How can life go on? Reflections for HMD 2017

Personal reflections following a first visit to Auschwitz in January 2017

Two weeks ago I flew out of Cracow having been in Poland visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time. It was my first visit to Auschwitz and I was there as part of a group of Anglican clergy led by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

That question: ‘how can life go on?’ is addressed to all humanity. The implications of the question are huge. How can life go on in the face of crimes against humanity, genocide and pernicious, virulent anti-Semitism? How can life go on after the Nazi’s brutal, systematic attempt at exterminating a whole people?

But I want briefly to give a very personal, rather unformed response in the wake of my visit to Auschwitz.

I have woken today with a heavy heart and, as I knelt to say my prayers this morning, tears that filled my eyes, just as when I was there, remembering that this day marks the ‘liberation’ of Auschwitz.

Those tears were prompted as I walked around Auschwitz 1 and the site of beatings, hangings, shootings, starvation, torture, gassing and sadistic brutality.

Those tears were prompted as I stood by the railway line at Auschwitz 2, Birkenau, where families - men, women and children - were separated and sent to die by gas or by hard labour, starvation or random acts of malice.

The railway at Birkenau and 'Death Gate'

I stood there considering what would happen if I and my family had been taken there: would I be judged fit to work? What of my fit, sporty 17 year son? Would he be assigned to the Sonderkommando to the work of removing bodies from the gas chamber and putting them in the crematorium, after extracting gold teeth and cutting off women’s hair? What of my skinny 14 year old son, the right age to be spared the gas but would he be judged strong enough? What of my 12 year old son, could he be passed off as 14 and thus not go straight to the gas chamber? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What of my 8 year old daughter? What of my wife? The chances they would live beyond their first day at Birkenau would be limited, and I would never see them again and not be able to say goodbye. How can life go on?

The entrance to Auschwitz 1 - 'Work Makes You Free'

Images and thoughts assaulted me throughout my visit. I know others in my group were struck by the same things as me: walking under the Arbeit Macht Frei gates; through the death gate at Birkenau; the close proximity of the house of Rudolf Höss, the Camp Kommandant, where he lived a normal family life next to his murderous day job and where he was hanged after the war because of his crimes. (The 2024 film 'The Zone of Interest' documents this).

And there were other images that will stay with me. Being January there was snow on the ground and the landscape looked beautiful and innocent as snow does. But the dissonance between the beauty of the snow and the sunsets over Birkenau with what happened there was acute.

I was astonished not to see any walls, but just thin strands of barbed wire meaning that the prisoners could see out and the locals see in. I was revolted, almost physically, to learn more about the programmatic degradation of human beings so that they felt disgusting to one another and to themselves. I simply stood in silence by the pits into which the ashes of the dead were dumped, and where they still remain. How can life go on?

But life did go on for some. And, thanks be to God, the Jewish people were not eradicated, but are here and contribute to the diversity of society and our world.

The liberation of Auschwitz came 72 years ago tomorrow [80 years ago now].

What sort of liberation was it? Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s accounts as survivors of Auschwitz remind us that the liberation for them was not a joyous time for a party like VE Day 1945 here. Rather, it initially meant being force marched in appalling weather to other camps.

But following the end of the war and the uncovering of all that the Holocaust was, the question ‘how can life go on?’ is a haunting one. Perhaps after my visit my first response is that it does: life does go on.

One of the great contributions of the Jewish tradition to humanity is the priority of life. One of the great sayings of wisdom in the Jewish tradition, if not a direct quote from the Scriptures, is the toast ‘l’chaim’, which means, so I am reliably informed, ‘to life’ or ‘for life’.

Life goes on but never to be the same.

With the Archbishop and fellow clergy we reflected on deep and painful themes such as the Church’s relationship with God’s ancient people the Jews; deeply aware given where we were, of the inglorious part played by the Christian churches in fostering antisemitism in Europe over centuries and the almost total silence of the Church in the 1930s during Hitler’s rise to power.

How does life go on? It goes on in never letting the memory of Auschwitz fade or be denied. Life goes on in all the times we speak out about genocide, in all places where it happens. Life goes on in an uncertain world if we can name and expose anything which snuffs out life, or fosters hatred and death, for example, where people are identified in groups as somehow less than the ideal or norm, whether based on their faith, ethnicity, sexuality, gender or physical abilities.

Returning from Auschwitz my life does go on, but never to be the same again.

