Archbishop and Chief Rabbi at Auschwitz

As we report, and again here, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks have made a joint pilgrimage to the Auschwitz-Berkenau death camp in Poland. About 180 school students and teachers are accompanying them, as well as seven other faith leaders from the Baha'i, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian faiths. The Archbishop and Chief Rabbi have both written moving 'messages' to mark the pilgrimage, organised by the Holocaust Education Trust, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary and has taken 2,000 school children on similar visits in the 12 months it has been organising them. The two messages are reproduced in full below. 'Evil for evil's sake,' says Sir Jonathan. 'A pilgrimage not to a holy place but to a place of utter profanity,' says the Archbishop. Incredibly, the attitudes that led to the Shoah are still alive in our world today. Only on Tuesday, the President of Iran, a country which some believe is just 18 months or fewer off nuclear capability, forecast that Israel itself is to be 'wiped out.'

The Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks

For years I could not bring myself to visit Auschwitz. There was an evil about it that, even at a distance, chilled my soul.

It was not just the sheer scale of the extermination: some one-and-a-half million innocent victims, ninety per cent of them Jews, but also Poles, Gypsies, and Russian prisoners of war, gassed, burned and turned to ash.

It was also the madness of it all, the lengths the Germans and their helpers went to search out every single Jew, to make sure not one would remain alive. At the height of the destruction, German troop trains were diverted from the Russian front to transport Jews to Auschwitz. The Nazis were prepared to put their own war effort at risk in order to kill Jews. This was, as one writer has put it, evil for evil's sake.

Yet this did not happen far away, in some distant time and in another kind of civilization. It happened in the heart of enlightened Europe in a country that prided itself on its art, its culture, its philosophy and ethics. More than half of the participants at the 1942 Wannsee Conference that decided on the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question' –total extermination of all Jews – held the title 'Doctor'. String quartets played in Auschwitz-Birkenau as the factories of death consumed the victims.

However painful it is, we must learn what happened, that it may never happen again to anyone, whatever their colour, culture or creed. That is what the victims wanted of us: that we should never forget where hatred, left unchecked, can lead. We cannot bring the dead back to life, but we can bring their memory back to life. We cannot change the past, but by remembering the past, we can change the future.

Hate has not vanished from our world, nor have war, violence and terror. That is why we must still remember, so that we, when the time comes, are willing to fight for tolerance, respect and human decency, honouring the image of God that lives in every human being however unlike us he or she is. Only thus can we rescue hope from the gates of hell.

Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams

The name has become so much a shorthand for the worst atrocities of our age that we can almost forget that it is a real place where real and particular people perished. As has often been said, the six million deaths of the Shoah mean one person’s death repeated six million times: the statistics have to be returned to the realm of the specific, to names and faces.

The journey to Auschwitz that we are undertaking is part of the continuing effort not to lose sight of the specific. These things actually happened in a particular place to people with names and relationships and stories. Our faiths speak of God through telling the stories of specific people in actual places; it is in these particulars that we learn of God. But this means that we learn the horror of evil and godlessness also by hearing and telling particular stories. We are travelling to Auschwitz to hear and to learn this. And we are travelling so as to hear and to learn what we can say to each other of compassion and hope in the face of an evil that seems almost to defy human language.

Auschwitz, as many have said, reduces us to silence. But to say this and no more is to shy away from the challenge it poses. It is not enough to say that this evil is past understanding or imagining: this is something that human beings did, and so we have to seek to understand and imagine. If we do not, how shall we be able to read the signs of the times, the indications that evil is gathering force once again and societies are slipping towards the same collective corruption and moral sickness that made the Shoah possible?

Distorted religion, fear of the stranger, the reduction of humans to functions and numbers, the obsession with technological solutions that take no account of human particularity – Auschwitz is more than the sum of these parts, but it would not have happened without them. They are still at work in our world. If we are truly committed to hearing and learning, we have no choice but to seek to grow in our ability to identify where these are present today and to go on telling the story of how they swelled the flood of inhumanity that overwhelmed a ‘civilized’ nation and continent.

This is a pilgrimage not to a holy place but to a place of utter profanity – a place where the name of God was profaned because the image of God in human beings was abused and disfigured. For many the name of God has become something that cannot be uttered or taken seriously because of what was done here. Yet our hope is that in making this journey together we also travel towards the God who binds us together in protest and grief at this profanation – and the God who even here was discerned in acts of solidarity and love, in voices raised in prayer even from the depth of suffering and in faces still marked by human warmth and care for fellow-sufferers. And if there were people who spoke and lived for God here, this too is something we and our world need to hear and to learn.

Comments

[Peter]

David Cohen!!!
In Poland there wasn't protestant clergy but only Roman Catholic clergy and some Jews. Now, in Poland aren't any Jews, but all people are Roman Catholic.

[Geoffrey Smith]

"I find it incredible that not one English Catholic bishop could make the time to be there."
- Chris Gillibrand, 19 NOV 2008, 12:57:14

They were all far too busy, Chris, organising their Fairtrade diocesan fairs for Christmas.

[Chris Gillibrand]

I asked the HET, why no Catholic representative was there.

"In response to your question, a number of representative from the Catholic faith were invited to take part on the visit. Unfortunately, no representatives were able to attend our visit on this particular date."

I find it incredible that not one English Catholic bishop could make the time to be there.

[j]

In the States the legislation on religion or belief beame very difficult when pro-life people got jobs in abortion clinics as receptionists, protested their views to all-comers, and then claimed employment protection under the faith legislation.

