und Form“, „Kommen und Gehen“ – außer Kraft. Nicht-Wissen ist ein Zustand der offenen Präsenz ohne Trennung.
In diesem Zustand können wir Zeugnis ablegen (der zweite Grundsatz), mit einer Person, einer Situation, einer Umgebung verschmelzen oder uns damit verbinden, deren Essenz tief einsaugen. Aus diesem intimen „Wissen“ heraus können wir dann eine angemessene Reaktion auf die Person oder Situation wählen – mit den Worten des dritten Grundsatzes: „die Handlungen vollziehen, die aus Nicht-Wissen und Zeugnisablegen erwachsen“.
Dies zusammen führt zu der holistischen, integrierten, umfassenden Art von dienenden Projekten, wie Bernie sie mit seiner Vision inspiriert hat.
(Wenn wir über die Drei Grundsätze als getrennte Übungen und Phasen des Bewusstseins sprechen, zollen wir unserer Unterscheidungsfähigkeit Respekt. Im Prinzip sind sie aber ein kontinuierlicher Fluss; jeder der Grundsätze enthält die anderen und bringt sie hervor.)
http://zenpeacemakers.org/zen-peacemakers/three-tenets / 20.6.15
(Übersetzung K. Battke)
Eve Marko
Some December Days in 1994
I first accompanied Bernie Glassman to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first days of December 1994, before anyone imagined a Bearing Witness Retreat. He was going there to do a Transmission of Precepts ceremony for Claude Thomas, a Vietnam veteran. An interfaith convocation was being convened at the site of the concentration camps by Buddhist activist Paula Green and the Nipponzan Myohoji Zen community, and Claude was joining a group of walkers that would walk from Poland all the way to Hiroshima, Japan.
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. Given all this history, I thought, what better way to go to a place like Auschwitz than with one’s own teacher?
But as I sat alone on a bench along the Vistula River on the weekend before meeting Bernie, I wasn’t so sure. Years of Zen practice slipped off me like snakeskin, revealing underneath the Jewish woman whose forebears lived, prayed, starved, and finally left Poland for Czechoslovakia.
“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 Kraków, peering out the windows at dark, hushed houses and even darker twilights. Other Westerners in the compartment, en route to the convocation, 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.
Only some six years had passed since the overthrow of Poland’s Communist government; the beautiful Old Town of Kraków was not yet crowded with tourists, cafés and flashy shop windows as it is now. The Jewish quarter of Kazimierz had only one café and bookstore at the very top of Ulica Szeroka; Klezmer and Jewish revivals, now a staple of Kazimierz, were still a long time in the future. I walked for hours searching for small bare rectangles on doorframes where mezuzahs had once hung and the carvings of Jewish stars or menorahs on the walls of the old houses, then sat along the river beneath Wawel Castle watching the crows, listening for the trains as they approached Kraków Glowny, the main train station. Is there an East European Jew who doesn’t dread the sound of trains in Poland, who doesn’t imagine instantly the sealed boxcars, the lone whistle of a locomotive echoing across a ravaged countryside, shunted down smaller tracks till it finally rolls in, slowly and exhaustedly, under a brick arch and comes to a stop?
I walked a great deal that weekend and never once saw Poland or Poles, just the dreadful land of stories whispered to me at night long ago when I was a child.
I picked up Bernie at the airport and together we continued to Oświęcim, home to Auschwitz-Birkenau. We arrived in the late afternoon at the German Hostel, which would host several of our retreats in later years, and were greeted warmly by Paula Green, but almost instantly I felt like a stranger. Talks were being given in the main room by a variety of people: 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, confused. This is not my family, this is not my people. They talked about compassion, love, and making sure that Auschwitz never happens again, but their words meant nothing to me. What’s this got to do with you, I wanted to ask them. Look at where we are! There are no words for a place like this.
We walked to the Gate of Auschwitz 1. It was a freezing night and the ground was covered with ice as we stood in front of the gates with the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei and there lit a candle for the first night of Chanukah. The flames of those candles dancing in the cold wind lightened my spirits.
But the hardness came right back the next day when we went into Birkenau, entering under the famous guard tower and walking down the tracks. 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. That first time it was easy to let my imagination take over, sense a quivering inside the barracks, look up at the sky and feel that the land where you’re standing, filled with visitors, is more abandoned than the North Pole.
Once again I remembered the stories I heard as a little girl lying in bed as my mother recounted what happened to Frieda, her sister, who chose to hold on to her baby and die with him rather than to part with him and join the laborers, as Mengele suggested. I thought of Mordechai, 10 years old and sickly all his life. When they knew they had to go into hiding, his parents scraped up some money to keep him in a hospital for safety, but the Nazis sent all the patients, including children, straight to Auschwitz. No mother had accompanied this young boy to his death and my grandmother never forgave herself.
But the old voices were interrupted by the strange singsong of the Nipponzan Myohoji followers chanting their devotion to the Lotus Sutra, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, and banging their hand drums as they walked down the tracks. I was repelled. This is not yours, I wanted to tell them. It’s our place of death and destruction, of cries and mourning. My eyes remained dry, my pinched cold cheeks saw no tears, and I felt it was their fault. I shouldn’t be here, I thought to myself. I shouldn’t be here with Buddhists or Christians or American Indians. I should be here only with Jews, people who feel like me.
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. I watched from the perimeter as someone gave him a mike but he shook his head. 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. He ran a home for children who came from places of war all around the world, but that meant little in a place like this, he said. 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