Reflections from Rabbi Sacks’ following his visit to Auschwitz in 1995

[Fenris]

Tomorrow, April 18, is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. It commemorates the six million Jewish lives taken away by the Nazis during the Holocaust. I am a big fan of the writings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory. I think he says some very profound things about the Holocaust here. Judge for yourself-

A million shoes saved, a million lives destroyed

Published 17 September 1995

Reflections from Rabbi Sacks’ following his first visit to Auschwitz in 1995

Until now, I’ve never been to Auschwitz. For me, it’s been the black hole of Jewish history, an echoing abyss which I never sought to enter. But, listening to the nightmare stories of the survivors, I realised that there was something they wanted from us, the generation born after the Holocaust.

They wanted us not to forget. But what is it to remember life in the midst of death? I don’t know, and that’s why I’ve come here, to see and listen and reflect. Old men and women, children in their hundreds of thousands, Jews from across Europe, Rabbis, musicians, professors, husbands, wives, ordinary people whose sole crime was that they had a Jewish grandparent. They came packed in cattle trucks. Many of them died on the journey. They brought their luggage with them because they’d been told they were just going to be resettled, and then they came to the gate with its words: “Arbeit macht frei” – “work makes you free”. By then, some must have realised that Auschwitz was built on lies and these were the gates of the kingdom of death.


Walking through Auschwitz, what strikes you today is how careful the Nazis were to waste nothing. They took everything, kept everything, and not only items of value. Here you see mountains of suitcases, piles of toothbrushes, and shoes, hundreds of thousands of shoes, worn, battered, but still collected. Nothing was too valueless to throw away, except life. A million shoes saved, a million lives destroyed.

For three thousand years, Jews lived by a set of values first proclaimed in the Hebrew Bible: the sanctity of life, the moral covenant between man and God, the idea that authority is conferred by right not might, the love we owe the stranger, the dignity of every human being as the image of God. It was those values that Hitler despised; he once called conscience a Jewish invention. But when they are lost, this is the world created in their place. Here might ruled over right, the stranger was hated, the covenant defaced, and the image of God burned and turned to ash. It was the nightmare kingdom where man sent God into exile and condemned his witnesses to the gas chambers.

The Nazis weren’t content to kill Jews; they wanted to murder Jewish faith itself. They cut the beards from  Rabbis’ faces, they shot Jews who prayed, and they deliberately chose the Jewish holy days for their worst acts of brutality. Here at Auschwitz, the worst selections for the crematoria took place on Yom Kippur. Dr. Joseph Mengele used to tell Jewish prisoners: “Here I rule in place of God. I decide who will live and who will die.” On Yom Kippur, we believe God writes us in the Book of Life. Auschwitz was the book written by man, and it was a book of death.

People sometimes ask me: Where was God at Auschwitz? I don’t know, but Jewishly it’s the wrong question. The real question is: Where was humanity at Auschwitz? God never said He’d stop us harming one another, but He did give us a moral code, commandments engraved in stone which taught us how to stop ourselves. Where was humanity when old men and women were being murdered, millions being gassed, children thrown on the flames still alive? The real question, so painful we can hardly ask it, is not where was God when we called to Him, but where were we when He called to us?

I don’t understand what it was to live here, I don’t understand what it was to die here, I don’t understand what it was to issue the orders, carry them out, decide who would live and who would die. But I think I understand one thing, that this is what the Bible warned against in its very first chapter when God said, “Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness.” When human life is no longer sacred, Auschwitz becomes possible. And standing here, I hear those other words from the book of Genesis, God’s words to Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.”

What prayer do you say here on this desecrated ground? Shalom Katz was one of those who stood here. He and fifty other prisoners were ordered to dig their own grave and then stand in front of it to be shot. Before the guns were raised, he asked the guards’ permission to say the Jewish prayer for the dead. It was granted. He sang it, and the guards were so moved by the beauty of his voice that they took him out of the line, kept him alive to sing for them, and he was still here when Auschwitz was liberated. Then he sang the prayer a second time for all those who had died. “Oh God full of compassion, grant rest to those who have gone from this world and shelter their souls under the wings of Your presence.”

