Journey 2017 engl.

Journey to Auschwitz 2017 Documentation

Auschwitz-Experience – Fragments

Never ever I would have traveled to Auschwitz on my own. This was one of the many insights at the end of this journey, after which I was allowed to feel, how supporting, caring and moving the group has been. Sharings in the morning and the evening with the big group as well as the short connecting meetings in my group of four inside the camp often brought me out of the solitude and dullness of the Holocaust.
At crematorium III, inside the extermination camp I experienced an intense and surprising moment. During the group meditation at that place, I stood up and went closer to the ruin. I kept moving and began to speak the "Lord’s Prayer" (quietly to myself). Again and again. Imagined what had happened here. Tried to open myself to the incomprehensible suffering. And the prayer helped me to open myself to the incomprehensible divine, in the face of this place. And it happened that something was connecting, went into connection in me. Trust came up within me, and grief and emotions moved through my body. Repeatedly there were waves of emotions or energy as soon as I connected to the words of the prayer. I never would have thought that this is possible. But right here, in the confrontation with the cruelties of dehumanization, I also came across the incomprehensible divine. Puhhh, that was very special. What a blessing, what a gift.

Inside the Shoa-House of the main camp („Stammlager“) I had another important experience. In one of the rooms the Jewish way of living before the war was projected cinematically on the walls. I saw laughing faces, I saw joy and dance, people in everyday life, children at the sea and much more. And a feeling came up inside me. Yes, I am like them! In that moment my unconscious separation and distance from the Jews became clearly tangible for me. At another place (in the Czech House) I read of the fates of several Jewish people with an artistic or theatrical background. All of them had been murdered during the Holocaust, either on death marches or in a gas chamber. This moved me deeply. I had to think of my girlfriend, who just completed an actor-training and of my own creative moments in life. I felt this connecting force of creativity and invention. Something that unites us all, no matter how seemingly culturally different someone is. This had been destroyed in this place as well.

(German version written in rhymes)

Surely there is more to write
                                                       How can I stay here with words?

                                                     While the incomprehensible is knocking
   I get intellectual very quickly

           But don´t judge me all too much
      All this is so difficult anyway

In prayer there was comfort
               Tickets to heaven had been drawn

                           May the souls break their silence
           And no one avenge on another

                           As human beings we´re living together
What´s that condemnation for?

May we stand side by side in prayer
And turn with the earth in connectedness

Letting the horror of Auschwitz move within us
In this the Lord sees all of our blessing

Big thanks to Monika and the three Stefans for their initiative, the structure for the group and their courage.

I am very grateful for this journey and experience.

There was a deep, common witnessing of this place of inconceivable extermination of human beings and the sharing of our own processes. So I feel my longing for a deeper, personal, intimate space that I can share. I feel my gratitude and longing to keep a witnessing position like we had experienced and shaped it together: to be there in a conscious and feeling way with whatever is. Inside me there is a new calm, I feel more centered and softer at the same time. I feel sorrow and love, I wish to embrace life deeper and more honestly and there is a deep wish that our endeavors in common witnessing and feeling may penetrate place and time.
Flashlights:
Facing the mountains of human hair, of the shoes and dishes ... tears are flowing – as if being overwhelmed the helpless-childlike desire emerges in me, to give wholeness and belonging back to the hair, to the things...
I look for the photo gallery afterwards, for the faces of the people. I want to see them, want to remember them now and want to be with them.

Gas chamber: deep horror, getting stiff, I try to pray, but no prayer fits. I find no access, no connection to the word, try to stay there. Outside the chamber, it feels good to stand hand in hand, in a semicircle, more intimacy is not possible.

Birkenau, I´m going slowly, always looking for the others. Where are they? Where was the
meeting point again? Disorientation, restlessness and anxiety are inside me.
The way through the former camp, infinitely long, feeling separated, lonely, suddenly the impulse / thought came up: Everything should be gone - nothing should be visible, not a single stone...
I am pushing it away, only later I am becoming aware of this thought again.

At the lake of ashes: during the meditation I suddenly feel comfort, being comforted.
How could this come to happen? I am confused and ashamed and I allow it to be.

During the meditations:    Light. Soft, mild, sunny light,
           I haven’t experienced this before...

