#479: Auschwitz 75--A Pilgrim's Memory

This week’s 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has revived an indelible image from my long–past (but not lost) youth. I wrote this piece 5 years ago, and it continues to shock me that my first encounter with the Nazi genocide came barely 20 years after it was ended. Some of those survivors, now old, were then in their 20s and 30s. But this memory must outlive all our lives.

One November day in 1968, during my college year in Paris, I killed time between classes by wandering the area around Notre Dame Cathedral. After a few minutes exploring the Pope John XXIII garden behind the church, I noticed a low stone wall at the far end of a small green across the street, and crossed over to get a closer look at the words carved into the stones.

My French was still pretty basic, but I managed to figure out that the wall commemorated 200,000 French deported by the Nazis who occupied France during WWII. Actually, it was not a wall at all, but the roof of a (mostly) underground building, with stairways cut into it leading down into a courtyard.

This was the Mémorial de la Déportation. I had never heard of it, but I was about to experience it for the first time. I would emerge convinced it was the most powerful monument in all Paris---and I would emerge a changed person, someone whose personal pilgrimage had taken a sudden unseen turn.

The roofline rose around the narrow stairs as I descended, squeezing me between the stone walls. The same high wall enclosed the deep-set courtyard itself, blocking any sight of the city beyond. The Seine’s waters just below showed through one small grated opening, topped by the jagged points of a plate-iron sculpture that looked like barbed-wire enlarged 100 times. It felt like I was standing in a prison yard.

Turning back toward the stairs, I saw two massive stone slabs splitting a narrow space leading inside.

I squeezed through and found myself in an underground crypt softly lit by faint light coming from its four corners. In each corner I found a barred doorway to a stone jail-cell; the light came from windows one could not see from outside the locked empty cells. Carved into one stone wall is a poem reflecting the spiritual anguish of the camps:

I've dreamt so much of you

I’ve walked so much

Talked so much

So much loved your shadow

That there is nothing of you left for

     me—

What’s left for me is to be

The shadow between the shadows

The shadow that will come

And come again 

Into your sunlit life.

Returning to the center, I stood before a fifth set of bars blocking entrance to a low, long, tunnel-shape corridor. 

It led, like a horizontal black hole, to an invisible destination, but along both sides I saw thousands of tiny, faint-white lights, and instantly knew each one represented an individual lost to the Nazi genocide machine.

 

 Just beyond the bars, at my feet, was a raised coffin-shaped black stone, to mark the resting-place of an unknown deportee. Just behind me, in the middle of the floor, burnt an eternal flame.

And as I turned to go I saw, carved over the huge slabs leading out, the plea:  “Pardonne, n'oublie pas”—“Forgive, but Don’t Forget.”

When I climbed up the cramped exit stairs to ground level, cold drizzle greeted me like a refreshing breath of life after the stunning, symbolic specter of so many deaths. The few minutes I had spent inside had marked me, and shadowed the rest of that day and the weeks that followed.

I remained in France another eight months, and returned to the Mémorial every three or four weeks. In a city unrivaled for its cathedrals, monuments, places of historical significance and breath-taking beauty, this obscure, almost invisible memorial became my own personal place of pilgrimage.

Three years later I returned to Paris, and made time one morning to visit the Mémorial. After a few minutes of reflection I noticed the guard on duty approaching me.

“Excuse me, Monsieur, I do not mean to intrude. But I was wondering—you have been here before, non?”

I admitted I had.

“But it was some time ago, was it not? Two, maybe three years? And more than once?”

Yes, I agreed.

“You see, Monsieur, most people who come, they are just on tour—they walk in and walk out, maybe they take a photo or two. After five minutes they are gone, and have already checked this place off their list of sights to see. But you would come and stay, spend time, and you would return again.”

“Yes, it’s true,” I said. “But I was studying here, not on tour. I was here a whole school year.”

“That is what is even more striking, Monsieur. You see, the people who live here, the Parisians? They do not come at all. Most of them don’t even know it exists. And frankly, Monsieur, many would not care to know.”

He then added that I was not the only pilgrim who returned, telling me of the US officer who led the first US liberation of a Nazi death camp in January 1945.

“He saw what there was to see, Monsieur, and immediately said, ‘Ike (Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower) has gotta see this.’ He got Eisenhower to come, and (Generals) Bradley and Patton with him. The man was marked for life, and every year, when he returns there to observe the anniversary, he also comes here to pay his respects.”

