The Second Tenant: Bearing Witness (Part 1, Auschwitz 1)

Auschwitz 1

When I enter the gas chamber my body tightens. This is just a replica but I still have to sit down--I can't breathe and feel nauseous. I am staring at that cursed hole in the ceiling where death would enter. I can't get a full breath in my lungs and find  a weight on my shoulders that pulls me to the floor. I feel like the bodies of thousands are collapsing on top of me and around me. I hear the screams echoing somewhere low beneath the shifting feet around me and the whispers. The tour guide says words I don't hear. My hands are pressed against the concrete floor as I wait for the door to shut and a canister of pesticide to drop through the hole. Everything is descending and there is a length of time when I literally cannot stand up. Not a moment too soon it is time to leave.

When I finally rise, I turn into the next room--the crematorium. I don't linger long to look at the human-shaped carts and row of low ovens. I move through with the crowd, glancing back once to make sure I have seen clearly, and then step out to into the bright brisk day of blessed sunshine.

After I exit, which feels like a miracle, I make a bee-line for a patch of grass and a birch tree. I put my hands upon them and breathe as deep as I can until we move on to the next horror. The earth helps, but it takes hours after leaving the camp for my chest to loosen, my stomach to uncoil, and the pressing weight to lift. And even when it does it seems my body will never forget this. 

outside of the gas chamber/crematorium replica

~~~

I came to Auschwitz to bear witness. During my journey here I have thought a lot about what that actually means; what the implications are of "bearing witness." In one sense, “to witness” feels passive, and in the face of injustice being passive feels like complicity. But I am also starting to understand “bearing witness” as something active and engaged.

“To bear” means to withstand. To support. To sustain. To endure. To carry. To give birth to. To move. To deliver. To accept. To manage. To testify to. And more.

This is a big word. A strong word. A word of action. It is a loaded word that carries a load.

28 years ago I was born. But more accurately I was birthed by my mother. I was carried and delivered. The pain of that was endured so my body could be moved into this world. I was borne.

If being borne is an active thing, then “to bear witness” must be as well.

For more understanding of what bearing witness means, I think back to Trebbe Johnson's article "Gaze Even Here" in which she describes bearing witness as “sustaining the gaze”—not looking away but bearing/withstanding what you see. Her experience of bearing sustained witness to a specific clear-cut and falling in love with it, demonstrates the power of the act: that it can transform how we relate to something; that we can love something we might have otherwise ignored or abhorred.

But how do we sustain the gaze when what we are looking upon is harsh, dark, and incredibly painful? I think again to the Mandorla, the symbol and practice that helps me tobear the tension of opposites, the existence of difference. I use it to bear the variety of responses I feel when I witness something disturbing or confusing. The two sides of the mandorla represent opposites, the extremes, the possibilities. The overlap in the middle represents a third way—the resulting alchemy based on the conversation between the two sides. This seed-shaped middle represents that there is fertility in any conversation, but specifically a conversation across the chasm of significant difference.

Conversation requires overlap, dialogue, a bridge. I am reminded of “the narrow bridge” and realize newly that part of the tenuousness of life is the immense challenge of meeting each other across the chasm of difference. A bridge (even a narrow one) bears itself, tensioned and heavy, across a chasm. And by doing so it creates the possibility for a dialogue between one side and the other. It bears our bodies across, it bears itself against the weight of gravity, it bears the tension, and because of all of this we can move across the chasm to the opposite side; we can meet in the center and talk; we can find a middle ground.

In all of these instances to bear means “to not collapse.” Maybe "to bear witness" means the same: to be able to sit in not-knowing, in the existence of difference, in the pain, in the fear of it all; to hold the tension and not collapse under the weight of what you see.

~~~

I am collapsing. It has only been one day. We have only visited one camp. Four more days of this horror?! And where is the grief ritual? I want the drums and the chanting, the wailing of my friends. I want to scream. Everyone is just talking here. I need to scream. Why isn't anyone screaming? I am going to scream. She just gave me permission didn't she?

