After our morning at Harmęże, we
returned to the proximity of Auschwitz I to the Center for Dialogue and Prayer
located across the street. For me the familiarity of this place was reassuring,
one, since our Amizade group spent every day there while we were working in
Oświęcim last summer, but also because I feel the very heart of this Center and
its focus on interreligious-dialogue is where I am heading vocationally. We met
with Father Manfred Deselaers, a German Catholic priest, who, through detailing
his personal history and post-Holocaust history in general, discussed what it
means to encounter the memory of Auschwitz. He asked us to “listen to the
voices of the soil”; visiting the camp complex is not about reliving the
experience, but attempting—to the extent that we are able—to comprehend what
happened and what it means for human relations in the present.
A litany of both historical and moral
questions immediately arose: What should I (we, as outside observers) be
learning about this memory? What does it mean? Germans, Poles, and Jews will
obviously interact differently with the memory of Auschwitz than (non-Jewish)
Americans. But can this “wound in our identity” which Father Manfred termed to
describe the German, Polish, and Jewish experience, also wound us too, as we do
not necessarily identify as Poles or Germans, but as fellow humans? The wound
is not just in our own individual identity; the wound is in our relationships. At
the very core of who we are as humans, as Christians, as Jews, as atheists, and
so forth, Auschwitz elicits a tantamount moral concern: Can we trust each other
after Auschwitz? Or can we trust only ourselves? Even if we cannot
learn to trust one another again, addressing the consciousness of this memory
can at least help us be better.
The Center for Dialogue and Prayer’s
mission is to create a place where everybody is welcome with wounds—where no one
has to talk about Auschwitz if they do not want to. The Center makes it clear
from the beginning that dialogue begins with listening to one another, not
talking about the other. Their message is not only about ‘Never Again’ but
about respecting the identity (and dignity) of others in the past. For Germans
who, let’s say they were 14 at the beginning of the war which would make them
20 at the war’s end, what happened was not their fault—they were not the
decision makers. Today these same Germans are in their late 80s; they are very
old and they feel like victims too—blamed for the Holocaust and living in
post-war German society paying reparations for what their parents’ generation
did. Thus the “German wound” is one of guilt, yet it’s confusing guilt, often
intertwined by similar feelings of victimhood. Father Manfred, as a German, often
reminds non-German visitors to the Center that many German families today do
not know what their grandparents or great grandparents did during the war. Germans
today are not guilty. The German language is not guilty. Outsiders (and especially
the next generations of victims of Nazi atrocity) must understand this.
On the other hand, when Poles, Roma, and
Jews come to Auschwitz, they want to remember their people, which is not the
case for the Germans. For Poles and the memory of Auschwitz, there are two
fundamental aspects in Polish understanding. First, the role of Christianity (with
the Catholic Church as the backbone of the state, the tradition of martyrdom in
Polish culture, i.e. that it is better to give your life than to become a
traitor, and the connection of resistance with Christian values). Whereas in
western Europe, Christianity was seen as a hindrance to forward movement, in
Poland, freedom and liberty are embodied in the Catholic Church and the
politics of the nation were (still are?) often intertwined with the views of the
church (especially after John Paul II, more to come on him later in the blog).
And second, the two-phase experience of World War II (which deals with the
notion that for Poles, the war began twice: on September 1, 1939 with the Nazi
invasion from the west and on September 17th with the Soviet
invasion from the east).
Although our conversation with Father
Manfred was only an hour, in those sixty minutes the sixty years of post-Holocaust
memory and pain resurfaced in an inter-ethnic and inter-faith context. The
proximity to the very site we were discussing added to the weight of the conversation,
and I walked away with a new-found respect for the Center and for the work
Father Manfred and his team have done, are doing, and will do to foster
relationships and further dialogue.
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| View from the ACJ that evening |
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| Beautiful sunset in Oświęcim |
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