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.
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.
