My Path to Bearing Witness at Auschwitz (Part 2)

When I first started consciously witnessing the painful realities of the world I was about 13. And what I saw was incredibly heavy and painful--more than I knew what to do with. This was a major contributor to my decade-long struggle with depression. I only fully emerged from that depression when I learned how to grieve, and move my pain through me rather than letting it sit stagnant. I now regularly attend grief rituals where I exploring the territory of my grief and express it. These rituals are largely about bearing witness to real, raw, excruciating emotion--my own and that of people I deeply love and that of people I've only just met. In a culture that wants us to suppress or medicate our emotions, and be silent or private about our pain, this grief ritual invites expression of it and an opportunity to sustain our gaze on it. This ritual is how I keep breaking through the concrete that builds up around my heart, how I keep cutting down the barbed wire that tries to keep out what hurts or keep in what I am afraid to look at.

When we are witnessed and choose to witness each other in our sorrows, in our messiness, in our wailing, in our uncontrollable and impolite expressions, we are like Trebbe Johnson going into the clear cut. We are deliberately seeking out the desolation and we are being willing to actually experience each other in raging, screaming, snotty, ugly, wailing agony. I've seen over and over the alchemy these witnessed expression. It's not that the ritual fixes everything (or anything at all). But by letting these emotions flow freely (or be painfully birthed) through--especially with my community at my back--I am energized into action rather than feeling depleted and deadened as I do when I hold those same emotions inside without expression. And not only do I have more energy to act, but I often have a better idea of how to act because I feel more connected to myself and to others.

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The Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz feels like a natural extension of the grief work and the youth rite-of-passage work I do. My co-guide in leading a wilderness rite-of-passage trip this summer was the one who told me about the Auschwitz retreat. She shared about her experience and about the Tenants of Bearing Witness (which act as part of the framing for the retreat) and I was totally engrossed in the idea of it. The tenants are: Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action. Each of these practices resonated deeply with the rite-of-passage work we were doing.

This work with youth has largely been about learning how to bear witness to whatever arises in the field (be it pain, suffering, and tears, or joy, ecstasy, and laughter, or anything in between), and to do so without necessarily trying to fix anything or make sense of it. Just as there is nothing my dad could say to fix what I had seen, I cannot change or fix the life experiences and pains of the youth I work with. I can often only witness it and mirror it back to them so they feel seen and heard. Sometimes I can respond with an invitation, or draw them out with questions, or offer them opportunities to discover inner resources that will help them navigate their difficulties. Very rarely is there more I can do. And in order to do any of that effectively, the first thing I must do is listen deeply, sustain my gaze, and bear non-judgemental witness to their experience. And I feel it acutely--the minute I try to fix anything is a moment of distancing rather than connecting and witnessing.

At the end of these trips I often don't know if I have had any lasting impact on the youth, nor do I ever know if a grief ritual will change other people's lives the way it has changed mine. I go into these interactions not knowing. I come out not necessarily knowing any more. But it is in acknowledging what I don't and can't know, and then in engaging in the conversation anyway, that the possibility for something new emerges. When I am then not hemmed-in by expectation of outcome, nor am I trying to manipulate or extract what I find, grace often finds its way in and allows for something more profound to occur than what I could have tried for.

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In this way perhaps being willing to bear witness is an act of faith. Faith that it is worth anything at all to keep my eyes open, and sustain my gaze upon the pain of a seemingly broken world. Faith that I will have the resources to deal with what I see. Faith that perhaps by witnessing something a meaningful response will come through. And if nothing else, faith that whatever it is that I see will bring me closer to connection, empathy, and compassion with others, and to the heart of this exquisite and excruciating existence. 

I don't know what faith I have in going to Auschwitz. I intend to go in order to bear this type of open-hearted witness. But there are pieces of me that do have pre-concieved notions, bias, resentments, angers, horrors. I've been watching a documentary on the creation of Auschwitz and in it listened to a surviving SS guard essentially say he didn't have remorse, and that he maintained a similar worldview as he did back then. That is horrifying and sickening to me. And the events of recent months, with Nazi and KKK mentalities rearing up in Charlottesville and beyond, have heightened that horror. But they have also ramped up my longing to go to Auschwitz to bear deeper witness to all of it--including the experience of the SS officers. I want to stand on the ground where these harsh conclusions killed millions of innocent humans. I want to ponder the possibility of something like that happening again, and more accurately, to accept the reality that in so many ways it is already happening "again"--that it never really stopped.

But I also want to go encounter what is actually asking to be encountered by the place itself, and not just what I anticipate encountering; to feel what I actually feel and not what I anticipate feeling or think I should feel. I imagine this will be incredibly challenging. How could I go to such a place and feel anything but horror, anger, and fear? And yet there are stories I've reading and hearing about from the retreat where people spent time laughing and dancing. Many people witnessing that act, found it repulsive. Is expressing joy on a land of pain only a further desecration of the lives lost there? Is celebration of life in a place of death an unforgivable taboo? Or does it somehow honor what happened there? I don't know.

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Yes: I don't know. That is my practice right now: not knowing. I have a lot more questions and part of me is still begging for answers. But maybe there are none. (Can I be okay with that? Will my life still have meaning or direction if I don't know everything?) The practice of bearing witness isn't about finding answers, or at least not seeking for them. It is about offering acknowledgement and attention to whatever exists. So when I think about people laughing or dancing at Auschwitz I think again to the desecrated landscapes of the clear-cut and of Johnson's discovery that he, in fact, could fall in love with that place--that by gazing across the acres of stumps and piles of death long enough, they all became beloved to him (and, indeed, we laugh and dance with our beloveds).

I have spoken to people, in preparation for my trip, who go to the retreat at Auschwitz every year. The way they speak about the place is mostly not with horror or revulsion but with reverence and love. This brings up even more questions: What has to happen to transform disgust and avoidance of something to reverence for it? What are the implications of feeling reverence or love for a place that was the site of the murder of millions of people? Could that possibility be used to justify further genocide?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I actually don't know. I have ideas and opinions, but I don't know. We live in a world where knowing (or, quite often, even just pretending to know and acting on that) is valued, expedited, and rewarded, and where everything is polarized and people are dying because other people insist that they "know." So maybe the willingness to sustain (even for a little while) a gaze into the incredibly vast unknown--to bear witness to the immensity of "not-knowing" itself--is an endeavor quite worthy of exploration and maybe even deserving of the designation of Radical Act. 



For more information on my trip, my intentions, my story, and how you can support me, please check out this link: https://www.gofundme.com/alexsbearingwitnessretreat