Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (2 page)

The Carmelite presence at the gate of Auschwitz was immediately protested by leaders of Jewish groups throughout Europe and in the United States and Israel. "Stop praying for the Jews who were killed in the
Shoah,
" one group pleaded. "Let them rest in peace as Jews."
³
Jewish protesters invaded the grounds of the convent, carrying banners that said, "Leave Our Dead Alone!" and "Do Not Christianize Auschwitz and
Shoah!
"
⁴
The protesters registered complaints about Father Kolbe, who before his arrest had been the publisher of a journal that had printed antisemitic articles, and about Edith Stein, whose conversion could only look to Jews like apostasy.

Polish Catholics from the nearby towns of Oświ[ecedil]cim and Birkenau rallied to the nuns' defense. Fights broke out. "One More Horror at Auschwitz," read a headline in a British paper. "They crucified our God," a boy screamed during one demonstration. "They killed Jesus."
⁵
At one point the nuns' supporters arrived carrying the stout wooden cross from the papal altar in Krakow. They planted the cross in the field next to the old theater. However piously intended, it could seem a stark act of Christian sovereignty, a sacrilege. Eventually John Paul II intervened in the dispute, offering to fund a new convent building for the Carmelites a few hundred yards away. He prevailed on the nuns to move. The sisters did so in 1994. In the compromise that was worked out, Jewish leaders in turn accepted that the cross would remain in the field near the wall, but only temporarily.

In early 1998, the Polish government, perhaps responding to pressure from American senators friendly to Jews—pressure exerted just prior to the U.S. Senate's vote on Poland's admission to NATO—announced that the cross, like the convent before it, would be removed. "The cross overlooks the camp, which is unacceptable for Orthodox Jews," a Polish official said, "because it imposes Christian symbols." But a month later, before the removal had occurred, Poland's Roman Catholic primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, insisted that the cross should remain where it was. Jewish leaders again protested, prompting an expression of concern from the Vatican. At Auschwitz itself, Polish Catholics began to plant new crosses, appropriate to a cemetery, making the point that Catholics, too, died at the camp. The dispute raged throughout 1998, with escalations even to the point of homemade explosive devices being planted in the field by radical Catholics. More than one hundred small crosses were put in the ground. Finally, in 1999, in an odd "compromise," the Polish parliament passed a law requiring the removal of the smaller crosses but making the papal cross permanent. The small crosses were taken away by Polish officials, but the large cross remains at Auschwitz to this day.

What does the cross of Jesus Christ mean at such a place? What does it mean to Jews? What does it mean to Christians? Or to Polish Catholics? Or to those for whom religious symbols are empty? What does the cross there signal about our understanding of the past? And what of the future? If Auschwitz has become a sacred center of Jewish identity, what does the cross there imply about the relations between Jews and Christians, and between Judaism and Christianity? These questions were in my mind one November morning as I stood alone before that cross.

I thought of the pope's designation of this place as Golgotha, and I recognized the ancient Christian impulse to associate extreme evil with the fate of Jesus, precisely as a way of refusing to be defeated by that evil. At the Golgotha of the crucifixion, death became the necessary mode of transcendence, first for Jesus and then, as Christians believe, for all. But I also thought of that banner, "Do Not Christianize Auschwitz and
Shoah!
" Can mechanized mass murder be a mode of transcendence? I could imagine the narrowed eyes of a Jewish protester as he detected in prayers offered before the cross at Auschwitz echoes of the old refrain "Jews out!"—only now was it Jewish anguish that was expected to yield before Christian hope? If Auschwitz must stand for Jews as the abyss in which meaning itself died, what happens when Auschwitz becomes the sanctuary of someone else's recovered piety?

Christians are not the only ones who have shown themselves ready to use the memory of the six million to advance an ideology: Orthodox Jews can see a punishment for secularism; Zionists can see an organizing rationale for the state of Israel; opponents of "land for peace" can see a justification for a permanent garrison mentality.
⁶
The "memorialists," who have raised the new temples of Holocaust museums and memorials in the cities of the West, have anointed memory itself as the deepest source of meaning. The legend engraved at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the first Holocaust memorial, reads, "Forgetfulness is the way to exile. Remembrance is the way to redemption."