The exhibition of Marian Kolodziej: like going into the barrack, eyes and human bodies everywhere, traces of lines, light and blackness.
Icon-like: the sacrificed human, humanity
Suffered torments break out of the drawings; I am standing as if standing inside the echo of a thunder, I feel my heart beat for a long time.

With heartfelt thanks and connection to all of you!

Day 1: Holocaust Memorial / Topography of Terror

From the first day I remember most strongly that I felt the most resonance while I had been on the edge of the field of stelae of the Holocaust memorial. Going from the edge into the field the tightness of certain parts of my body became stronger and stronger noticeable. But after a certain distance I began to think and to be less present until, after a further step, I did not feel anything anymore. When I kept standing at the point before the "last step", the field of stelae had the most effect on me and I had the visual perception as if the stelae were trucks, closely running one after the other, transporting something, and I thought of the Jews.

Day 2: House of the Wannsee-Conference / Track 17
On the second day, visiting the House of the Wannsee-Conference, I felt a certain fascination while looking at the images of senior members of the NSDAP. Something inside me admired that they had everything in their grip and that they controlled the happenings in the country. This was already a first reference to the process that I had been running through during the next days in Auschwitz, and that began with the realization that there was something very hard and unyielding in me. Something that is convinced that certain living motions need to be kept under control.

3rd day: train journey to Oswiecim / Auschwitz I - Main camp
On the first visit to the main camp, the exhibition of a small metal can, which must have belonged to one of the people murdered here, shattered me the most. In the previous group-sharings we already had spoken about the fact that in the attempted extermination of the Jews also many Germans had been killed. People who had clearly felt as Germans. This small metal can really made me aware of this, because it had a German written label and must have been bought in a German shop. I had the feeling that this can could have also belonged to my own grandparents.

4th day: Auschwitz II - Birkenau / Auschwitz I - Main camp
The first day in Auschwitz - Birkenau was really scary to me. Very soon after the entry I was able to perceive that my whole body was numb. Similar to the feeling that I know from a dentist’s anaesthesia. Over the course of time, this effect intensified so much that I felt as if being in a dream the whole day long, or like being a ghost, caught in an intermediate dimension. Everything was somehow foggy. In the evening I was afraid that I would return to this state on the next day and wouldn´t be able to get out of it again.

5th day: Auschwitz II - Birkenau
Fortunately, the next day I was much more connected to my body again. Still I didn’t feel very much, at least not on the emotional levels. From time to time something like sadness came up, very shallow and immediately ended when I tried to intensify the emotion somehow. Slowly I understood that I needed to touch that feeling only quite gently, actually not at all, to stabilize it a little bit. Finally, the strongest perception I had after the last meditation, on the way from crematorium V to the exit. Out of a rather easy and somewhat more cheerful conversation suddenly a new clarity about what has happened here, came up in me and was reflected in a very gloomy feeling of horror within me.

Day 6: Exhibition / Auschwitz II - Birkenau
The last day in Birkenau has brought me back to life. I walked on a path that ran between the barrack fields, and heard a bird which sang its song very loud and completely chaotic. No passage of its singing repeated, everything was completely new. This kept me in the presence of life, while I was attuned to the atmosphere of Birkenau. Now I am ready to respect and to listen to those impulses of life inside of me which I previously considered not worth living or too weak or too strong. And now I am able to understand the fear of not being able to make it. For me this is the gift from Oswiecim.

Blind Drawing First Day

I´m starting to write out of kinda complete resignation.

This is my third day back, I have no job right now to keep me busy and make me land here at home, in Berlin.
Berlin also is the place where we started as a group visiting monuments, Haus der Wannseekonferenz, Topographie des Terrors, the tracks (Gleis 13) where the deportations to Auschwitz, Theresienstadt etc. happened. As expected, this journey to Auschwitz has been a troubling one.
I discovered a deep hidden terror, anxiety , fear of death and disgust as well as moments of deep peace, laughter, gratefulness, warm hugs and kind words from the lovely people of our group.
Our group was so harmonious and committed from the start, I felt safe enough to feel whatever there was to feel. Anyways, I have underestimated the forces that are at work there.

