Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat Day One

Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat 11

Auschwitz Notes

Monday, November 5, 2007

Forty of us, from 11 different countries began the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat this morning, leaving Krakow early
by bus and arriving mid-morning at the Auschwitz
I museum.  We are a diverse group along
many dimensions, including age, our youngest participant 17 and the oldest
among us, 82.   Our retreat begins with
watching to documentary films at the Auschwitz I museum theatre, one
documenting the liberation of Auschwitz by the
Russian troops and the other the liberation of Bergen Belsen by British soldiers.   This is my sixth time on the retreat and if
anything these horrific films are harder to watch each year.  After the films, we step out of the darkened
theatre into the Auschwitz I camp and walk
through the famous camp gate, its archway emblazoned with the slogan, Arbeit
Macht Frei, “work makes you free.” 

This Peacemaker Bearing Witness retreat is a “plunge”
practice, designed to plunge us into not
knowing, the first of the three Peacemaker Community tenets.   The other two are bearing witness and loving
action.  Coming out of the theatre I
found myself in fractured state that I had no words to attach to, unable to do
anything but bear witness in deep silence.  
We spent the next several hours touring Auschwitz
I, the former Polish military barracks the Nazi’s turned into a concentration
camp and punishment barracks, where they first imprisoned members of the Polish
intelligencia and resistance, and later Russian prisoners of war.  Eventually, they began bringing the Jews and
Gypsies there as well, and when the camp was overflowing, the Nazis began the
immense project of building Auschwitz II, known as Birkenau, with prisoner
labor.  Birkenau is 25 times larger than Auschwitz I, stretching over 600+ acres.  It was planned to be twice a big, but
expansion was eventually cut short when the Germans started losing the
war. 

Auschwitz I was crowded as usual, with bus load after bus
load of visitors, many of them school children begin guided through the camps
many exhibits, often jostling other groups for space as they pass through the
narrow passageways in the barracks.  Most
striking were the Israeli school children, many wrapped in Israeli flags.  It’s better to visit Auschwitz I in the early
morning or late afternoon, so one can actually connect with this place and the
presence of its past. 

We finished our day with a large gathering of the entire
group, followed by the first meeting of our small council groups, our first
chance to share deeply with the 8 or 9 people we will meet with in this way
every morning.   Having slept badly for
two nights now, I find myself somewhat on automatic pilot as I write this.  In the morning we head for Birkenau, which is
for me where the retreat really begins, sitting in meditation at the “selection
site,” outside on the railway tracks, where Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors
would people, mostly Jews, either to immediate extermination in the gas
chambers or to death by starvation, cold and overwork in the labor camps.  We will sit there in silence and then read
the names of those who perished there, honoring their memory and bearing
witness to this human tragedy, so representative of the genocidal aspect of our
human culture that continues today.  In
between sittings and readings, we will wander about the camp along or in small
groups, making our own way into the depths of this place, perhaps discovering
yet another layer of the unhealed human shadow, personal and collective.