The God who led a people out of Egypt is, of course, a redeeming God, but at Auschwitz the question must have become, Are God's saving acts only in the past? Some formerly religious Jews saw in the Holocaust only the absence of God, and moved on without faith. Other Jews went from atheism to the faith of Job, an affirmation devoid of piety. There are the Jewish voices, from Elie Wiesel to Richard Rubenstein to Emil Fackenheim, who reject the idea that suffering such as Jews underwent in the death camps—a million children murdered—can be meaningful. To value those deaths in such a way is to diminish their horror. And there are the voices of Emmanuel Levinas,
⁷
who speaks of the Holocaust as a "tumor in the memory,"
⁸
and Theodor Adorno, who, in a famous essay, argued that the entire enterprise of education must change after the Holocaust.
⁹
"Auschwitz negates all systems, opposes all doctrines," Wiesel argues. "They cannot but diminish the experience which lies beyond our reach."
¹⁰
These and other figures insist that the Holocaust shatters all previous categories of meaning, certainly including Christian categories. But isn't the state of being shattered, once reflected upon and articulated, itself a category? Does the very act of thinking about the Holocaust, in other words, diminish its horror by refusing to treat it as unthinkable? The more directly one faces the mystery of the Holocaust, the more elusive it becomes.

Perhaps the voice a troubled Christian most needs to hear is that of the Jew who says the Holocaust must be made to teach nothing. "What consequences, then, are to be drawn from the Holocaust?" asks the theologian Jacob Neusner. "I argue that none are to be drawn, none for Jewish theology and none for the life of Jews with one another, which were not there before 1933. Jewish theologians do no good service to believers when they claim that 'Auschwitz' denotes a turning point."
¹¹
That voice is useful because if Jewish responses to the Holocaust, which range from piety to nihilism, are complex and multifaceted, Christian interpretations of the near elimination of Jews from Europe, however respectfully put forth, must inevitably be even more problematic. The cross signifies the problem: When suffering is seen to serve a universal plan of salvation, its particular character as tragic and evil is always diminished.
¹²
The meaningless can be made to shimmer with an eschatological hope, and at Auschwitz this can seem like blasphemy.

But what about an effort less ambitious than the search for meaning or the imposition of theology? What if the cross at Auschwitz is an object before which Christians only want to kneel and pray? And, fully aware of what happened there, what if we Christians want to pray for Jews? Why does that offend? How can prayers for the dead be a bad thing? But what if such prayers, offered with good intentions, effectively evangelize the dead? What if they imply that the Jews who died at Auschwitz are to be ushered into the presence of God by the Jesus whom they rejected? Are Jews then expected to see at last the truth to which, all their lives, they had been blind? Seeing that truth in the beatific vision, are they then to bow down before Jesus as Messiah in an act of postmortem conversion? Shall the afterlife thus be
judenrein
too? Elie Wiesel tells "a joke which is not funny." It concerns an SS officer whose torment of a Jew consisted in his pretending to shoot the Jew dead, firing a blank, while simultaneously knocking him unconscious. When the Jew regained consciousness, the Nazi told him, "You are dead, but you don't know it. You think that you escaped us? We are your masters, even in the other world." Wiesel comments, "What the Germans wanted to do to the Jewish people was to substitute themselves for the Jewish God."
¹³
Here is the question a Christian must ask: Does our assumption about the redemptive meaning of suffering, tied to the triumph of Jesus Christ and applied to the Shoah, inevitably turn every effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust into a claim to be the masters of Jews in the other world?