I mourned the victims, I cried for everything that wasn´t supposed to be for them, for all that was lost, I felt anxiety and panic at the ramp and on the way to the gaschambers, I felt disgust at the sight of them, I felt disgust just everywhere, I experienced physical pain, I was in and out of shock , I had flashbacks of screaming and panic and bad smell.
I also found out, that I have to suffer as hard and as strong as I can in order to feel less guilty.
I have never asked god the question where he was at that time because I feel we - as humans - were not there, as we aren´t on so many other occasions that happen right now in the world.
In this moment, I feel helpless, small and powerless. As I very well know, this has to do with me and my upbringing as well. But not only.

Auschwitz leaves me with a deep resignation and the question, if there is a god. I have never questioned his existance, I do now. I would like to stress again that this has nothing to do with me being annoyed at god for not doing better. I seem to have lost the connection. Or maybe we invented god as an entitiy to rely on when the shit hits the fan. The last anchor.
It´s kind of a relief for me that I find this not to be true. Sobering, somehow.
Maybe now, I can start to have a more adult relationship with god ...

Blind Drawing Crematorium 3

Days of preparation Berlin

The difficulty of exhibitions. Most of them are very cognitive, but the Point of Information of the memorial in Berlin is a positive exception. It really touches, even on the fourth time. Almost all of the exhibitions want to give a total perspective about the time of National Socialism and Holocaust, not only about the specific topics related to their location – a problem that especially occurs at Topography of Terror.
One is being sucked into the flood of information and takes it gladly as a distraction from feeling. In addition: Everyone needs to find his way through. The paths to perception are different. Selection and reduction are important: Who wants to get it all, doesn´t get anything at all.
More clearly for me this time: The deep belief of the SS-men in their cause; to act for a higher, better ideal of mankind. The manifold collective wounds in Germany which the Nazis had perfidiously and perfectly utilized for their irresistible model of greatness and strength, and the rebirth of Germany as the core of a better world.
Memorial Track 17 inside the Grunewald, harmlessly hidden at the rim of the S-Bahn station, which is daily used by hundreds of human beings. 75 years ago every few weeks trains for deportation. Entered here, exited in Auschwitz, tracks directly into death. One cannot take in this place, if you haven´t been in Auschwitz – I thought. But the whole group seems to me as if being stunned, almost as out of the blue. Unbelievable silence, depression and dried tears are putting themselves on us.
Again and again the scenes with children are the ones that get me, photographs, texts, drawings. The letter of a twelve year old girl who knows that she will die, full of love to her father. Inside the train on the outward journey, while one of us is being shaken from the feeling of being a mother with her child on her lap on the wagen towards the camp, clutching to any loose hope, but deeply inside knowing that she is driving into death. The pencil drawings of the children in the Shoa-House inside the main camp: How much delicacy, blossom, innocence, openness for life – eradicated without a trace. Goebbels 1942: "There isn´t left much of the Jews themselves.”

Days in Auschwitz
This time, the physical rigidity captures me each time before we go to the camp. It takes a lot of willpower to step inside. And again and again in between an inner and silent rigidity.
First day in Birkenau, I am standing with my small group on the tracks in front of the entrance, vulnerable, open, frightened, but ready. Skeptically, I am eyeing a gathering group of people with uniforms, the men with shirts and cap, and the women with green combat uniforms. In the concentration camp in Ravensbrück near Berlin, uniforms are forbidden. But these are Israeli forces, they are allowed to do this. Rows of two, the flag-carrier in front. And indeed they are marching with combat boots in lockstep through the camp. I can´t believe it. How can you enter this place of million fold killing in this way? Can one remember the dead with goose-step? Testify what happened here? Or is it just self-assurance? Yes, Israelis have a different relationship to the military, for good reasons; maybe Israel would not exist anymore without its defensive force. And one reason lies exactly in the Holocaust. And still: It doesn´t belong here!

I walk along the intersection in Birkenau where women and children had been driven to the rear crematories, directly from the ramp to the gas chamber. I need a hand, go with M., like the two boys on the photo, who were only ashes a few hours later. A stifled scream is inside me, the urge to really scream with all one´s might. Alone I do not dare, here in Auschwitz one does not shout, one behaves and rips itself together. Today in 2017 just like back then.
During our small group’s exchange I meet our Jewish fellow traveler again. We know each other, we like each other, we already have been here together. I deeply appreciate her courage and openness, with which she shows her anger and grief. I am always very touched by it, even if it is sometimes against me because I am representing perpetrators energy. And now I suddenly notice the separation. That, despite of everything, there is something divisive, that she remains alien to me, that I ward off something inside her.
And then I feel that it has little to do with us as persons, but that we are bound in a field of we "Germans", you "Jews" - still effective, what power that has! All at once, for the first time ever, I feel the deep tear that the Holocaust has left in humanity. Nameless, unspeakable, eternal, it cuts through me and us.