I came to Auschwitz to honour the memory of those who died, among them members of my own family, great aunts and uncles from Poland and Lithuania. But now that I’ve come, I feel overwhelmed by a sense of evil so vast it leaves you numb. Here, where a million and a half died, where those who lived were robbed of all humanity, where you’re surrounded by factories whose product was death, you feel a chill like ice. I’ve come, and I don’t know that I’ll ever want to be here again. The sense of desolation is still too great. There’s nothing here but a massive echoing silence that swallows words and robs them of their meaning. And yet, I now know that we must never forget the Holocaust. Never again may we walk down the road that begins with hate and ends in attempted genocide.

Towards the end of his life, Moses summoned the Israelites and said, “I’ve set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore, choose life.” That choice still stands before us with its two monumental symbols: Auschwitz and Yom Kippur – the book of death or the Book of Life. And this too, I now know, that some extraordinary reserve of spirit has renewed itself. Jews didn’t despair; the survivors built new lives, new communities grew up elsewhere, and in the State of Israel, we’ve come together as a people again, building one of the world’s oldest and newest countries, and singing, “Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people lives!”

For me, faith after Auschwitz is the courage to live and bring new life into the world, never forgetting those who died but never yielding to despair. It means fighting for a world in which we recognise that those who aren’t in our image are still in God’s image. It means remembering for the sake of life and humanity and hope.

Wherever I travel throughout the Jewish world, in Israel as it strives to create peace, and throughout the Diaspora as Jews marry and build Jewish homes and light the candle of faith in a new generation, I witness something I can only call the Shechinah – the name we give to God as He enters the human heart and gives it a strength we didn’t know we had. And on the faces of Jewish children, I see a people who walk through the valley of the shadow of death coming to life again, cherishing life, sanctifying it, and knowing that in it is the breath of God

[Sojourner]

Indeed, profound and poignant reflections. And Rabbi Sacks is on point when he says the question is not, "where was God during the Holocaust," but where was humanity?" The German people put Hitler in power and empowered him to do what he did. The Pope himself set the example of turning a blind eye to Hitler's atrocities, as recently unsealed Vatican archives have proved. Many were complicit in the death and mayhem because of their silence and inaction, yet it did take the combined might of the Allied powers to derail Hitler's mad dream.

As horrific as the ordeal of the 6 million was, it's worth remembering that in its aftermath, the road was paved for the rebirth of the nation of Israel. After the dreadful darkness came the dawn of a new day for the Jews, who experienced what had been an elusive dream for 19 centuries: a return to the Holy Land. It was Hitler's intent to exterminate the Jews and sweep them into the dustbin of history, but it was instead, the Nazis who ended up there. Along with their ill-conceived and inglorious Third Reich. The Nazis are in a long list of those who sought to destroy the Jews throughout history. Yet they prevail to this day because of the promises, grace and mercy of our God.

[RabbiKnife]

And we must not forget the complacency and complicity of the evangelical and mainline Christian denominations here in the United States that not only turned a blind eye, but also turned a heavy hand against the Jewish people, politically, financially, and in an absence of mercy.

The German Bund in America, the U.S. Nazi party, the seminaries and universities, the KKK, the white supremacists in both north and south in the U.S., the rants from the so-called Christian pulpits about "Christ Killers"... The heavy political funding and financial support for the Third Reich in American Dollars and British pounds sterling...

The rejection of the St. Louis with its 900+ Jewish refugees in 1937... the US refusal to accept Jewish refugee children, the damnable policy of the US. State Dept and Franklin Roosevelt in relation to Jewish immigration and refugee action.

