It's time the lesson of Auschwitz was learned afresh in our souls

Published on Monday 26 January 2009 21:06

LAST April, my oldest son and I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. It was a personal pilgrimage, one I'd long wanted to make.

It was awful. It is awful.

I'd read the stories, visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, seen footage of the Shoah, but to be there is utterly chilling. Despite the crowds and accompanying organisation, the reality reaches the soul.

The gates Arbeit macht frei (Work Brings Freedom), the high barbed wire fencing, the bleak terrain, the rain, the primitive huts, the horrific railway line, the one crematorium not demolished, the remains of the gas chambers dynamited in a failed attempt to destroy the damning evidence; the firing squad wall, the hook from which prisoners were hung, hands tied behind their backs, a punishment from which only death made free; the bottle cells, one metre square, into which four people at a time were left to die.

The barbarism is unimaginable, and we must never forget. And although it brings little comfort, or even hope, this is a pilgrimage everyone should make, even in their imagination, lest we forget our capacity for "man's inhumanity to man".

And I say "our" deliberately, for the first mistake is to think only others are capable of such barbarity. The line between good and evil does not lie between you and me, it goes through my soul.

Last August, the Ukrainian Consul General paid me a courtesy visit in my office. He told me of the Holodomor when, between 1932 and 1933 over eight million Ukrainians were the victims of genocide; peasant farmers systematically killed and starved to death by the Soviet army. I'd never heard of the Holodomor, and I don't believe I am alone.

Recently we have become aware of five million Congolese citizens murdered; but no-one will use the word genocide, as the United Nations would be obliged to take action.

And Cambodia (eight million Buddhists massacred), Darfur, and Srebrenica – all which occurred within our memory.

But the world community merely wrings its hands and tries to remember, but prefers to forget. We're all busy people, with more pressing and private concerns.

In Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan, the two passers-by who ignored the man left for dead were not necessarily any different from the rest of us.

They were simply asking the question: "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" Jesus makes the hero of the story a man of a different faith, who turns the question around: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

If we try to look at the issues that make people behave in such a brutal fashion, there are still lessons to be learned from history, including British and Christian history, for our record towards people of other faiths and other nations and other races is not without shame.

Even a cursory glance at some of the Nazi philosophy allows us to see that there is still similar pernicious thinking prevailing today, and not always below the surface.

The first people to be sent to Auschwitz were Poles displaced from their villages and farms to provide lebensraum for the German people.

Living space is still at the root of many of our current conflicts. "This is our land, you have no place here". It has led to ethnic cleansing, by violence in some instances, by stealth in others. "We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we will perish together as fools" said Martin Luther King.

The doctrine of the master race has not died. When a nation, on the pretext of race or religion, regards some of its inhabitants as second class citizens, denying them the basic human rights given to those in power, and routinely harasses and humiliates them, then Aryanism is not dead. Forcing people to live in latter day ghettos or reservations is the same mentality; it justifies scapegoating and victimisation, guerrilla-type terror tactics and state intimidation. The end point is reprisal killing, even of children.

"Butter will make us fat, guns will make us strong," said Goebbels. Nations are still tempted to regard military might as the main basis of their strength. "Mach macht recht" was the Nazi phrase "Might is right."

Does the proliferation of arms really make the world more secure? The worm will turn. The human spirit will not finally be crushed, and a healthy society can only be built on sound moral foundations of honesty, integrity and caring.

There may be much suffering before that comes to pass, but Martin Luther King used to say that unmerited suffering is one of the ways God brings about change. A lie will not live forever. "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet the scaffold sways the future…" (Lowell).

Truth will out, no matter the attempts to suppress it, or to rewrite history by airbrushing out the atrocities.

St Augustine said a long time ago: "The weapons with which I destroy my enemy must first pass through my own heart".

The challenge for people of faith, for people from all religions, is to recognise that too often in the past – and even in the present – religion has been used to divide, separate, and ostracise; and we have to admit that sometimes religion does not bring out the best but brings out the worst in people – see Holy Willie's Prayer in this week of celebrating Robert Burns.

All true faiths promote compassion, justice, tolerance, magnanimity, and a way of living together in peace which does not deny others the right to life and livelihood. And all religions recognise that we are sooner or later accountable to God, that "man proposes, but God disposes".

We remember best and honour best the victims of the Holocaust and the Holodomor and the Congo and Pol Pot and Sebrenica and Darfur if we order our lives personally, nationally and internationally, to ensure that never again do we make victims of anyone.

&#149 The Rt Rev David Lunan is the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.