“You see, Monsieur, I can tell the pilgrims from the tourists! That is why I remember you.”

My first visit came only 23 years after the camps were liberated. It shocks me to think how near that awful history was to me then, and how fast the time since has passed.

Now, this week, we observe the 70th anniversary. That old guard is gone (as are, of course, most of the holocaust survivors), but the Mémorial remains.  It is still mainly seen by tourists who traipse in and out and check it off their lists. It is still largely invisible to, and ignored by, the average Parisian.

In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the Holocaust, Boston erected its own Holocaust Memorial, an evocative rendering of 6 glass chimneys symbolizing the 6 major death camps, each one etched with 1 million numbers—one for each of the victims. It is a haunting venue, and I am grateful to have it near my home.

The New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston

But whenever I return to Paris, I still make sure to go back to the Mémorial. Often I bring someone along: in 1971 it was with the woman who became my wife; another year, it was a Parisian friend seeing it for the first time; in October 2013, it was my daughter.

And more than once I have returned to my old American school in Paris to arrange an official tour of the Mémorial for the students. This tour includes an upper level inside the building containing a great deal of historical documentation.

On one occasion, several English–speaking tourists tagged along with our group. Realizing this, the tour leader, who spoke only French, asked me to act as interpreter. For half an hour I translated her remarks for the tourists. So once again this place touched me in a personal way.

In the last 10 years, however, the Mémorial de la Déportation has been largely displaced by the new Holocaust Memorial, only a few hundred meters across the Seine, which is the largest center for Holocaust research in Europe.

So when I go back to this place—and I do, as often as I can—I know it will probably be quiet, or even empty, and unchanged. It will still urge me “Pardonne, n’oublie pas”—Forgive, but Do Not Forget.

For our generation, this has become a sacred duty. We face a time when, more than ever, faith and violence seem linked by emerging Holy Wars waged by global crusaders. The horrifying prospect: genocide may not yet be buried in our past, as long as fanatics seek a “final solution” for their fears by liquidating the hated evil enemy.

 As former President Jacques Chirac said in 2005 at the Holocaust Memorial’s opening: “The refusal to forget is all the defense we have against the renewal of barbarism.” And part of what we remember is that Nazi genocide emerged, not from a historical vacuum, but from the history of Christian anti-Semitism.

The holocaust was, indeed, mass murder—but it was more than that. It was a deliberate, intentional program aimed at making the Jewish people extinct. And it was carried out by people who claimed the Christian faith as their heritage, and a “Christian” view of Jews (as, for example, “Christ-killers” guilty of “deicide”) as their justification.

So, as we journey out of the shadow of the 20th century (history’s bloodiest century) into this new century of terror and revenge, our refusal to forget—our determination never to forget, to remember always—may be all that determines, for each of us, whether we are mere tourists or genuine pilgrims.

“Am I Tourist or Pilgrim? Just sightseeing, or sharing a journey?” If we ignore this question, we cannot give the right answer.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2020

#452: Must America Be the Modern Sparta?

As the editorial pages and the blogosphere filled up with appreciations for the life of Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who died last week in New York, my sadness was not for him but for our country. 

Berrigan, who was 94, had a full life devoted to the cause of peace, often choosing radical, even illegal actions in the name of gospel values.  But by 2016, more than 50 years after he began his crusade, America doesn’t seem to have made much progress toward peace. We peaceniks used to say, amid the struggle over Vietnam, “The enemy is not the enemy.  The real enemy is War.” And we still have not conquered war. 

In fact, a blog post that popped up on my Facebook page last week observed that the United States has been at war for 93% of its history.  That means 21 scattered years of peace in our entire national life! Find the details at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41086.htm  .

I remember how shocked I was to read, during my college days, that 1968 was the first year of the 20^th century that no British soldier died in combat.  I should not have been shocked, of course: I should have known that permanent warfare is the price of empire.  And sure enough, Britain went to war in Northern Ireland the very next year. 

By the age of 30 I was less naive.  In 1977 I told a fellow peacenik that I planned to look for work in Canada, just in case of war.  I’d done some rough math, and figured that, based on our past history, we could expect the next war by the time my one-year-old child reached draft age.  I was close enough: the first Gulf War came 14 years later. 

