a silence set in. The responders, now numbering more than twenty, awkwardly gathered themselves. The stillness, after what we’d been doing the last forty-five minutes or more, was both pensive and overwhelming. Bird song—a series of two slow, widely-spaces ethereal multi-tonal notes, came from the denser spruce below us. Varied Thrush, I thought to myself. I brushed the dirt out of the victim’s hair and face. One of my cohorts knelt and took one of the victim’s hands in his. I looked up at the crowd of people that, by a rich human mix of choices and chance, found themselves in that moment, in that place.

I stood and found some words. “We are here—right here, right now,” I said. “Take a moment, and just take it in. And I invite any of you, if you might wish, to acknowledge this—all of this—in whatever ways that seem right for you.”

Some stepped forward and knelt beside the victim. Some laid their hands, gently, on him. One soaked a bandana in water from his drinking bottle and wiped off the victim’s face. Some knelt with their hands in prayer. Others brushed the mosquitoes and black flies from the victim’s skin and blood. Unspoken, but expressed and felt, each in their own way—“We are here.”

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Just being present. This “just,” as a descriptive adverb, arises throughout Zen teachings. Dōgen and his successors have found endless ways of teaching that zazen is just sitting, that Zen is the practice of just being present in the moment as it arises, right here right now. What we are called to do in moments such as the one we experienced at the scene of a fatal helicopter crash above a remote mining facility southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, at its core, may be just being present and responding to and in the moment—just showing up, just being human.

This just, though, is not the diminishing descriptive we often place on it in our language and our culture. This is an expansive just—an opening, not a closing. This expansive just, this “boundaryless, empty awareness,” as Peter Coyote reflected in a 2025 Zen Peacemakers podcast, opens ourselves to our “deepest, truest nature,” and all that might flow through and from this original self. This just being present, this emptiness, “doesn’t mean nothingness,” Coyote offers. “Emptiness means boundlessness.”

In a spontaneous, authentic engagement in and with the world and those with whom we share it, we often do not have the platitudes that customarily follow the “We are gathered here today” found in many, if not most, more conventional Western religious traditions. In the moments requiring unrehearsed, spontaneous response, the acts of gathering attention and mindfully choosing the words occur before dualities and discrimination, when one does not perceive the mountains walking or not walking. To find the words, or the absence of words, we need to settle in with the attention and mindfulness fostered by authentic practice.

We need to practice this just being present. We need to just sit.

References:

Coyote, Peter. The Three Tenets of Current Affairs. Peacemakers Podcast. Zen Peacemakers. May 29, 2025. https://voice.zenpeacemakers.org/p/the-three-tenets-of-current-affairs.

Bio:

An alumnus of the Zen Peacemakers (ZP) Bearing Witness Native American Retreat program, Peter Pierson worked 20+ years as an advanced life support paramedic in northern Minnesota, North Dakota, northern Arizona, and remote arctic Alaska—and for part of that time also as a Unitarian Universalist lay minister and regional emergency services chaplain.

A one-time Minnesota Regional Arts/McKnight Foundation Fellowship recipient, his radio essay work had been produced and broadcast with KAXE/KBXE—Northern (MN) Community Radio and CBC Radio One in Canada. His work has been featured previously in ZPI’s Journal and with Natural History Institute’s Real Ground, Minnesota Historical Society Press’ Voices for the Land, Vertical Jones, The Climbing Art, and other venues. He and his partner now live in the Kansas City area where, as a graduate of the Upaya Zen Center Chaplaincy Training program, serves as a volunteer chaplain in the Kansas State Correctional Facility-Lansing.

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