Saturday morning on the way to the meeting in Berlin:

Fear, dizziness, my body trembles, I want to turn back...
I meet Russell, where I spend the night, and later Esther, both with Jewish roots and not with us this time. I have become aware that I am the only representative of the descendants of Jewish victims with 16 German people. It makes me insecure because we all travel as individuals and as representatives for our ancestors.
I am more visible with my identity and with my anxiety about it, that I had suppressed for years mainly unconsciously. Now I cannot hide it anymore.
At the beginning in Berlin, there was mainly a strong anger inside me, which could melt only a few times for grief and pain to arise. My anger was welcome in the group so it was easy for me to be angry until I realized that I was avoiding something in myself, and that I was also separating myself from the group, the human beings. To feel anger was easier than to feel nothing or a diffuse fear - to know it meant not wanting to use this way out anymore.

Arrived in Auschwitz, I shortly had the feeling that I had not been away at all. One more time in the main camp with the oppressive energy, the photos, the hair, the lists and all the testimonies of the murders, I have experienced as if I were in two realities - in the present inwardly and suitably also outwardly cold, stumbling, and with fear and horror in the footsteps of those people, in that time. And yet I wanted to see everything again. Both here and in Birkenau there was a YES to "being there again" as a promise, which I had given to come back again, to testify, to feel as far as I can and to meditate and to pray, especially for the Jewish people, as to strengthen the connection to my roots. There is also a shame that their death touches me more than the death of the other prisoners.

The exchange in the group, the meditations, the Toning and the empathy for the shakiness of the others - all this helped me a lot to go there again every day. And in between there were also phases in which I had doubted God and in which I could no longer feel a connection. And then there were phases in which it was clear to me that I had come here to find out how I can contribute to more peace and love, also in me.
I have a big thanks to our container, which was strong and intense and supported me / us to be able to testify and feel and to endure the feelings. During our last meditation at the crematory in Birkenau, I had an experience of bright energy and beauty, which has shaken me so much and then also cut me off from this experience. – I could not give space to my knowledge of the murder of so many thousand people in this place and to the beauty at the same time, which made me sad.

I thank you all for our journey to Auschwitz. I know I'll return and suddenly there was the thought that the next time it could be with Jewish people. It makes me even more fear and at the same time it feels right.

Auschwitz - Birkenau in April 2017

- one of my experiences: On the ramp in the direction of Crematorium 3 I stop in front of one of the watchtowers and listen to the inside. „It feels good, powerful, to be standing armed up there on this watchtower. In front of me the barracks lie next to each other. It is cold and wet, the paths are muddy. Only the lamps along the barbed wire fence illuminate this inhospitable scene. It is quiet inside the camp. I have my district under control! Discipline, subordination, humiliation, obedience, violence are a natural handling of these people, who must be destroyed. For me it is a duty I do not question. I feel the rigidity in me like a block.“ Little by little I am rising up again into the present; I perceive the rain and go on slowly, carrying these relentless feelings inside me. During the embrace with two women from my small group, the stiffness dissolves into intensive crying. And I realize that there is control, discipline, severity, obedience inside me, as well, as internalized values. It shakes me to perceive to what extent I did experience it and also passed it on. Being lovingly held, I can stay with all these feelings, allow the pain. I get an inner picture: like an outer shell is getting cracks and crumbles.

Due to our journey

and the intensive preparatory period, the German past has came closer to me.
Similar to constellation work, where one´s own line of ancestry comes closer, I feel more „in my place as a German“. Now it´s possible to look at and feel at that time of Holocaust and Nazi time in a more precise way. Germans did this millionfold extermination of lives, above all, to Jewish fellow citizens of many nations, including our own.

Our group was a stable base on which a lot could be felt. Consternation, shock, deep grief and sadness, fear, anger, hatred, … were expressed; always in relation to someone from the group or at the evening sharing. And on one level, a distinction between the individual and the collective was no longer appropriate. Usually held fairly in each individual and group container.
This being present for each other, in a benevolent, self-sustaining, supportive, non-judgmental
way was beneficial to me.

