und 2014, Bonn, 30. Juli 2015
Legend
What this book is (not)
This book is a collection of personal testimonies of people who – once, or repeatedly – took part in the Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is not an attempt to define or explain or even relativize history, not scientific research about how Auschwitz could happen, nor does it offer a systematic concept for peacemaking. Still, readers might learn something about how peace can rise through these sometimes sharp-edged, often tentative and contemplative, mostly heartfelt and honest biographical smithereens.
Diversity and Oneness
In this book you will find testimonies from seventeen nations, mapping the outreach of the retreat. About forty percent of the contributions are from the USA, around ten each from Poland and Germany. Participants from Palestine and Israel, Brazil and Japan, Lakota Nation and Canada sent testimonies, and some more European countries like Ireland, Sweden, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are represented. As a credit to this diversity of cultures, you will find the nation(s) the individual writer affiliates with at the end of each article (in case there are two, the first one usually is the country of birth, the second one the place where the writer lives today).
In brackets next to the country, there’s the year(s) in which the writer took part in the retreat.
There are writers following a religious tradition like Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and there are many more shades of spiritual pathways, embracing the mythology of the Lakota First Nations, Hindu wisdom, and crossover spiritual philosophies (f.e. connecting Buddhism and Sufism). And there are also agnostic voices to be heard.
To me, these testimonies are like verses of a song, of a ballad, and this song has a refrain that speaks of sudden or slow-motion insights, of fundamental letting go and gentle transformation, of unfolding love and dedicated compassion in action. Each and every experience is unique, and still, the struggle for words to express what happened during or after the retreat lead to miraculously similar wording here and there. So please listen to the stories in this book as if humanity sings of its own colorfulness, its dazzling array, and keep in mind that the verses of this ballad may all stem from the same source …
In the beginning our vision was to have each offering in this book in English, Polish and German (if not print each contribution in its original language). In the end we had to cook it down to two languages. This was a practical decision – capacities for translation and also the number of pages were limited (and as the retreat language is English, editor and publishing house are German, these were the two languages chosen). But it is also a symbol of our longing for understanding, the wish to build bridges by translation, being fully conscious about Holocaust victims and their descendants still feeling uncomfortable with the German language. So we took on the hazardous task to put soothing words against the deep injury the German language still suffers by the Nazi’s use of Arbeit Macht Frei and Sauna, Gaskammer and Stacheldraht.
You will find every contribution in both English and German – first the language it was written/submitted in, second the translation.
Inviting contributions, we suggested two questions as a guideline:
• What is alive in you right now if you tune into the experience of Bearing Witness at Auschwitz-Birkenau?
• What, if anything, changed after the retreat? In which way did the retreat influence your life?
The answers to these questions, as you will read them here, are dazzling in all colors of the rainbow.
The three parts of the book
Then these pearls lined up for the book manuscript. They formed a string. It was part of my practice not to judge them. Respecting everyone’s experience, and the testimony of it, as original and true, I needed to find a way to give some kind of structure, of succession to them.
Some of the articles seemed suitable to give readers, who are not familiar with the Bearing Witness practice of the Zen Peacemakers, an idea of what it is all about, how the retreat came up and how it proceeds, and to what kind of essence this practice points. These contributions are gathered in Part I: Basics, Frameworks, a kind of fundament to the book.
Part II: Testimonies, Reflections comprises the majority of testimonies, and we decided to string them in an organizing principle random to the contents or “quality” of the more than 60 texts: They are arranged in the alphabetical order by the first names of the writers (from A like Ajeya to V like Viktoria).
If Part I is the foundation of the book’s building, Part III: Scopes, Futures is a kind of look-out onto the potential of this peacemaking practice beyond the barbed wire fences of Auschwitz-Birkenau: We dip into today’s challenges from Climate Change to the Mideast Conflict and more recent locations of genocides like Rwanda or Srebrenica, throw a glance at the daring to marry at Auschwitz (what two Peacemakers did in 2013), opening out into the spacious question, posed by Eve Marko in the final article of this book, of how to make our conversations bigger: “What else is there? What else must we listen to?”
It is the invitation to, standing on the grounds of Auschwitz, listen to the future and actively bear witness to its emergence.
The views, experiences, perceptions and interpretation of historical events offered in this collection, are those of the individual contributor, and not that of the publishers or Zen Peacemakers.
As many contributors are not native speakers/writers of English, there are a lot of idiomatic expressions to be found in the articles. We decided to leave the testimonies as original as possible and perceive variations in expression as part of the artwork, so we didn’t correct all idioms to mainstream English.
Lesehinweise
Was dieses Buch (nicht) ist
Dieses Buch ist eine Sammlung persönlicher Zeugnisse von Menschen, die – einmal oder wiederholt – am BearingWitness-Retreat der ZenPeacemaker in Auschwitz-Birkenau teilgenommen haben.
Es ist weder der Versuch, Historisches zu definieren oder zu erklären oder gar zu relativieren, es ist keine wissenschaftliche Untersuchung darüber, wie Auschwitz geschehen konnte, noch bietet es ein systematisches Konzept für Friedensarbeit.
Dennoch – vielleicht erfahren Lesende durch diese manchmal scharfkantigen, oft tastenden und nachdenklichen, vor allem aber von Herzen kommenden und wahrhaftigen biografischen Bruchstücke etwas darüber, wie Frieden entstehen kann.
Vielfalt und Einheit
In diesem Buch sind Beiträge von Menschen aus 17 Nationen versammelt, was die Reichweite des Retreats andeutet. Etwa 40 Prozent der Beiträge kommen aus den USA, jeweils etwa zehn Texte aus Polen und aus Deutschland. Teilnehmende aus Palästina und Israel, Brasilien und Japan, von der Nation der Lakota und aus Kanada haben Berichte geschickt, und eine Reihe weiterer europäischer Länder – wie Irland, Schweden, Frankreich, die Schweiz und die Niederlande – sind durch Beiträge vertreten. Um dieser Vielfalt der Kulturen die Ehre zu erweisen, ist die Nationalität der Autorinnen und Autoren jeweils am Ende der Beiträge aufgeführt (bei zwei aufgeführten Ländern handelt es sich um Herkunftsnation und heutigen Lebensraum).
Darauf folgt – ebenfalls am Ende der Beiträge – in Klammern das Jahr bzw. die Jahre der Retreat-Teilnahme.
Es gibt Schreibende, die einer religiösen Tradition wie dem Buddhismus, dem Judentum, dem Christentum angehören, und es gibt viele weitere Schattierungen spiritueller Orientierung, darunter die Mythologie der Lakota, die Weisheit des Hinduismus oder Traditionen übergreifende Philosophien (wie z.B. Schulen, die Buddhismus und Sufitum verbinden). Auch agnostische Stimmen sind zu hören.
In meinen Ohren klingen diese Zeugnisse wie Strophen eines Liedes, einer Ballade, und dieses Lied hat einen Refrain, der von plötzlichen oder zeitlupenhaften Einsichten spricht, von fundamentalem Loslassen und sanfter