"We are our own S.S. men..."

The artwork of Marian Kolodziej
Auschwitz prisoner #432

While this post is actually reaction and commentary to the post Auschwitz One , I am posting it here so it's easier to find for anyone who might want another way to address suffering, their own or others'....

The Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreat is multi-faith but the very idea of going to a place like Auschwitz to "bear witness" is a very Zen Buddhist practice. Gemmon and I spoke after she read and helped me fact-check the post, Auschwitz One. She liked that I caught myself, mid-post, avoiding my feelings about standing in the gas chamber by telling facts. And she added,  "I liked your breakdown about the expectation phase. See, Auschwitz still has something to tell you: maybe how hard you are on yourself? Aren't we our own worst SS men?" 

Gemmon leading one of her
Caregivers Workshops 

Yes, Gemmon, I am. I am brutal to myself and, when I sit with dear friends and we really tell each other the truth about how we talk to and feel about ourselves, I'm quite sure I'm not alone in this. I would not let anyone speak about the people I love the way they sometimes speak about themselves. And I know they would defend me against anyone who might judge me as harshly as I judge myself. I can bear witness to that.

But, months after the retreat, I still have no simple answer for the people who ask why I went "really" or "why anyone would put themselves through that?" In other words, what's the "purpose" of "bearing witness" and, when you do, how to cope with all that comes up?  Zen Master Bernie Glassman, who organized the retreat more than sixteen years ago, explains the purpose this way: 

Much of Zen practice, including many teaching techniques used by Zen masters, is aimed at bringing the Zen practitioner to this same place of unknowing, of letting go of what he or she knows. After walking through Auschwitz and Birkenau, there is an end to thought. We are numbed. All we can do is see the endless train tracks on the snow, feel the icy cold of a Polish winter on our bare hands, smell the rotting wood in the few remaining barracks, and listen to the names of the dead.  

Fine, but I still am left with some oxymoronic paralyzing need to act, to DO something when there is nothing to be done, at least about what happened to the people murdered at the Auschwitz camps.

When everything crumbles, what is left?

Bernard Enginger was a member of the French Resistance when he was captured by the Nazis and put in concentration camps for a year and a half. After he was released, he spent years in India, among many other places, where he was given the name Satprem by his spiritual teacher. One of the Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreat participants heard an interview he gave much later in life and transcribed what he said. It's astonishing...

…. A man only starts to BE when he reaches the complete nothingness of what he is, what he believes, that he thinks, what he loves. When we reach this complete nothingness, then something must BE, or we die, right? 


I experienced this in the concentration camps. There was nothing. All was destroyed, broken. Even I was broken. All the ideals, the nobility, everything was broken. There was nothing, nothing, nothing, You see? No politics, no religion, nothing to hold on to. So when there is nothing, what is left? What is left? There is a centre of strength, of being. There is something left. And that is the key. It’s not all that we think, all we feel or love. It’s not our ideals or God. It’s none of that! It’s something poignant, as if the whole being was wrapped up in an anguish that is so intense that it becomes a prayer. Or like love, it is warm, powerful. There are no words to describe it. It is our being, what we are. That is the question, the thing that everyone reaches. When everything crumbles, what is left?


Everything is broken to force us to reach that human moment, where we are what man truly is. What is man, really? We are completely fooled by philosophies, religions, politics. They are only outgrowths that were added from one century to the next, They have nothing to do with human reality. So, what is human reality? A man in a cell who will get shot the next morning, knows what that is, sometimes. 


In the morning, in my cell, I often heard steps in the hallway.

Dream argument

That first night in the dormitory room in the Center for Dialogue, after spending a day at Auschwitz, my dreams were the most mundane ever. In it, Kevin and I argued about whether or not Matt, much younger than he actually is, should have to come with me to buy something he wanted to entertain himself, perhaps a movie, or should we allow him to stay home while one of us went to get it for him. It wasn't a heated argument, just all-encompassing. Confronted by Auschwitz, my brain natters on about the inane, the unimportant, the trivial.

Do we argue because don't want to feel? Because it makes us feel safely and permanently alive? Important? Immortal? Because these petty but oh-so-important clashes distract and cloak the reality of our existence and the incomprehensible facts in it? Could people kill other people because it makes them certain, at least for that moment, that they will never die?

Stacks of paper

After dinner, I came early to the first group meeting and the room was empty except for Andrzej Krajewski, the coordinator of the retreat from Poland. He was busy sorting stacks of paper so I asked if he wanted help.

"Yes, take from here," he said, indicating the box next to him filled with stacks of paper, "And please count twenty or twenty-two pages and put them in piles here."

Okay. I started to count, to stack. I assumed I was creating piles of twenty-two copies of the same document. But, as I counted, I started to notice that, no, each page was different. They weren't the same document.

"What are these?"

"These are names of the people who were recorded at the camps, the ones who made it through the first selection and actually worked at the camps before they died. No one knows how many actually died at Auschwitz because many were sent directly to the gas chambers so their names weren't recorded. There is no record of them."

There were at least twenty to twenty-five names on each page and a box full of pages. We were making piles of the names we were going to read aloud over the course of the retreat.

When we were done making all the piles we needed, the box was still full of paper, still full of the names of the people who had died in the Auschwitz camps, many more than the pages we had counted out. Andrzej picked the box up and walked towards the back of the room to put it away for another time. I wanted to grab them from him, to tell him no, not again, we can do it, we can do them all. We have to.

But we couldn't. We couldn't do them all. There were too many for the time we had.

There's a reason why people don't come to places like this. Whatever you do, you have it ground into your face, into your gut, into your bones, again and again, that it can never be enough. There is no matching this horror with anything "appropriate."

I sat down in that big empty hall filled with chairs and couldn't even cry.