Still, that 93% is even bleaker, and it stuns me (even though three of the 21 peaceful years came just as my first child was born).  Think of what that figure of 93% means:

It means that no U.S. generation has lived ever lived their lives in peace. 

It means that every single U.S. president has been a wartime present

It means that no U.S. child has grown up in peace.

It means that no U.S. parent has raised their children free of war. 

Of course, even the tamest of our schoolbooks revealed how bloody U.S. history has been.  Our nation was born in the blood of Revolution in the 18 century, became an indissoluble union in the bloodbath of the Civil War in the 19^th century, and we spent most of the 20^th century fighting wars overseas.  And those modern wars have inflated our military’s scope beyond all our rivals and allies put together.  We remain the only nation to use nuclear weapons in war, and the only major nation to claim the right of a first nuclear strike.

The US military has expanded dramatically even in the last 15 years. We now maintain up to 800 military bases in 70 countries. We have up to 150,000 military personnel present in 153 foreign countries.  It used to be said that the sun never set on the British Empire, but today we can say that the sun never sets on the U.S. military.  Viewed strictly for our war making capability, we are the world’s only global empire.

Why so much war?  Since World War II, it is largely because our leaders have convinced enough of us that our “National Security” can be jeopardized by the puniest forces, by the vaguest, most remote threats.  So we went to war in Vietnam supposedly to prevent the “dominoes” from falling across Southeast Asia.  We fed weapons to the Taliban supposedly to thwart Soviet control of Afghanistan. We backed the Contras to unseat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  We invaded Grenada to stop the construction of an airfield.  We occupied Panama to unseat Noriega.  We attacked Saddam Hussein and bombed Iraq, invaded Haiti, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq again to remove Saddam, waged war in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and now Syria.All those in the last 40 years, at the cost of millions of lives and countless refugees. 
Except for Vietnam itself, public protest has failed to alter US policy.  It is as though the American people really believe that the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Noriega, and Daniel Ortega were threats to the most powerful--and most isolated--nation on earth.   
We might even argue that the paranoia has intensified since Vietnam.  50 years ago, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” meant the hundreds of real Soviet nuclear weapons aimed at us. By 2002, “WMD’s” meant some non-existent cache of aluminum pipes hidden in Baghdad.  And a healthy percentage of Americans still believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, and that our mission in Iraq had some connection to something called the “Global War On Terror.” Of course, it does connect now—since Saddam’s henchmen metastasized into ISIS after our invasion.  As one Facebook post put it: “All this started by invading a country to drive out the terrorists that weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out.”

It seems we Americans are prepared to accept war on the flimsiest of excuses.  And the government has made this as easy as possible by (1) Eliminating the draft to short-circuit popular protest and (2) Paying for war on credit.  We don’t feel war touching our families or our wallets, because the cost of war falls on the poor who serve and on the future generations who will inherit our debt.

Moreover, our people seem to actually believe that such “threats” jeopardize our “freedom,” and we willingly sacrifice many of our liberties to protect "it."

This theme is, of course, as old as the nation itself:  “Live free or die”; “I regret that I have but one life to give…”; “Better dead than Red”; “The Domino theory” ; “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Perhaps we need to face facts and ask ourselves (if only to honor the spirit of Dan Berrigan): “Are we Americans by nature a war-like people?”

As a school kid, I love ancient history, and was particularly fascinated by the typical textbook contrast between Athens and Sparta.  Athens, we learned, was the seat of Greece's noble culture: sculpture, theater and poetry, history, philosophy, learning.  Sparta, by contrast, was portrayed as a kind of barracks-state, its men constantly preparing for or waging war.  We gathered, from the stories, that these wars were fought for honor, for revenge, for security, for wealth--but anyhow war was Sparta's defining trait.

This stereotype about the two cities lives on.  After all, who ever heard of a football team called “The Fighting Athenians"? 

As I grew older, and I began commuting to high school in Boston, I learned of a traditional nickname for the city of Boston: “The Athens of America.” Actually, Samuel Adams proposed nearly the opposite in a 1764 letter. "Boston,” he wrote, “might become a Christian Sparta."

