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 drew him to this place:

The first time I went to Auschwitz, when I walked into Birkenau, I could just feel all the spirits crying out, wanting to be remembered. And so right away I said, I’ve gotta come here and sit and be with those spirits.

It struck me, pretty much right away, that there were all kinds of spirits there. That was a place many Jews were killed, but gypsies and Catholics and intellectuals and gays and people with handicap — so many different kinds.

I felt like I should try to bring as many different kinds of people there to be together, and to see how we can deal with each other.

Jews and Poles and Germans, Buddhists and Christians and the unaffiliated, descendants of victims and descendants of perpetrators — all sitting in the same silence, sharing the same meals, reading the same names aloud.

A place that holds everyone

In Buddhism, Bernie noted, the word for compassion carries two meanings at once: one is compassion as we usually understand it, and the other is removal of fear.

We all talk about the interconnectedness of life. The oneness of life. But if we look carefully at ourselves and see how many aspects of life we shy away from or won’t come in contact with, and then try to figure out why — I think the biggest reason is fear.

What I found for myself was, I needed to go to places where I didn’t want to know what was going on, where I felt I had to stay away, or I was afraid of it. And so those are the places I went.

I think that there’s certain things that we’re afraid of and we stay away. So we’re not in touch with that part of life.

Our work in compassion is to remove fear.

So we go to Auschwitz.

Going beyond fear

In a council group at one of the retreats in Auschwitz sat a German woman whose grandfather had been SS at the camp. She had waited fifteen years to come, afraid she would meet a Jew or a Pole. In the same group sat a man from Krakow who had waited ten years, afraid he would meet a German. They had each spent most of a lifetime avoiding the other.

After four days, they were hugging.

The spectrum of life that each of them could touch had widened enormously.

We do the same in street retreats, where people who would normally cross the road to avoid someone who is homeless instead spend days on the street and learn to ask a simple question: How are you? What’s your name? And also when we sit in the Black Hills with Lakota elders, and listen as they share about boarding schools, beatings, and the graves of children.

We begin in Not-Knowing, setting down our certainty about a place, a history, a person. We Bear Witness to whatever is arising and meet it just as it is. And then, from that intimacy, Taking Action arises – the hug after four days, the name remembered, the ability to respond with love instead of fear.

To go beyond the fear and to celebrate in the diversity of life — that’s beautiful. - Bernie Tetsugen Glassman

Join us this November

We invite you to join Zen Peacemakers in Auschwitz-Birkenau for the Bearing Witness Retreat this year. We will sit together on the selection site, read the names in remembrance, share silence and council and song, and let this place do what it has done for thirty years: open us to one another, and to the parts of life we are most afraid to meet.

Join us in Auschwitz this November. Learn more and register here.

PEACEMAKERS PODCAST

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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Author: Amanda Gorman

When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.

We braved the belly of the beast.

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And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.

Somehow …

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Accept it is all fiction. The assassination attempt, the bleeding ear, the fist pump. The billionaire, being so moved by the courage of the fist pump that he converts, becomes radicalized, joins the president’s team. The billionaire coming to work at the White House with his child on his shoulders, and the president smiling lik…

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“So, what do you do in the US?” someone asked me a short while ago. She was not American.

“I work for the Zen Peacemakers,” I told her.

Her blue eyes went blank and the edges of her lips twitched. “Huh,” was all she said, nodding vaguely.

From her reaction, I suspect she felt that making peace is almost an affront to reality nowadays, or at best a child’s imaginings. For many years I have seen people raise eyebrows at this or look away, not so much in disapproval, more as if I’m daft and have wasted many years of productivity. After all, I could have started a business. I could have been a therapist or taken my writing to a new level. Instead—Zen Peacemakers?

Of course, members do all those things. But in these critical times, with so much at stake, I hear this question again and again: What are Buddhists doing?

I can’t speak for Buddhists, I can hardly speak for Zen Peacemakers, just describe how I see our work. I’ll start with what we don’t do: We don’t take sides, or, as someone said yesterday in a meeting, we work as one family.

That’s not easy today, when family members won’t speak to each other because of who one voted for (in most of the cases I hear about, it’s the liberal voter who refuses to talk with the other side). In the Zen Peacemaker family, we talk to everyone provided some minimal rules of courtesy are observed. That means that we don’t stay silent.

It doesn’t mean we cave in for the sake of a false harmony, or that we comfort ourselves with spiritual cliches, or that we turn fragile in the face of horror. A long time ago, at a wonderful yoga ashram, I heard a woman say she never reads the newspaper because her personal calm and equanimity are very important for her. She’s probably not a member of Zen Peacemakers. When a family is blind or in denial, dysfunction sets in.

I’ve often wondered, when reading about children taking guns to school and shooting their schoolmates, how their parents feel. If your own child wounded and killed other children, do you stop acknowledging him or her? You can condemn the actions loudly and vociferously, and of course, nowadays prosecutors go after parents as well. You can feel horrible about what they did, make atonement, even reparations. In my mother’s older age, young Germans would come and paint her apartment, their way of making reparations for the Holocaust. But tell me, do you stop acknowledging them as your children?

Or do you say, much as Gandhi pointed out: People are people; it’s their actions that cause harm. Nobody is born evil, except in horror movies. Individual choices and actions can be horrific or great blessings to all of humanity, but there’s a basic equality to all humans, be they a Hitler or a King.