That allowed the UK pressure groups- of which the church is only one- to get a clause allowing for the ability to protect their ethos.

It's supposed to be OK to require faith in an ordinand, as it is part of the job, but not in a cleaner in a theological college. In practice I used to hear of abuses of this right.

I can see it is a nonsense that I would have rights to employment as an atheist vicar. The protection from discrimination in employment on grounds of sexual orientation is the same law as the law on religion or belief (it's the employment equality regulations) so what fits one has to fit the other.

The problem you then get is that a church can refuse a gay candidate as being incompatible with its ethos, just as much as an atheist would be. Which to some Christians is nuts and to others is absolutely right.

Separately, the structures for employment rights such as maternity leave in the church are way overdue for reform.

[J Pearce]

"I can see no grounds for the Church to have a derrogation clause that is inadmissable to other organisations."

Neither can I, but can you imagine the absolute furore it would kick up if the State tried to enforce such legislation, specifically to deal with inequality within the Church?!

It would make the fuss over the SOR's look like a playground tiff.

Bring it on!

[andrew holden]

J Pearce - I agree that it is difficult but I try not to simply assume that all who oppose women priests and gay bishops are all 'homophobic/racist/misogynist bigots'. Some of them undoubtedly are. Others have reasons for their opposition which are best opposed by rationally pointing out their errors rather than mislabelling their presented motives (whatever is going on in the subconscious).

I'd prefer the state to simply legislate to end the argument by making discrimination on any grounds completely illegal. I can see no grounds for the Church to have a derrogation clause that is inadmissable to other organisations.

[J Pearce]

"There is room in the church for different opinions, and indeed there should continue to be respectful debate between those who hold different views."

"The appeasement that tolerates intolerance on the mistaken assumption that we must be nice to everyone... "

Unfortunately, Andrew, these are mutually incompatible goals. "Respecting" the opinions of homophobe/racist/misoginist Christian bigots, regardless of how pedantic and mollifying they might try and present themselves as, is essentially appeasement.

No doubt you will have also noted how the bigots tend to invert the argument, every time their offensive opinions are criticised - they throw the accusation of bigotry right back at you, as if it is somehow an affront to them to find their "self-evident" opinions challenged. Such is the inherent flaw with belief systems that promote ideological purity over all else.

[j]

quite agree, Andrew.

Its not so long ago that anti-semitism was enshrined in christian theology. When was it that the then Pope formally agreed that the Jewish people were not to blame for the death of Christ? I know it wasn't all that long ago.

As for the employment practices of the CofE, which I am told, on excellent authority, operates on the theory that there is no need to offer maternity leave or comply with other employment law because- get this- there is no contract of employment: clergy are directly employed by God- it is being challenged in the courts and quite right too.

The only this is, I am not sure the intolerance is always tolerated in order to be tolerant. I think that the aggressive stance of some anti-gay christians is genuinely scary and people turn away from inviting bullying behaviour in that way.

Such a shame that the natural space of the church- to take a lead on social justice- is sabotaged by theological inflexibility and its associated cruel turns of phrase that we've all read on this blog at times.

[andrew holden]

"His shabby performance at Lambeth left no doubt of that fact."

In the end those who hate women and those who hate gays should be able to expect no tolerance from the Anglican Communion - just as those who hated Jews, communists, homosexuals and disabled people could expect no tolerance from the world community in WW2.

There is room in the church for different opinions, and indeed there should continue to be respectful debate between those who hold different views. Neverthless, DEEDS of inequity and injustice must not be tolerated - and it will not be long before the same principle will apply throughout society, let alone in the church.

Derogation ('get-out clauses') for any group in modern society must come to an end. Dicrimination against people on the grounds of race, gender or sexuality must not be tolerated now any more than it could be in 1939.

The appeasement that tolerates intolerance on the mistaken assumption that we must be nice to everyone leads back inexorably to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

[S. Chaudry]

My daughter, aged eighteen took part in this visit. The presence of the 10 leaders from diverse faiths united and standing together in this place of bleak and terrible darkness; helped make the experience more bearable. It gave hope to a place that for so many years had none.

[Dr. Irene Lancaster FRSA]

On Friday, the recently retired Israeli Ambassador to the Holy See addressed a group of Jews and Christians in Manchester on the importance of education in the quest for real dialogue among the various religious groups.

This was in the context of learning from the lessons of the Holocaust. It was agreed that virtue was not enough in itself and that the attributes of those who do not 'pass by' are complex and not always encouraged in the education system.

I've blogged on it here:

http://irenelancaster.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/11/inter-faith-dialogue-a-marathon-of-education.html

[David Cohen]

Why have the Christian victims apparently been airbrushed out of the history of Auschwitz?

137,000 Polish Christians were killed there, and the Nazis murdered many besides, including Protestant and Catholic clergy from Germany and all over Europe.

[Jenny]

It wasn't fear of the stranger, the ABoC should clear his eyes, and recognize that it was hatred and intolerance, the same things he countenances on a daily basis. Like those in the past, who appeased those who hated, Williams gives silent approbation to hatred, and cruelty. His shabby performance at Lambeth left no doubt of that fact.

[Dr. Irene Lancaster FRSA]

This is a very interesting event. I'm just preparing a course on interfaith dialogue to be held in Manchester next year and one of the methods of such dialogue I've proposed is the importance of pilgrimages to places of shared religious interest, both positive and negative, as in this case.

At a meeting in Liverpool in 2004, the Dalai Lama sugggested that one of the best methods of inter faith dialogue, or mutual understanding between religions, is to travel to places of pilgrimage with people of different religions.