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.
