Auschwitz

I’ve just returned from a Zen bearing witness retreat at Auschwitz with the Zen Peacemakers. https://zenpeacemakers.org For a little context, anything to do with the holocaust has plagued me since childhood. It was time to bear witness to my own fear and this was the perfect situations for this. People from different parts of the world gathering to practice not knowing, bearing witness and compassionate action. This was not holocaust tourism but a mission to strengthen our ability to keep our eyes open when facing the suffering of ourselves and others-a great asset for any activist.

People keep asking me to describe the trip and I keep being at a loss for words. It was cold, vast and unfathomable. The 50+ people I was sharing this experience with were wonderful, I couldn’t face this without them. At this point I’m only 5 days into reentry and quite raw. But as we are moving into a new year and have all been through a lot with the election and the turn towards authoritarianism, I wanted to say at least a bit of something. Humanity has moved on since the holocaust and it will move on from the rise of the fascist regimes we are seeing around the world at this time.  If we don’t we will perish as a species and the cockroaches will take over to begin again. Those of us who are able need to buckle up and do whatever is in front of us to do to ease the suffering that our communities are in and are moving towards. We are all in this together, we all do what we can while finding some ease in daily moments.

 I leave you with this poem:

Auschwitz

Fierce winds whip

Bare skin

Cold needles prick

Icy air stings

Open eyes.

Vast expanses

Railroad tracks

Leading nowhere

Surrounded by the bones of

Millions of ancestors who have died here.

But the ghosts have all flown off

To Krakow, to Warsaw, to Amsterdam

There are no more children here,

Some flew home

Others, confused and lost,

Were led home by

Kind strangers.

Now free to roam

But where is their family?

Yet, yellow birch leaves drift gracefully to the earth

In the biting wind

acorns carpet the ground

Where dry grass once smelled of death

Green fields roll

The forest is not innocent.

Layer upon layer upon layer of grey clouds

One bird sings

Two deer leap through the charnel fields