 © Andrew Bishop 2017/2025

What can be said? Reflections on Auschwitz

These reflections come following a visit to Auschwitz with the then Archbishop of Canterbury and a group of fellow Anglican clergy in January 2017. I later joined 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 the Archbishop said at the time, “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, 2016/2025

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[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.

John the Baptist: righteousness is not hereditary

First preached as a sermon at Guildford Cathedral, second Sunday of Advent 2016

Isaiah 11.1-10; Romans 15.4-13; Matthew 3.1-12

+In nomine Patris…

Over the last few years the interest in family trees has grown and grown. Family trees tell us something about who we are by naming the connections and relationships that have brought us to being: they tell us about the roots and branches of families, groups of people and ultimately nations.

They can be dangerous though. They can lead us to over identify with close biological connections - tight or exclusive and the bonds of family, kinship and nation can lead to an unhealthy tribalism or veneration of social groupings. This fragments the oneness of being human in a common ancestor made in the image of the One God.

It is precisely that issue that John the Baptist identifies in the Pharisees and Sadducees who came to hear him. ‘Do not presume to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor”; for I tell you, God is able from these stones [the stones of the wilderness] to raise up children to Abraham’ (Matthew 3.9). In other words, don’t rely on your supposed ancestral connections, on your family tree, to think you’re right with God. Righteousness is not hereditary, it is something each one of has to work at here and now.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, as was well publicised at the time, discovered that the man he thought to be his father was not. His response was to situate his identity not in a family tree, but in Christ.

The axe ‘lying at the root of the trees’ (v. 10) will bring down the idea that righteousness is hereditary, that biology always gives the most sustaining relationships.

It is ironic perhaps that John the Baptist shared a family tree with Jesus. John was Jesus’ cousin, although like in many Asian families the word ‘cousin’ could be a loose description. It is clear though that Mary, the God-bearer from whom Jesus received his humanity, was related to John’s mother Elizabeth. So Jesus’ and John’s DNA must have been pretty similar.

But similar DNA does not cut the mustard. What connects John - and us - to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is in the fruits of repentance and baptism, for the forgiveness of sins, which is a demanding, radical association of ourselves with Christ above all things, even bonds of kinship and tribe. It makes us ask: what do true, sustaining relationships look like? Where do I find them in my life?

The axe, then, is not destructive. John proclaims a message of both threat and promise. Threat: an axe lying at the root of the trees. Promise: a shoot shall spring forth from the tree stump of the family tree of the man called Jesse. Both in his own day and here and now John brings threat to many and promise to all.

We just have to glance around us at this time of year, late autumn giving way to early winter, to see threat and promise in the trees. The trees have all but shed their leaves. They look at their most dead. And yet deep inside the tree sap is brewing ready to rise and generate new leaves and new growth.

So it is that our final arboricultural image is in the promise that springs from the stump of a tree, the stock of Jesse.

Isaiah names this promise; St Paul, in our second reading, in the letter to the Romans also references it. This is an inclusive promise that the heirs of the patriarchs and prophets are not solely the people of Israel but those who have been adopted into the people of God in Christ. They are known as the Gentiles, that is you and me. We have no ancestral entitlement yet, Paul says, there will come from the root of Jesse ‘the one who rises to rule the Gentiles, [the nations, the peoples, the tribes]; and in him shall they/we hope’ (Romans 15.12). The God of Israel is the God of all Nations, ‘from whom’ as Paul writes elsewhere, ‘every family in heaven and on earth is named’.

In the Lady Chapel of this Cathedral there is an icon, of the Orthodox tradition, which is of the Jesse tree. At the bottom Jesse lies prone, asleep or possibly dead, yet growing out of him is the trunk of a tree. In the branches are our ancestors in the faith, patriarchs, matriarchs and prophets. And at the heart of the Jesse Tree is the Mother of God with her Son, our Saviour, enthroned on her lap. As the Elizabethan poet, Francis Kindlemarsh, put it, ‘an earthly tree a heavenly fruit it bore’: that heavenly fruit, Jesus Christ, the earthly, Mary.

The invitation of that icon is to be grafted into the living vine, to the Tree of Life in Jesus Christ.

John the Baptist prepares the way for the coming Lord, and demands of us lives that reflect the purity and holiness of the One Who Is to come. Something that we achieve, not by our ancestry, not by our own strenuous efforts but by confessing our sins, resting in Christ and receiving his life in baptism and eucharist.

Sharing in that life may we pray that the God of hope will fill us and all the world with all joy and peace in believing, so that all may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.