Eighty years ago this month, Allied forces liberated the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. As the war’s atrocities were uncovered, the cry came, “Never again!”
Yet scenes of atrocity have resurfaced over and over, their place names now all too familiar. Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Guatemala, the list goes on and on. The latest is Syria, where the nation’s former president, Bashar al Assad, brutally destroyed as many as half a million people and tragically altered the lives of millions of others.
I find myself startled by photos and reports coming out of Syria. Not because I have never seen the like before. But because I have – all too many times – and I cannot believe this has happened again. A recurring nightmare that won’t go away.
Oh, the tragic and brutal loss of innocent life!
My heart turns to those who remain, who have survived. Individuals who’ve lost scores of their own family members. People who’ve suffered inhumane torture and imprisonment and yet find themselves still living, if barely.
What kind of living is that? So much of their lives spent in unspeakable pain and horror, their minds and bodies still reeling from the effects? What is to be done for them?
I think of those who fled Syria as refugees and wonder if they will return. Can they return? Will they want to?
A concern often voiced about refugees is that if we take them in, they will not go back. So, we wait to see what these Syrian refugees will do.
I think of my friend, Pauline, born in a refugee camp in Kenya. Her family had fled South Sudan, a place she has never seen. She has no memories of her birthplace in Kenya, let alone her parents’ home country. She, her mother, and her siblings were granted refugee status in the U.S. when she was but a toddler. They found a permanent home in San Deigo, of all places.
There is no “back there” for her. The refugee camp in East Africa is not something she can return to, even if she wished. And there is no home in South Sudan for her either, this thoroughgoing California gal.
So it is for many who flee their homelands.
The Nazis wiped out millions of people, particularly the Jews. There was no staying in Poland or Germany for survivors or returning to wherever the occupying forces had taken them from. These victims of Nazi brutality had been gathered from all over occupied Europe. And when the occupation ended, where could they go? Family and everything they had called their own was lost.
Many fled the carnage for safe havens such as Israel and the U.S. Some even landed in my own hometown. The Schewlakows (pronounced Shev-lak-o) had met in a Nazi concentration camp; the second generation became pillars in our community.
I think of all the Syrians who fled Assad’s madness. By the millions they clawed their way to Turkey, Greece, and European nations beyond. They did whatever they could to protect themselves and those they loved. Too many died along the way, like the little boy whose picture still haunts us, drowned at the edge of the Aegean Sea.
Many Syrians are returning, hoping to rebuild their lives and their nation, finding only rubble where their old homes and businesses had been. But for others there is nothing to return to, nothing with which to rebuild. No resources to take with them or to find there.
When people flee danger, they don’t leave because they want to be somewhere else. They just want to be elsewhere, wherever is safer than where they are fleeing.
I think of the stories of kids who’ve fled violent and abusive homes in my own country. Like a man in Oregon’s Gorge, now in his 30s, who escaped an explosive dad for the relative safety of the streets. He was just 9 at the time. With no place to go, he knew he couldn’t stay with his father. He wouldn’t survive. He discovered the streets had their own cruelties. To cope, he eventually got hooked on drugs. Decades later, his abysmal life has yet to find meaningful outlet.
Brings to mind the words of Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman who with her family helped many Jewish people escape from the Nazis. She and family members were arrested and sent to concentration camp, where she alone survived. In her book, The Hiding Place, she wrote, “Surely there is no more wretched sight than the human body unloved and uncared for.”
I think of the stories I have read of desperate people braving the perils of the Darien Gap in Central America. Like the family who lost everything under the rule of Maduro, and so fled their beloved but ruined Venezuela for remote Chile. Finding sustainable life elusive, they determined to try asylum in the U.S., only to lose it all in the nearly impenetrable jungles between Columbia and Panama. Now they wait in Mexico – in limbo. (See What I Saw in the Darién Gap.)
The will to live is powerfully strong. We human beings will do whatever it takes to survive – and to protect and provide for those we love, especially our own offspring. That is why violent fathers, such as that boy had, and demonic rulers like Hitler and Assad are so repulsive to us. We trust them to protect the innocent when instead they betray. We, who expect kind leaders and kinder parents, find their brutality totally foreign to our concept of humanity.
From the relative comfort and safety of our homes, we question why people choose to flee into the streets or battle the Darien Gap or brave the Aegean Sea. What would possess people to do such a thing, risking the lives of their own children?