But in 1819, William Tudor (a leading literary figure and co-founder of America’s first railroad) wrote a letter describing the town as "perhaps the most perfect and certainly the best-regulated democracy that ever existed. There is something so impossible in the immortal fame of Athens, that the very name makes everything modern shrink from comparison; but since the days of that glorious city I know of none that has approached so near in some points, distant as it may still be from that illustrious model."

The phrase “Athens of America” stuck. And even if the nickname does not accurately describe Boston itself (and certainly it predates Boston’s becoming America’s pro sports capital!), it does describe why Bostonians are proud of their town. We like to think that our contribution to the richness of American culture (in the arts, education, politics, science, etc.) over nearly 400 years is all out of proportion to our size and power.

Why this digression?  Because, dear reader, as a native Bostonian I not only embrace this (admittedly romantic) image of my city, but I also hold the fervent desire that it be a model for my country.

Alas, it seems to be a hopeless longing.  Many people around the globe (not only the French!) may admire American movies, our jazz, our jeans, our energy and vitality and creativity.  But despite all that, our image for most others in the world is defined by our real presence in the world—a presence that has brought (and still brings) our troops to every continent and, tragically, has left behind the victims of Washington bullets.

Must I accept that we are Sparta? 

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016

#430: 10 Reasons to Choose the Life Penalty

After several weeks of a trial to convict the Boston Marathon bomber who had already admitted his guilt, the question now is: will the jury choose life or death?

Martin Richards, the 8 year old boy killed in the Boston Marathon bombing, went to school just a few hundred yards down the street from my house.  This week his killer’s trial has entered the penalty phase, when jurors will decide if Dzhohkar Tsarnaev will be sentenced to death or to life without the possibility of parole.

But just before the penalty phase began, the boy’s family publicly requested that the death penalty be set aside.  No one suffered more than the Richards.  Martin’s sister lost a leg, his mother suffered serious injuries, and his father was forced to make the soul-rending decision to leave his dying son in order to say his sister.  Their plea now is to be released from the further suffering the death penalty would bring.  Known as active Catholics in a heavily Catholic neighborhood, the Richards intended to speak only for themselves, yet they can also be seen as representing modern Catholicism’s increasing rejection of lethal violence.

The taking of human life has many forms, but none is more central to Christianity than the death penalty.  Jesus himself was a victim of capital punishment, and the instrument of his execution--the cross--has long become the “trademark” of his followers and their faith.  Indeed, we’ve become so accustomed to the cross, and even the crucifix, that we might be shocked to imagine, as one Bostonian suggested this week, walking into a church to find Jesus hanging from a noose or strapped to an electric chair.

Most of Jesus’ apostles were also killed by the authorities.  We call them martyrs, but they effectively spent their last days on death row.  The same is true for more than a few Christian saints even into the 21^st century, executed for their faith.  The image of Christians killed by ISIS is tragically fresh news. 

Sadly, Catholics had been not only victims of the death penalty, but agents of execution as well.  The Inquisition regularly tried and condemned “heretics” and “witches,” even if the actual killing was done by civil authorities.  And we should never forget that France’s patron saint, Joan of arc, was only canonized after being burned at the stake following the Church’s condemnation.  Over the centuries, then, the Church has been both the victim and the perpetrator of the death penalty. 

But recent years have brought a dramatic shift, as Catholic teaching has come to reject virtually every argument used to justify capital punishment.  That teaching has had its effect: fewer than half of U.S. Catholics support the death penalty, down from 70% a generation ago.

But it is still worth seeing why the Church now opposes virtually any use of the death penalty, even for cases as uniquely heinous as the Boston Marathon bombing.  In view of Pope Francis’ plea to build an encounter culture, these reasons might help us to encounter others at this very moment, when the death penalty is urgently debated.

The Vatican, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the U.S. bishops collectively, and many bishops of individual states have gone on record opposing the death penalty.  They have joined together in a growing consensus about why the death penalty is wrong.  Drawing on their views, here are 10 good reasons:

1. Playing God.  Catholics believe the power over life and death belongs to God alone.  Murderers usurp that power for themselves, which is the most profound reason for calling murder evil.  And executioners, no matter how good their intentions, usurp God’s power as well.

2. Cycle of violence.  Catholics are supposed to believe that violence is not the greatest power on earth.  We believe, in fact, that love can conquer violence.  But answering violent acts that take human life by taking another human life means we give in to the power of violence and thereby perpetuate it.