Once, for Christians to speak among ourselves about the murder of the six million as a kind of crucifixion would have seemed an epiphany of compassion, paying the Jews the highest tribute, as if the remnant of Israel had at last become, in this way, the Body of Christ. Yet such spiritualizing can appear to do what should have been impossible, which is to make the evil worse: the elimination of Jewishness from the place where Jews were eliminated. The Body of Christ? If Jesus had been bodily at Auschwitz, as protesting Jews insisted, he would have died an anonymous victim with a number on his arm, that's all. And he'd have done so not as the Son of God, not as the redeemer of humankind, not as the Jewish Messiah, but simply as a Jew. And in a twist of history folding back on itself, his crime would have been tied to the cross—"He killed our God!" That indictment, first brought as an explicit charge of deicide as early as the second century by a bishop, Melito of Sardis,
¹⁴
was officially quashed by the bishops of the Second Vatican Council in 1965,
¹⁵
yet it remains the ground of all Jew hatred. That, at bottom, is why it is inconceivable that any Jew should look with equanimity on a cross at Auschwitz, and why no Christian should be able to behold it there as anything but a blow to conscience. "Though there were other social and economic conditions which were necessary before the theological antecedents of antisemitism could be turned into the death camps of our times," the Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein has written, "only the terrible accusation, known and taught to every Christian in earliest childhood, that the Jews are the killers of the Christ can account for the depth and persistence of this supreme hatred."
¹⁶

I am certain that the first time I would have heard the word "Jew" was from the pulpit of St. Mary's Church in Alexandria, Virginia, where I lived as a child. My father was an Air Force general working at the Pentagon, but we made our family life in the Old South river port down the Potomac, where the Catholic parish was the oldest in Virginia. It would have surely been one Holy Week when I was six or seven that I heard the mythic words proclaimed: "The Jews cried out with one voice, 'Crucify him!'" But the first remembered time I heard the word "Jew" was from a boy who lived next door. Let's call him Peter Seligman. The hint of something in his last name had registered with me not at all.

Peter and I were probably about ten years old. Though he went to the local public school—the Protestant school, to me—Peter was then my best friend. I loved running with him through the woods just south of Alexandria, slapping our thighs as if we rode in the cavalry—a word I was already confusing with Calvary—dodging branches, leaping the narrow creek that was our constant point of reference. I remember one summer day coming upon an overgrown stone wall surrounded by tall trees and choked by briars, the vestige of a former pasture or farmer's field. The aura of a lost past drew us, and when Peter announced solemnly, "I bet this was built by slaves," I stepped back. A door in my brain snapped open, and whenever I think of slavery, I think of that wall.

Perhaps it was the same wall that inspired a game we used to play, the two of us betraying our northern origins—I was born in Chicago; the Seligmans seemed, perhaps in stereotype, to be New Yorkers—by pretending to be Mosby's Rangers. We called ourselves Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson. I see now the shared loneliness in our romping fantasy, because the other boys with whom we might have played were native Virginians, defensive heirs of a rural culture that was being turned into suburb before their eyes, not only by outsiders, but by the ancient enemy—us. The other boys had shunned me and Peter as Yankees, which perhaps accounts for our rather desperate play at being not just Johnny Rebs but true Confederate heroes.

Sometimes our hard rides through the woods took us to Gum Springs, a shantytown with dusty, unpaved streets where Negroes lived, the hired laborers and croppers whom we often saw doing menial chores for the white contractors of the new subdivisions. In Gum Springs we saw black people with each other. Once—it must have been a Sunday—Peter and I crept up a deserted street to a small white-steepled church. We listened to the congregation singing hymns, glimpsing the men's dark suits and ties, the ladies' hats, the uplifted brown faces. When a deacon looked our way, we turned and ran.

After that, reciting the Lord's Prayer with its confession of the sin of "trespass," I thought of Gum Springs. Even now, the image of its shacks and dirt streets stabs me with guilt. Gum Springs, teaching me that I am white, laid bare another meaning of Mosby's raids. I associate this first felt recognition of anti-black racism with Peter, my fellow would-be Reb, my fellow crypto-Yankee, my fellow white, my friend. Rarely would I share a sense of so many levels of complexity with another. But then Peter forced a next recognition, and it changed everything.