Personally, in this encounter with Auschwitz, the fate of the murdered children always shook me violently. A single set of children's shoes in front of the huge shoe-mountain of the victims; a suitcase with the inscription "Waisenkind"; in the background the information of an American tour guide that 20% of the murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz were children; 200,000 young lives extinguished.
The tears often flow into awe of the fate of individuals; the immense number of the dead, the whole extent of this madness brings me rather into silence, solidification, disbelief.
In addition to a very great gratitude to the group, who felt like one body, I was also deeply moved by a question that arose inside me. After an unspectacular meditation with many "disturbing" thoughts, I immerged into an unusual inner silence and very own inwardness. In this, a question came to me, almost physically, felt in every cell: "Are you there?" It was nice that I could feel a clear and simple "yes!" at that moment. A calm and depth has accompanied me for many days. A gift from this place; where deepest darkness and also light are strongly perceptible.

Since my return from Ausschwitz 10 days ago,

it has become an internal space within myself. Though calm now, this inner place feels touchable and alive. It is filled with the experiences, feelings, thoughts, and body sensations that took place within me while I was there.
Grappling with the words to describe this, I notice the limitation and impreciseness of my words and language.
It was good to have been there with you, rather than alone. To be there together made it easier for me to open up more fully and to repeatedly and consciously stay with the pain of this incomprehensible atrocity. To feel it over and over again, and to accept my small part of it - to feel, to bear witness. Our mutual support sustained me.
On the one extreme lay a pole of dread, horror and desperation. On the other, an almost peaceful pole of light and profound silence. In between these, I experienced a sea of grief and sadness. And sadness is the feeling, the energy, with which I most frequently connect, including in Ausschwitz.
The sheer magnitude of this killing machine and the abys into which human society can sink remained incomprehensible to me, despite repeatedly trying to understand.
I feel changed by this visit. But to define in which manner is quite difficult to say. I believe I have gained more humility.
Repeatedly the word humanity comes to mind. To this I wish to devote myself more fully, to bear witness to our capacity for collective human failure, but also to our human longing for peace and connectedness.

Blind Drawing Krematorium 3

Now, when I look back to Auschwitz

after this journey, this look is something special… there is a deep closeness, emotions arise gently inside of me, and there is also love for this place and for the experiences.
The notion of „Auschwitz“ and the shocking events somehow have
found a place inside of me. A place inside of me that feels warm in spite of the horror and that shows itself in many different facets.

From now on, Auschwitz is not only a name for the events… Auschwitz is like a feeling inside of me.
A feeling that is allowed to be… Love that is allowed to be…Pain, grief and tears that are allowed to be… Touches, hugs with dear people that are allowed to be, that were and are so precious and that melted a lot inside of me.

I’m very thankful for having made this trip… thankful for the things I experienced with you, dear fellow-travelers.
I’m thankful for everything that could find its place and its expression among us, thankful for experiencing and sharing our individual processes, thankful for the „not wanting“ of everyone of us and thankful for every hug and touch.

I feel as if my „inner space“ had expanded… this space of experience is still working inside of me and it is neither pleasant nor unpleasant… but in any case it’s perceptible.
With every thought or felt memory something gets reactivated inside of me… the world has become a little bit more amiable…also my inner world…

and more silent… in a wonderful way.

Auschwitz is teaching me how to love

I felt fear as the journey to Auschwitz came closer. And I knew inside that it’s right to go. After a short time already the group felt very warm and bearing, and it was also important for me to feel the support from the outside, from Thomas, from friends.

In Birkenau I had a moving experience:
I walked in the direction of the ramp where the Jews used to step off the waggons. Suddenly I felt taken back in the past, and I felt as a Jew. I couldn’t bear the infinite sadness in myself, to see all the children, the women and the men who will be murdered, and to feel the endless suffering. I asked myself how I could set fire to the watchtowers of the SS, where I could get a gun to kill these people, and that it would be the best to exterminate all SS-officers directly in the gas chamber. I felt a lot of hatred inside of me and I just wanted the suffering and the murdering to stop.
I walked along the ramp and suddenly I felt as a former SS-officer. As if I would have changed sides inwardly. I walked very upright, I felt powerful, I knew the Jews have to be exterminated. I thought, „all beasts, no one must be left“. I felt extremely narrow, stiff, rigid and cold inside, without sensing anything nor being able to look right or left.