3. No deterrent.  There is no evidence that executing people reduces crime.  In fact, states that execute have higher crime rates than states that don’t.  And European countries, all of whom ban executions, have much lower crime rates than the U.S.

4. Expensive and inefficient.  It cost several times more to implement a death sentence than it does to impose life without parole.  Years or decades of appeals often mean criminals eventually die on death row anyway before they can be executed.

In the specific case of the Marathon bomber, the killer’s lawyers publicly stated that, had the federal government taken capital punishment off the table, Tsarnaev would have pleaded guilty, thus avoiding any trial at all, and would already be out of sight, serving a life sentence without parole. Thus the trial was only needed for one thing: to secure a death penalty. That means that this week’s penalty phase—as well as the entire trial before--are but one wasteful part of the unnecessary price we pay by insisting on the death penalty.

5. Prolongs victims’ sufferings.  Execution is not magic.  It will not bring back the dead, or make their families suffer less.  On the contrary, the death penalty keeps a case alive far longer than the disappearing act of a life sentence.  This is precisely why the Richards family fears the anguish they will undergo after a death sentence.  The Boston Globe’s Kevin Cullen, who has listed all the terrorists already waiting on death row since 1993, predicts Tsarnaev’s death sentence would never actually be carried out.

6. Racism.  In U.S. history as well as today, minorities are disproportionately targeted by the death penalty.  In part, this reflects the difficulty poor people have obtaining effective counsel.  The result: a double standard by which better-off criminals are likely to evade the death sentence. Thus, while African-Americans make up only slightly more than 10% of the American population, they constitute more than 40% of those on death row.

7. Innocence. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 152 people sentenced to death have been exonerated since 1973. An increasing number of these were exonerated when DNA evidence proved they were innocent. On average, these people spent 11.2 years on death row before being released!

No human institution will ever be perfect, so we must always be prepared to identify and correct our errors. But once a person is executed, it is too late to correct that mistake! How many innocent have been executed before they could be exonerated? How many innocent deaths are justified by our desire to kill the guilty? 

8. Cruel and unusual?  Cruel and unusual punishment is prohibited by the U.S.  Constitution, but those words have yet to be clearly defined.  Yet every attempt to invent a more “humane” form of execution ends up in grotesque suffering, mistakes, and mishaps.  The result is the irony of people shocked to learn that a state might return to firing squads because lethal injections have proved so difficult to implement.  As the rest of the world leaves the death penalty behind, the American practice of it appears even more to be cruel and unusual. 

Some argue that while in general the death penalty is wrong, in the specific case of the Marathon bomber it is uniquely justified.  But of course that simply makes the penalty that much more unusual, and no less cruel. 

9. Last resort.  In its attempts to promote a “seamless garment of life,” the Catholic Church now teaches that the death penalty must be regarded as a last resort--to be used only when there is no other way to protect society from a criminal.  But the high security prison in Colorado to which the U.S. has already sent convicted terrorists means that any threat is removed, and any further suffering is prevented.  In practice, then, the Church’s teaching of a last resort faces us with the truth that there may be no situations where there is no other alternative.  Clearly, in this case, as in virtually every other case, life without parole is an available option.  Those seeking death face the burden of explaining why the alternative cannot be justified.

10. It is bad for us.  Virtually all advanced democracies have eliminated to the death penalty--except the U.S.  By now, moving beyond executions is the world’s mark of a truly civilized country.  Given the alternatives, capital punishment serves only one real purpose: revenge. And the world now regards revenge as a relic of a more primitive culture.  In short, the presence of the death penalty in our society separates us from the truly civilized world. Thus resorting to the death penalty appeals to the worst instincts in our nature, and makes us less as a people. 

Listen to the joint statement of Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downs, newlyweds who each lost limbs in the Boston Marathon bombing, as they describe the spiritual challenge before us all:

In our darkest moments and deepest sadness, we think of inflicting the same types of harm on him.  We wish that he could feel the searing pain and terror that for beautiful souls felt before their death, as well as the harsh reality of discovering mutilated or missing legs.  If there is any one who deserves the ultimate punishment, it is the defendant.  However, we must overcome the impulse for vengeance.  

By overcoming that impulse for vengeance, by    rising above those dark instincts and choosing life, we become more—we become a better people.  And still justice is done.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015