Bishop's Letter - May 2010
Bishop’s Letter
with Bishop Martin Wharton
As this edition of Link reaches you, I will be travelling with a group of Christians and Jews, to visit Auschwitz. For me, it will be for the very first time. I don't know what I will experience there, nor do I know how I will feel. But what I do know is that Auschwitz was liberated 65 years ago this year. And what I also know is that 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews perished under Nazism in the period from 1933-1945.
When the Second World War ended, so had a whole way of life for European Jews. Their numbers were decimated. Of the pre-war Jewish populations of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany and Austria, fewer than ten per cent survived. Over 1 million people, mainly, but not exclusively Jews, died in Auschwitz alone. The group with whom I am travelling from Newcastle will not be able to escape the impact of these terrible events which are so dreadful, so traumatic. So how is it going to be, for us? How will it be for me?
There's a story told about Mother Theresa of Calcutta. What did she say to God when she prayed, she was asked: "I don't say anything" she said. "I just listen". "And when you listen," she was asked again, "What does God say"? "He doesn't say anything" she replied, "He just listens".
When our group stands in Auschwitz, however different we may be as individuals, and however different we are, as Christians and Jews, my sense is that there will be a longing to recognise ourselves as brothers and sisters. And while the words of our prayers will be different, our tears and our silence will be the same.
Elie Wiesel, a Nobel prize winner and holocaust survivor described his experience of Auschwitz in a book called 'Night'. In a harrowing passage Wiesel tells how a young boy was punished by the guards for stealing food. He was hanged - and all the other prisoners were forced to watch.
"For more than half an hour the boy stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony before our eyes. We were all forced to pass in front of him, but not allowed to look down or avert our eyes, on pain of being hanged ourselves. Behind me a man muttered "Where is your God now"? And I heard a voice within me answer "Where is he? Here he is. He is here hanging on this gallows." For me - if not for Elie Wiesel - this is the meaning of the cross. That God is one with us in our suffering and not just 2000 years ago, but through all time.
Another well known holocaust survivor Rabbi Hugo Gryn put it this way: "I believe that God was there Himself, violated and blasphemed". He told how on the Day of Atonement he fasted and hid among the stacks of insulation boards. He tried to remember the prayers that he had learned as a child at Synagogue and asked God for forgiveness.
Eventually, he says: "I dissolved in crying…. I must have sobbed for hours…. Then I seemed to be granted a curious inner peace…. I believe God was also crying." Hugo Gryn found God in the camps, and God was crying with him.
One of the things I will be trying to do as I visit this place of terrible destruction is to listen to God and to the silence of God, as well as to listen as carefully and attentively as I can to the voices of my sisters and brothers.