After that I was the Jew again and turned into the lane where all
selected children, women, men and elder people were led directly into the gas chamber. I became softer inside, I was infinitely sad and began to cry. Two members of my unit were standing around and I asked for a sharing. I could share the experience and I felt how I hardly bear my immense sadness, all the dead, the children and women, all the suffering… and I had to cry very hard all over again. I told them everything and also cried over this hatred in me.
We walked on and I still felt as a Jew and phrases came to my mind like „I love my people“, „We are worth living“, „ We are worth being loved and to love ourselves“.
When we arrived at the Crematorium 4 and 5, we decided as a group to meditate together standing in a circle. After a while I heard the sentences again, „I’m worth living and I’m worth to love and to live“. And the question emerged in me: „How do I love under these circumstances? How do I do that?“ It didn’t seem possible as a Jew to love a member of the SS or the other way round.
Eventually I had the insight that empathy and understanding could be a possible way, and that it is important to widen your heart so that everything can take its place in it - everything. It was clear to me that this means to love unconditionally. And it didn’t mean to accept the mass extermination and all the degrading acts which happened here.

It was clear to me that it is love which effects peace - in me, in others and among us. After that the connection to God was full of light, with silence and love in it. At the end of the meditation a sentence came to my mind: „Auschwitz is teaching me to love.“
After the meditation it was good for me to exchange experiences in my unit. Later on we went to the crematorium 2 and stood there in silence in front of the gas chamber. I had the feeling as if the souls were telling me „ Bring love into the world“.

Before I had talked to an Israeli woman and she had told me about the same: „The most important thing we can learn from the Holocaust is to love one another.“

In the evening, during the exchange in the whole group I noticed that I was ashamed of sharing my experiences. I was ashamed of the hatred which is also inside of me. It resulted from the immense pain which I couldn’t bear. Yes, it was difficult to accept myself. And I was afraid of being rejected.
I am deeply thankful for this and other experiences which in my opinion allowed collective and personal healing. I feel a lot of gratefulness for God’s company, the support of the souls, the insights, Thomas’ company, for the caring in our group, the team and the support of all the people in the background.

Masculinity
In the room of the Wannsee-conference,

where on January 20, 1942, state supporting men approved of the Final Solution for „the Jews“, I was confronted with a masculinity that I fought against during my whole life. There was rage and hatred for these uniform men inside of me, for their ruthless togetherness. I’m afraid, feel excluded, don’t belong to them.
In this place there has been so much competition about toughness, about consequent decisions and acts, an omnipresent atmosphere of (anticipatory) obedience to try to suit „the Führer and the people“. I believe they were enjoying being strong together - and with this they accepted to exclude and to privatize all their present uncomfortable feelings.
In my world being weak, undecided and alone made sense to me for a long time - simply the better alternative.
So how much has my biography been affected by the way how these men (and also men of my family) have lived their masculinity!?

From black - white to grey
Auschwitz, Jews - Germans.
Victims - offenders. Black - white.
I’ m so happy to have met so many people’s lives during our journey: photos, faces, families, cultures, life and (violent) death. These people have touched me, have affected me. And again and again also my mind wanted to understand what had happened there. So I could keep a distance to the inhumanity.
The culture of Jewish life in Europe has been destroyed in those days, so many people have died senselessly. This touched me, made me more and more silent and sad.
At the end of the journey I walked over the huge Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. And at the entrance I’ve seen the dimensions of the Jewish ghetto, represented on a relief. How much life, how much tradition. In Poland, the terror and the scare of the Nazi regime seem to be omnipresent.
You don’t only meet it at the museums of the cruel prisons in Auschwitz-Birkenau, fenced with barbed wire. I don’t want to narrow my view on it. And I don’t want to see only Jews and Germans: there have been so many more people who suffered because they shouldn’t be part of the „Volksgemeinschaft“ - however the reasons were. The „Not-Jews“, where are they?
Black and white thinking is omnipresent in the inhuman world. Friend - foe, everywhere. But the more precisely (and therefore more lovingly) you look, the more people are emerging in the mosaic of inhumanity, which then gradually changes to grey. People who became victims, people who became offenders, and many more people who participated, watched or looked away. Also members of my family, to whom I can’t talk anymore today.
I want to see the human beings behind all this, also behind their identification, which is not so easy. (In the official narrative of Auschwitz I often found people named as „Jews“, „Not-Jews“ and SS/Germans.)

