Auschwitz Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat, 1st-5th Nov

Last week the international Zen Peacemakers held a Bearing Witness retreat in the former Nazi camp of Auschwitz Birkenau. It is the 15th year of holding the retreat, and this year we came together as 95 people from all over the world- UK, Israel, USA, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Sweden, Brazil, Canada, Holland, France, and including a group of 20 young adults aged 16-23 from many countries, with everyone coming from many different religious and cultural backgrounds.

On Monday we visited Auschwitz I, the first camp established in the Polish town of Oswiecim by the Nazis. It's now a museum with exhibits tracing the history of the concentration camp, with a film showing footage of the prisoners just after release. The next four days were spent in Birkenau, the death camp built just outside Oswiecim to gas hundreds of thousands of victims - mostly Jews - and work many more hundreds of thousands to death in conditions of indescribable deprivation. Birkenau is a huge ruin, a graveyard, with endless broken-down barracks, fences, trees, pools of water, and the remains of the giant gas chambers and crematoria built to kill as many people as possible as cleanly and mechanically as possible.

Each day we gathered twice by the train tracks where the victims arrived, and read aloud from the endless lists of names of those who died there. In the afternoon there were inter-religious services led by clergy from four traditions - Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Muslim. We visited the barracks where women were starved before being murdered, and sang songs of healing and love led by the rabbi. We visited the children's barracks and sang lullabies for the spirits of those who had been imprisoned there.

On Thursday we were joined by a Polish former prisoner in Birkenau, one of the very few who has escaped and survived. Among the retreatants were many who had lost family members in the Holocaust, and also several people whose parents had been Nazi officers during that time.

The week was one of listening deeply to what Birkenau can teach us, grief for what happened there, and also joy shared from the goodness of so many diverse people coming together in this act of remembrence. Music, tears, anger, silence, hope, fear, and also much love.