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

Eve Marko on Bearing Witness at Auschwitz

From Long Long Ago: Reflections on How It All Started by Eve Marko

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.

Execution Wall at Auschwitz 1

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.

Ash Pond at Birkenau

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.