Let's face it... even the "creation" of the national State of Israel in 1947 was not designed to create a national Israel... to the contrary, it was designed, with the help of the British and the United States, to abandon the remnant in the Promised Land to immediate death and extermination in the Promised Land at the hands of the hostile Arab nations surrounding it...

For Rabbi Sacks, the question was "not where was God, but where was humanity?"

Sadly, for the historic Church, the question was "not where was God, but where was the Church and the love of Jesus?"

God always has a remnant.

[Fenris]

Now to make it personal:

From Wikipedia-

Dubienka [duˈbʲɛŋka] (Ukrainian: Дубенка, romanized: Dubenka) is a village in Chełm County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland, close to the border with Ukraine on the Bug River.

The town was occupied by the Germans during World War II from 1939–1944. The Jewish population consisted of around 2,500 individuals. In May 1942, the Germans reported that there were 2,907 Jews in Dubienka, some of whom had been transported there from neighboring villages. On May 22, 1942 the Germans conducted an Aktion in which they murdered a number of Jews at the local Jewish cemetery. On June 2, 1942, local farmers, under German orders, took Jews by horse and wagon to Hrubieszow where they were held for two days with little food and water, then put on freight trains and taken to the Sobibór extermination camp where they were immediately murdered. Two to three hundred were left behind as laborers. Only about fifteen Dubienka Jews survived the Holocaust. The Jewish community ceased to exist.

My grandfather took my grandmother and my aunt and left Dubienka and crossed the border into the Soviet Union, shortly before the war broke out. I do not know why he did this. Did he read about the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact and deduce that Poland being between Germany and the Soviet Union meant only bad things could happen? I do not know. Whatever his reason, it saved his life. His family was caught crossing the border and sent to a labor camp in Siberia, where my father was born. They all survived the war.

My grandfather's entire family was murdered in Sobibor. My grandmother had one brother who survived the war.

To those who say that the Poles were just bystanders, I can only offer this: One of my grandfather's brothers was kept alive in the camp for slave labor. He participated in a daring revolt in which the prisoners murdered Nazi officers and escaped into the forest. He escaped. And he was captured by Poles, who turned him over to the Nazis, who shot him.

[ProDeo]

Here in the Netherlands we of course have Anne Frank who became a sort of symbol of the Holocaust. What they don't tell you is that there were Dutch bounty hunters who made a living betraying hiding Jews for money.

I sometimes wonder why -  God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

[Fenris]

What they don't tell you is that there were Dutch bounty hunters who made a living betraying hiding Jews for money.

I recently became aware that the Germans paid Poles to hunt for escaped Jews after the Sobibor revolt. I can't decide which bothers me more, that the Poles hunted Jews because they hated them, or because they were paid a bounty for capturing them?

[ProDeo]

What they don't tell you is that there were Dutch bounty hunters who made a living betraying hiding Jews for money.

I recently became aware that the Germans paid Poles to hunt for escaped Jews after the Sobibor revolt. I can't decide which bothers me more, that the Poles hunted Jews because they hated them, or because they were paid a bounty for capturing them?

I can answer that from the Dutch perspective, the Netherlands traditionally through the centuries was a safe place for Jewish people. The fact that the Nazi's offered money for betraying Jews got the worst out of some Dutch.

[Sojourner]

A lot of people from different countries saw Hitler's war machine as a juggernaut, and believed he would emerge victorious, subjecting the world to himself. As such, many ingratiated themselves to him, seeking to curry favor, or even profit from collusion. Some, such as Mussolini and Hirohito, to their own undoing, made the fateful decision of hitching their wagons to the Nazi campaign. That dark, calamitous period revealed some to be brave, benevolent humanitarians, and others to be treacherous cowards. 

[Fenris]

A lot of people from different countries saw Hitler's war machine as a juggernaut, and believed he would emerge victorious, subjecting the world to himself. As such, many ingratiated themselves to him

That's true. But in countries where hatred of Jews was endemic and normalized, I don't think that wasn't their motivation. I think they saw it as an opportunity, and took advantage of the moment.