terrified man. He is all eyes. I will remember him.
A German woman says: “It is like the street where I grew up.” Except there are gallows on this street and a shooting wall where we gather. Claude Thomas, a Vietnam Vet, tells us how people are shot. “Crack! Crack! Crack!” he shouts. He has seen it. He must tell us. Above the wall two trees point to the sky. At the wall we do our first ritual. We have to do something to express the pain and passion we feel. We have begun our journey into depths and darkness.
We stand in a semicircle, a hundred and fifty human beings whose faces are graced by the beauty of compassion. Some of us step to the wall, bow and place candles, incense or flowers. A few of us turn and recite a poem, or a prayer. All these offerings are accomplished by eloquent personal gestures. Here we realize that first stillness. The attention, the affection, for those then and now that we will share without any effort at all whenever we gather in their memory. In these moments time has no measure. Is this the holy?
Kaddish means holy. Rabbi Ed reads the original Hebrew-Aramaeic Kaddish; I read our English version; Heinz-Jürgen the German translation. A French woman steps forward. She is Jewish. She has translated the Kaddish into French. Her hands tremble throughout her reading, but her voice is strong and clear.
The Poles and Italians have not yet finished their versions of our translation. I sat with Heinz-Jürgen when he translated. “You can’t say that in German,” he said. I answer, half joking: “You can’t say that in English either: ‘… All that is Israel.’ It is universal. Everything is Israel, you too.” “But,” he said, “we don’t capitalize in German like that.” Then he wrote, “alles, das heißt Israel” (“all, that means Israel.”). At the end of our Kaddish, Bryan blows the Shofar. It is the call to atone.
1944 – three years into the death project. In anticipation of an extra shipment of 350,000 Hungarian Jews, the railroad tracks were extended through the middle of the Birkenau camp to the two great crematoria where smoke flowed continually from the tall chimneys. “What is that smoke?” a new-comer asked her neighbor. “That is us,” was the answer.
The formal rituals of our days begin after breakfast and the two-kilometer walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau. There we take our meditation cushions from a store room at the entrance to the camp, and walk along the tracks. We drop our gear where we will do our sitting. Then we continue walking to the end of the tracks and gather into four religious groups on the wide memorial platform between the ruins of the crematoria. Take your pick: Jewish, Christian, Moslem and Buddhist services. My colleague, Rabbi Ed, brought a small Torah from Los Angeles. The reading of the week is the story of Jacob’s greatest challenge, what the Christians call the dark night of the soul. It is night. Jacob is alone. Suddenly he is wrestling, striving in the darkness with someone nameless, a man, an angel, the unknown. “Let me go!” says the unknown one. Jacob holds on and says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me!”
Sister Anna and Sister Maria lead a service in song, a true song; all the lovely voices harmonize. Imam Sadik leads the Sufi chants of love, eyes closed heads turn in rhythm right to left, left to right. I hear the Buddhist chants on the far end of the platform: “… twisted karma.” Roshi has added “twisted” to the liturgy. Look around … this place is twisted. Near me Arnie reads a poem by a man who died in the Łódź concentration camp: “God, change yourself!”
Some people go to a different service every day. Each of our services is for everyone. Yet each universal has its own particular language that must always be translated in our hearts, for ourselves and for the other, like Kaddish we now all share. Each of us carries the consciousness of our group and our nation. Each of us is the conscience of our people and religion. Each of us is the world of good and evil. In this place we see that indifference is a synonym for evil. In this setting of absolute evil, goodness becomes for us no longer a choice but a command. There are many tender encounters that remind us of the complexity of our perspectives, and that we are drawn to one another.
One day Ken attends the Christian service. “Are you Jewish?” asks one of the nuns. “Yes,” he says. Tears fill her eyes. A woman stands outside our Jewish service. She is German. “Come join us!” – “Is it alright?” she asks, looking worried.
We sit by the tracks where the captive people disembarked. The Shofar sounds to begin our sitting. There is always someone at each of the four points of our circle reciting the names of those who went up in smoke. I hear a last name repeated: “Angel … Angel … Angel.” Sometimes I listen for my own name. We each take a turn to recite the names. Next to each name on the list is the place of birth, the year of birth, the year of death. If you pause you can conjure a whole life. But there are so many names. Every name should be heard. We must call out the names.
In the morning and in the afternoon when the Shofar sounds to mark the end of each sitting, we lead the group to the ruins of the crematoria and pick a place to say Kaddish. The first day we gather around a pond a few feet from the crematoria. The dust and ashes of the people are buried here. In the middle of this field of dust and ashes the earth recessed and a pond was born. Now a Polish man steps forth and recites the Kaddish with great heart in his beautiful language. If you know the karma of the Poles and Jews, you will know what that moment meant for some of us. On a later day the Italians recite their Kaddish. They recite it together, almost sing it. In their fervor they hearten us to share the Kaddish confidence that Peace will come.
It is Thursday. We recite the last Kaddish of our retreat at the undressing room of one of the crematoria. The long narrow room was built below ground. The people descended through one small entrance down steps four feet wide. For efficiency the steps were made shallow to ease the decent of the children, elders and the very weak. When the SS blew up the building, the ceiling fell and because it is below ground the walls are intact. What the SS intended to hide, is open to the sky. We gather around the sides, and look down into the room.
After the Kaddish I stand at my place above the room and watch. The others descend the stairs to be closer, to be more intimate. They step slowly, tentatively, as if on holy ground. As if asking, “Is it all right to be here?” They touch each other’s hands and gather where countless souls had undressed their bodies and paused before the darkness. The darkness has become clear for us. The clarity of the darkness. We feel blessed. But not from any consolation. The stones and the well-crafted edges of the concrete walls seem to speak to your eyes, to remind you of what should not be forgotten. I wait by the steps for Bernie to ascend. I have to see my friend’s eyes. To him I have to say: “… beyond consolation. Beyond consolation. Beyond! Beyond!”
People poured out their hearts at our evening gatherings. There were children of survivors, children of the Wehrmacht and SS, and the forgotten Poles for whom the Jews felt an affinity. The homosexuals passed out pink triangles, a sign that they too had been condemned by the Nazis. We sang, once even danced hand in hand, not every one of us, not for entertainment, but because we had to.
There was a ritual in the late evening. Bryan, our Shofar blower, had found a way into Auschwitz. Every night some of us followed him through the barbed wire. We stroll down the street to the shooting wall where he sounds the Shofar. It is said, “The Shofar is a simple sound from the breath of the heart that is higher than reason.”
One evening in our dormitory, I overhear Bernie remind someone that in our Zen lineage the symbol of enlightenment is the hazy moon. Later that night I accompany Bryan on his Shofar rounds to the wall. If you had been there you would understand. It is a cloudy night. At the wall we saw the flickering lights of the memorial candles in their colored glass containers. An Israeli woman, who sang a Gypsy song at the ruins, was playing a wooden flute. A man and a woman from our group walked up hand in hand. Above the wall two trees frame the hazy moon.
In Los Angeles a friend and colleague of mine had asked with tearfilled eyes: “How can you pray at Auschwitz?” Now I know, but before the retreat I could not know. If prayer is from the depths then we were prayer, because we were living in the depths. And we seemed to share a mysterious wisdom. We listened to the place. We dwelt there. Without for a moment forgetting the sorrow, there is joy. Sometimes a neighbor would voice a profound insight, speaking scripture without quoting. We would say strange things such as, “How can I leave