Through all this grey an uncomfortable truth is coming nearer, summarised by an Auschwitz-historian (T. Snyder) as follows: „… that people not so different from us murdered other people not so different from us, from the neighbourhood“, not only in Auschwitz but from „Paris to Smolensk“.

God have mercy!
God forbid!
For the first time in my life I prayed in such a direct way. In the gas chamber and in front of the mountain of hair the horror was so overwhelming that I couldn’t do anything else but coming nearer to God.

Incomprehensible like God: How can people do this to other people? It can’t be. It mustn’t be. It was. It is.

The dimension of extermination and the beauty of life

Many times I have looked at maps which showed the countless camps (esp. in the east), in which people were starved out, shot, tortured, gassed, murdered.
But I have never really seized the vast dimension of extermination.
During this journey for the first time I could realize at least to some extent what „systematic pan-European mass murder“ really means.
A tremendous gap in the tissue of life. Cold, brutal and merciless. A huge gaping wound, with the German people on one edge and the Jewish people on the other.

As a German I can go near one edge of the wound. In Birkenau this is a challenge for me, every day anew. To feel this strong anxiety again and again. And grief, still without tears. Which is very perceptible but stays frozen and depresses me.
Each time it’s relieving to leave the camp. I can breathe again. In these moments I’m aware of my strong tension inside the camp.

The direct physical contact with my fellow-travelers helps me again and again. A hug, walking arm in arm, a hand holding mine. The cold, the anxiety, the physical shaking - finally I can feel myself also emotionally through the contact. My tears can flow.

Auschwitz is a place where the saying „Where there is much light, there is much shadow“ applies very well. During one of our meditations at the crematoriums I sat in pouring rain and in sunlight. During this meditation I had a picture of release - a moment of grace on the brink.
Since this meditation a trace emerged within me - now I can feel and recognize more deeply the beauty of life and the beauty of being human.

I’m deeply grateful for this journey, for the warm, supporting intimacy in our group, and for every support from afar.

Auschwitz 2017

The beginning of the end

Is anyone here?

_____________________________________

Emptiness,
closure, exclusion
no light, no love for strangers,
what stands in our way
will be exterminated
we hate!
We bring you to death
animals, like humans: Jews, gays, Christians, opponents
we lead them to the slaughter
where they belong
and we do anything for this!
You can cry, there is no one listening
The camp, the fences
you want anything else?
beatings, beatings, beatings…
The gas chamber and
once I heard a sigh
and a scream
the grave you are digging yourselves!
It set my teeth on edge

Everywhere I am
at the mercy
of the superiority,
of the endless cruelty,
no safety
for life and
limb

Before death
he is invading
my body
for experiments!
Everything is lost
everything external
and inside only
hunger

Wretched agony
and fear
of even more
pain
fear!

I’m no longer
faithful to myself,
I’ve lost
God.
You - my One
are drowning
in my misery

The misery
in my inside has
found an outside
in Auschwitz

The threat of my existence:
Either I lose God
or I find him.

God’s
place
keeps
waiting
forever
for my „yes“

My screaming
for God,
in the depth
of this gap
in the deepest abyss of myself,
in the deepest abyss of humanity,
uncovers a room
for God

As much as I allow of Auschwitz,
as much I also allow
for God.
I show him all the wounds
and I don’t understand
Oh,

Lord, I don’t leave you!

I want to stay - in this place.

I don’t want to leave it behind, this place.
This place is holding.

I want to leave something here, something I can give to this place:
my witnessing, my silent awareness, my not understanding,
my mute inner crying, my tears, my love.

Eventually: turnaround.

I notice that I can leave something here, not in the sense of giving
but a letting go which relieves me of something

I’m coming in a state of foggy heaviness.
I’m going and I’m feeling clear and light.

I’m coming with a silent remote crying inside of me.
I’m going almost brimming with joy.

I’m coming full of concern and fear.
I’m going blessed with stillness and the courage to face life.

I can leave something
in this place.
This place is healing.

So I’m going into life - from this place.

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