Why flee when there’s no guarantee of safety? I think of the Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany in 1939 on the ocean liner St. Louis. Denied access to the U.S., they were forced to return to Europe, where 254 out of 937 died in the Holocaust. They risked all to what avail?
When we ask such questions, we betray our own short-sightedness. We are blinded to the demons others face. We cannot comprehend why people would leave home and homeland, not grasping the great risk they take in staying.
I have no idea why my ancestors left England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Denmark to face possible death on the high seas of the North Atlantic, the uncertainty of life in colonial America, or the dangers of the frontier. Others came to the New World for adventure or riches. But from what I’ve uncovered, my own forebears came because life “back there” was precarious and they hoped for welcome, safety, and freedom in a strange land.
Impulsively, we implore those who flee, If you must flee, do it legally. As if that were an option when facing starvation, torture, or annihilation. In the words of Auschwitz survivor, Elie Wiesel, “When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”
Legal is not something a desperate 9-year-old boy understands. Legal is not something a family, so distraught they’d travel thousands of miles in a potentially vain search, can comprehend. I’m not so sure legality was on the minds of my ancestors back in the 1600s.
I am not saying there shouldn’t be laws and that laws shouldn’t be respected. I am saying that before we go there in our conversations, we need to sit with our brothers and sisters in their suffering and pain, sit with those who, having lost everything, are still willing to do whatever it takes to find safety.
A 9-year-old boy can see no secure options any more than a family fleeing the sure cruelty of Assad can. It is either suffer and die where you are or flee and try your chances elsewhere. Sure, they may be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Sure, they may be making bad choices. But what is a good choice given the options such desperate people face?
Reminds me of the story of the four men with leprosy in the Old Testament who said, “If we stay here, we die. If we go there, we may also die.” So, they risked death in the enemy camp. (See I Kings 7.)
We think those we call “poor” more likely than the rest of us to make bad choices. But poor choices are not theirs alone. People who have means, including the wealthy, are just as inclined to make adverse decisions. The wealthy just have an better margin of error to navigate. For the destitute, errors compound, especially when there are no safety nets to protect you, no bank accounts to draw down, no connected uncles to get you out of jail.
Back to Auschwitz. It is perhaps only the most brazen of despicable examples from a sordid century of carnage and suffering. I am amazed when I recall Auschwitz was liberated only a decade before I was born. Now, though few holocaust survivors remain, their stories live on in living memory.
A network of 40 concentration and extermination camps in Poland, Auschwitz was one of numerous such networks run by the Nazis. I won’t enumerate the horrors of that entire system, only to say that out of 1.3 million people imprisoned in Auschwitz alone, 1.1 million of them died, murdered in unimaginable cruelty.
Auschwitz was liberated in 1945 by – irony of ironies – the forces of Joseph Stalin who was committing his own atrocities back home. As the Soviets advanced through occupied Poland, the Nazi SS emptied the camps, killing tens of thousands of prisoners and forcing tens of thousands more on death marches to elsewhere. When the Russians arrived at the main camp, only 7,000 prisoners remained, almost all ill or dying.
We now commemorate January 27, the date of the Auschwitz liberation, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Holocaust resulted in genocide for a third of the world’s Jewish people along with the deaths of countless members of other minorities, religious leaders, and political opponents.
Some who lived through that trauma have shared their stories, witnesses both to the hellish spirit that seeks to destroy our humanity and to the power of hope that propels life forward. Their stories are valuable for us to remember and to pass on to those who follow.
Sharing their stories has meaning for those who lived the experiences as well as for those of us who are listening. As Lawrence N. Powell writes in Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana:
“Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma’s essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness.” (emphasis added)
Bearing witness was General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s intent as he uncovered Nazi atrocities in Germany. Writing after the war and before he became the 34th president of the United States, he said, “I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’ [Crusade in Europe, 409]
I am skeptical we will ever stop such inhumanity against humanity – or the denial that such inhumanity exists. Yet we must never stop trying. Beyond that, we are called to sit with those who suffer and bear witness to their stories.
This conversation is ongoing; join me in journeying through the borderlands of life.
Public Domain photo: Brzezinka Auschwitz-Birkenau – Jacek77770 (Wikimedia)
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