I scream. Loud. Short. Sure. In a room of people I have just met in our first small-group pseudo-council as we sit in a wing of the Center for Dialogue and Prayer in Oscwicim, Poland, between the camps of Auschwitz 1 where we were today and Auschwitz-Birkenau where we will go tomorrow.

~~~

Earlier on Monday: We have arrived at our home base for the retreat, The Center for Dialogue and Prayer after spending the day at Auschwitz 1. We gather together for our opening circle with all of the 70ish people who have come here to bear witness. During this circle, the organizers, spirit holders, and elders of the retreat orient us to history and intentions of this 22-year-old gathering. We are told that though the retreat is rooted in Zen Buddhism and is held by practitioners of Zen Buddhism it is not a Zen Buddhist retreat. Many participants are not Zen Buddhists and don't necessarily have a seated meditation practice at all. I am one of those people.

opening circle, photo by Zen Peacemakers

Bernie Glassman, the founder of the retreat and author of the book Bearing Witness, speaks to us of his initial vision for this retreat which was not so much just about bringing Zen Buddhists together at Auschwitz. Rather, he envisioned bringing people of all backgrounds, beliefs, and practices together here, to this place where spiritual and cultural differences were not only in-tolerated, but were demonized, punished, and actively destroyed; to this place which represents, perhaps more than anywhere else, the horror that can occur when people can not, or will not, bear the tension of difference.

I feel relieved to hear someone say that this is not a straight-up Zen retreat. Such has been my sense the whole way along otherwise I never would have signed myself up for this, but it is still nice to hear. Even so, there are going to be many sessions over the next five days that will involved a seated practice given that a central component of the retreat is sitting silently on the train tracks near the “selection site” at the center of Birkenau. So on this first night we are offered some tools for meditating during those sessions. The invitations are primarily about form: breathing deeply into whatever arises, sitting tall through it, and most-strikingly “not collapsing.” It is suggested that collapsing is “one of the ways we run away.”

the floor in one of the barracks

This hits me in the gut and I immediately react, at first silently in my head, and then furiously in my journal while sitting in the circle. I am honestly in disbelief that we are being told to feel whatever we feel, let anything arise that wants to, and then we are told not to collapse. These feel contradictory to me. It is collapsing that makes sense when I feel certain things, namely grief and anguish. When those emotions arise I find myself pulled heavily toward the earth, as though all of gravity is bearing down on me, or as though the earth herself is pulling me in for embrace. That's what happened in the gas chamber and after. I feel it right now too. And for me that is not a reaction of running away. On the contrary. It is actually in the collapsing that I am able to more fully embrace what I am feeling. It is in falling down and falling apart that I can sink into the pain and allow to move through me. I am definitely and defiantly frustrated that we have been told not to collapse.

This is exactly why I have not engaged with Buddhism very much—I am afraid of the ways I have seen it used to bypass emotion. I am afraid of how I've seen it used to “run away” from fully feeling anger, grief, rage, and even joy. This flies in the face of my own experience: that feeling and expressing emotion (and thereby coming to know it and learning to work with it) is actually central to any sort of sustainable tolerance and peace.

I am suddenly afraid that I have misjudged this container, the whole framework of this retreat, this group of people. I am terrified that I have put myself in a situation where my grief—the lifeline to my heart, my joy, my compassion, my courage—will not actually be embraced here. I am afraid and I want to collapse. I can't collapse so I want to run. But in that moment I do neither. I do not reject the container or the people or the experience or the invitation. I decide to embrace not-knowing what will come of this, and bear the difference of opinion. I do not run away. I do not collapse.

I hold form.

~~~

It is during the small group “council” later in the night when the cracks begin to form and I start my process of collapsing. I put council in quotes because my small group facilitators have decided not to officially open a council space during this first meeting—“it is late and we will meet again first thing in the morning,” they reason. I feel a twinge of concern about this. I have led council many times during my rite-of-passage guiding, and have seen how setting the initial tone and creating a culture of council right away is super important for those groups. But I am not facilitating this group so I decide to sit back, trust it, and not say anything. We are practicing “not-knowing” after all, so what do I know here? That's what I tell myself.

And even though there is no official council space—no talking piece, no introduction of guidelines, and no real container for our experience of the day at Auschwitz 1—everyone is diving deep in their sharing. Things are getting emotional and intense as we go around the circle talking. Memories from

the day are rising up in me and I shake as the others speak. I want to crack open into my grief, but I am guarded and angry. I realize that, yes, there's a lot I don't know, but I DO know my emotional self, and I know that when I feel like this I need to express my anger before I can melt into the waves of grief that are wanting to move. I know that if I don't then I will start to go numb. I will shut down. I will run away. But I am afraid to collapse after what was said in the opening circle, especially without the container of council to hold me. 

When it is my turn in the small group I say these things out loud. Because we aren't officially in council, where no cross talk would be allowed, several people respond directly to me after I share, including someone who has been here many times. She is talking directly to me and recalls one year that a man would let out a heart-wrenching wail whenever he felt like it: at the camp, in council, in his bedroom in the middle of the night, in the hallway of the Center for Dialogue and Prayer, etc. As she is telling me this, the scream is viscerally rising in me. What she is saying feels like permission to scream. I teeter on the edge for a moment, and then just let it rip: a wholesale scream.