Serving that common humanity, that essence shared by all human and nonhuman beings, is what we mean by serving the whole. The peacemaking we do is serving the whole. I have gotten angry many times and spoke harshly to let off steam. What I’ve learned over the years is to act with immediacy when needed, but always to keep my eyes on the prize. And what is the prize? Bringing our oneness into consciousness, mine and everyone else’s.

That does not mean we do nothing. That does not mean we don’t resist terrible laws and hurtful actions. Instead, we bring medicine for the sick, food for hungry children, we take care of the earth and its species, give respect and dignity to all. By now, what with pandemics, prevalence of nuclear weapons, and the degradation of this earth, we know that we can’t cure these without taking the big picture into account.

“Whoever you exclude from the mandala of your practice will sabotage your work,” Bernie used to warn.

You can have a child who goes one way and another child who goes another, and have very strong opinions about the difference; you’re not neutral. But they’re both your children, and even in the worst of times you don’t forget it. We can work all we want towards wellbeing rather than profits, care rather than extortion, peaceful relations rather than continuing war. Some will join, some won’t. And—it’s all one family.

I recognize that not everyone agrees with this approach, including various religious traditions. But this is what I learned from Bernie Glassman and all the work that he and so many others did over the years. I rarely saw him indignant or upset. Instead, he’d call me: “Eve, let’s go out for dinner.” He would call it a day, get a good night’s sleep, and wake up in the morning refreshed and ready to get back to peacemaking work as he saw it.

Who has the energy for hate and indignation? For rancor or rage? I prefer to keep my decreasing energy towards building and rebuilding a solid foundation for a family with infinitely different members—but a family nevertheless.

I raise money for illegal immigrants. That doesn’t mean that I agree with those who say we should have open borders for all refugees headed to our border. As I wrote before, we should close the border for a while till we figure out new policies and institute new systems. We also have to honestly ask ourselves how open we are to vastly different cultures and sets of values that people bring here. There’s no room here for blindness or even rose-colored glasses.

One last thing. As I was reminded yesterday in a Zoom meeting, each and every one of us participates in some system of oppression. I don’t care if you’re white, black, Latino, Native American, Muslim, or Jewish, I don’t care how marginalized and even persecuted you feel your group has been. We operate inside systems that are often based on scarcity in order to maximize profits, strengthen religious or ethnic identities at a cost to others, empower one gender over another. We may try to act differently as individuals, but we’re all members of clubs, as Bernie often reminded us, consciously or not.

I remember driving across country and admiring the old pioneer families who settled in those vast plains, where women gave birth on their own and where many could not survive the terrible winters. Only later did I realize how much of this was done on the backs of Native Americans, whose land was stolen and their sustenance destroyed.

You may be part of a minority group, you may be a glorious human being, but you’re still part of that system, and if you look well enough, you’ll see and identify those who suffer as part of the system that you participate in. At the very least, it brings humility into the picture.

So, what should we do? There are certain clear-eyed people who see all this and turn their backs on the world. Not the Buddha. He is celebrated for his enlightenment, but I admire him for going back down to be with people and walk the earth. Just one thing interested him, and that was dealing with suffering. The compassion of that approach has always stunned and inspired me.

It doesn’t mean we don’t defend ourselves and others against violence. It doesn’t mean we don’t protect, shelter, and feed our families. We don’t ask whether to do those things, what we ask is: How do we do this? What is appropriate here? What is skillful?

If you have a better way of working in this world, I’m curious to hear it.

Eve Marko is a Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and head teacher at the Green River Zen Center in Massachusetts. She received Dharma Transmission and inka from Bernie Glassman. She is also a writer and editor of fiction and nonfiction.

Eve has trained spiritually-based social activists and peacemakers in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and has been a Spiritholder at retreats bearing witness to genocide at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rwanda, and the Black Hills in South Dakota. Before that, she worked at the Greyston Mandala, which provides housing, child care, jobs, and AIDS-related medical services in Yonkers, New York.

Eve’s articles on social activists have appeared in the magazines Tricycle, Shambhala Sun, and Tikkun. Her collection of Zen koans for modern Zen practitioners in collaboration with Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up In the Land of Attachments, came out in February 2020.

Hunt for the Lynx, the first in her fantasy trilogy, The Dogs of the Kiskadee Hills, was published in 2016.

“When I was a young girl my dream was to be a hermit, live alone, and write serious literature. That’s not how things turned out. I got involved with people. I got involved in the world. Two things matter to me right now: the creative spark and the aliveness of personal connection. In some way, they both come down to the same thing.”

I went to sleep on Tuesday evening way too early to catch any preliminary results of our national election, slept well, and was stunned by the headlines on Wednesday morning. There he was again, the man of the hour, the man of the past 8 years, the man I’d hoped not just to lose but to go to prison. This time the word Triumph flashed next to his name.

Th…

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“In Arabic we say that every situation has a word or phrase that suits it perfectly.”

I wish I could find that word or phrase here, in the Middle East. Those words were said by a young woman sitting in the living room of Sami Awad’s home in Beit Jallah, above Bethlehem, in the West Bank. Many activists come to his home, stay a while, then go home. This y…

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When I was four or five I started asking my mother questions about her mother.

Where is she?
She died, my mother said.
What was her name?
Anna.
How did she die?
She just died.
How old was she when she died?
I don't remember.
How old were you when she died?
I…

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Night deepens

with the sound

of a calling deer,

and I hear

my own one-sided love.

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