These reflections come following a visit to Auschwitz with the Archbishop of Canterbury and a group of fellow Anglican clergy earlier this month. On Thursday 26th January 2017 I will join with my Jewish colleague and others from around Surrey at the University of Surrey to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day. I have been asked to speak at the event having so recently visited Auschwitz. What follows is my beginning to work through what it means to speak about something unspeakable. As Archbishop Justin Welby has said elsewhere, “I’ve come away with too much to write, and no words to write it.”
But here are some initial thoughts of mine.
'There is a time to speak and a time to keep silent'
Ecclesiastes 3.7b
There is a profound silence at Auschwitz.[1] That silence emanates from the deathly hush of the gas
chamber after people have been killed - murdered - and before their mortal
remains are turned to dust and ashes in the ovens.
It is said that the birds do not sing at Auschwitz. In my
first visit there earlier this month I don't recall birdsong, but that may just
have been me being unable to hear sounds of beauty and unrestrained joy in a
place that represents the polar opposite of all that is good. What I do
remember, whilst walking around Birkenau, was hearing the barking of a dog
quite clearly. That bark pierced the freezing air as an inarticulate cry that
spoke more deeply than I knew at the time.
The people who were killed at Auschwitz had not always been
silent or silenced: they spoke, laughed, cried, had dreams, aspirations and
hopes. They prayed: praise, lament, supplication and thanksgiving. They spoke
eloquently and passionately; they gossiped and slandered. Some had not even
learned how to speak beyond the primeval cry for their mother's breast. In
short, they were human beings, ordinary and living their lives.
The humanity of those killed, in all its ordinariness and
prosaic detail, is the first thing that the Nazis sought to deny. Their
strategy was one of, first, identification (the Nuremberg laws and the wearing
of the yellow star), second, isolation (the ghetto) and, third, eradication
(Auschwitz). They predicated all this on the less than humanness of the Jewish
people, and because of that they had no right to speak, be heard, or to breathe.
Human rights only apply to human beings.
Witnesses to the killing testify that those people who were
killed at Auschwitz both sang psalms to God and screamed out in terror: they
were not silent lambs led to the slaughter.
'There is a time to speak and a time to keep silent'
Anything that one writes or says about Auschwitz has to be
properly reticent. It can never be casual or cheap. Auschwitz demands that we
pay attention to our silences and our speaking. It's not simply about the
choice of words but whether or not we deploy words at all.
Why so? In the face the industrialised and systematised
processing of death there is little that can be said that is not trite, hollow
or over earnest. Anything we might seek to say about Auschwitz has to pass a
high burden of authenticity.
In The Edge of Words Rowan Williams points out that choosing to keep silent can
operate in more than one way.[2] Silence can be a way of honouring those people and
situations about which we cannot properly speak. However the Nazi project was
dependent on German society keeping silence about the violence and death at its
heart: colleagues, neighbours and friends of Jewish people did not speak out.
For every Oskar Schindler and Maximilian Kolbe there are countless stories of
people betraying Jewish people and effectively condemning them to Auschwitz and
all that that held.
Silence can also manipulate and betray. Not to speak out
about Auschwitz, even 72 years since its 'liberation', is an abdication of
responsibility. Failure to speak about, and speak out about, Auschwitz will mean a failure to speak out about pernicious
anti-Semitism, crimes against humanity and genocide in our own times.
In the wake of Auschwitz we also need to guard against 'over
speaking' that is, naming things evil that may be distasteful, so that when
that which is truly evil is present it can be identified, isolated and
defeated.
Auschwitz puts me, as someone who always wants to speak, or
at least talk, in a difficult position. To speak means I might say too much or
not enough, to remain silent, whilst honouring the dead, also can collude with
the silence about their fate and what led and leads to it. All I can do is make
that judgement in the hope that I speak well: if nothing more, Auschwitz makes
me all the more aware of the power and 'edge' of words and silence. May
Auschwitz, the place and the idea, never be forgotten or the memory of those
who died there fall silent.
'There is a time to speak and a time to keep silent'
I want to conclude with the words of Elie Weisel an Auschwitz
survivor, the author of Night, with
words from his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986:
The
world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent
whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must
take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence
encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.
When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national
borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men and woman are
persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must
– at that moment – become the center [sic] of the universe.[3]
©
Andrew Bishop, 2016
[1] When I am referring to Auschwitz, I am
referring to both a place and an idea: the concentration camp and death camp -
Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz 2, at Birkenau - and also using 'Auschwitz' as
representing the whole Nazi eradication programme of God's ancient people, the
Jews, intentional, brutal and evil as it was, and the others - amongst them
Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviets, catholic priests and religious -
who were also murdered.
[2] Rowan Williams,
The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of
Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), Especially on silence as a moral
choice, 48-51.
[3] Elie Wiesel,
trans. Marion Wiesel. Night. (London:
Penguin Books. 2006), 118.
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