I surprise myself perhaps as much as anyone, but it feels really good. The coyote of me even kinda giggles inside, though I am also crying now and some people are shaking their heads. The women who had been speaking says: “You scared the shit out of me just now.”

empty canisters of Zyklon B, the poison gas used to kill

There is a “but” to her sentence that I don't hear. Even though I screamed it didn't really feel welcome, and doesn't feel energetically met like it might be in other spaces. My thoughts are spiraling now: “Why the fuck aren't we in council?” I think. “Why can't I just have my experience without worrying about what other people feel about it?! That's what council is for, isn't it? That's why we have council groups during this retreat: to be witnessed in our experiences of bearing witness. And for that matter, why the fuck aren't other people screaming after what we just witness—the gas chamber we walked through, the tiny dark prison cells we peered into, the piles of canister of poison, the entire rooms full of human hair and luggage with dead people's names on them, the carts full of personal effects, the endless mountains of shoes....

At this point I am gone. I don't even remember what else happens in the circle that night. The next thing I know I am pacing the hallways waiting for one of Spirit Holders I have connected with to come out of her circle so I can talk to her. It seems like the other groups opened council space because they are all still meeting. This frustrates me even more. 

~~~

It is really late now and I find myself in a meeting with a Spirit Holder and another woman involved in supporting the retreat. The conversation does not go well for me. I explain my experience at the opening circle, and again in my council group. I express my fears about the container's strength and resilience in the face of such harsh realities. I am told there are certain things that aren't appropriate in council. I refute, insisting that the councils I have been a part of have been strong enough to contain all sorts of crazy shit, including screaming and wild emotion. I am told that these are sensitive subjects and that my experience and response shouldn't scare or interfere with the experience of others as screaming does. I explain that I am scared and affected by other people responses too—I am horrified others are not emotional after what we have just seen. I also explain that I know it isn't my job to police other people's experience, nor to manage how other people feel about my experience.

It is then suggested to me that resisting their guidance I am not embracing “the experience,” that I am not embracing “not-knowing.” I respond that I thought “the experience” was to bear witness to what arises in me, to not judge it, but to embrace it and let it move through. I say that it seems like they want me to have a particular experience which is not the one I am having. I suggest that perhaps they are the ones not embracing “not knowing,” as if there is a proper way to behave in the face of horror. They tell me there is no proper way but there is a proper place for expressive emotion, which is in the woods where I won't disturb others. They do offer me company in that, but I still am not consoled. They want me to hide my grief and pain. I don't do that anywhere, much less in a place where death is the very ground we walk. 

The conversation ends before I am ready. I am told to sleep on it and that I am allowed to leave whenever I want. I go to my room feeling gas-lit, triggered, and almost sure I will be leaving in the morning.

~~~

The night is still long. I talk to my roommate, a woman around my age who likes me and seems to genuinely appreciate my perspective. She wants to learn more about the grief work I am speaking to and different ways of responding to pain. She encourages me to stick around for one more day to keep feeling things out. She thinks I have something unique to offer the group. Her curiosity and openness about my experience is heartening, calming, and reminds me of something I'd thought about during the opening circle.

I was sitting in our giant heart-shaped “circle” appreciating that our home base for the retreat is the Center for Dialogue and Prayer. This place was founded by Catholic Nuns after they were removed (through some controversy) from their station on the actual grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau. People were offended by the sustained presence of Catholicism in this place where Judaism was sent to be destroyed. The outrage makes some sense to me, but the nuns being ousted when they were trying to do good there does have some irony in it too. In any case thinking about it, I am glad this place exists as it does today, between the camps. To me the implication and intention of this center is an invitation to dialogue across the spectrum and chasm of belief and form of prayer. The name of the center suggests to me that dialogue is essential in our quest to understand or respond to what happened at Auschwitz, to prevent this type of intolerance in the future, and to move toward harmony across difference. And in order for conversation and dialogue to happen there must be difference represented.

Bernie said he wanted to bring all types of people together, not just people of a certain faith. If I leave the retreat then I remove my voice from the conversation completely; I essentially burn the bridge of that potential conversation. There is a potent possibility in staying and engaging with what is hard and different, and seems to reject my experience. The possibility is that by staying, and staying in the tension, something new can emerge. Maybe it is a fusion or alchemy of belief, maybe a growth of spirit and soul among all of us here, maybe we discover something even more powerful and healing than what we've known before.

If we can stand in the tension and create the middle space where every response, every form of prayer, and every way of engaging, is welcome; if we can collapse or sit tall, scream on the ground or silently breathe with our spines stretched toward the sky; if we can tolerate "the other's" opposite choice, and bear the difference and discomfort that brings; if we can hold that tension and honor it, then maybe we will create a bridge, bearing between our beliefs, where we can meet and talk, scream, breathe, and start to heal.