Friday last week was Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January. That was the date in 1945 when the Soviet Army liberated the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. The theme of this year’s commemoration is Ordinary People. It is, the organisers remind us, ordinary people who perpetrate the horrors of genocide, just as it is ordinary people who are the victims.
A few years ago on Holocaust Memorial Day, I watched an extremely powerful film on television called Holocaust: A music memorial film from Auschwitz which showed, amongst other things, how the Nazis used music as a psychological tool in their extermination camps. Of course, the Nazis were adept at the abuse of music – and to this day I cannot hear Wagner without feeling a chill of horror in my stomach.
Of course, that is nothing new. Through the ages, evil people have sought to manipulate music and indeed the other arts as well as religious faith to their own ends. One of the interesting facts that shone through the horrendous experiences of some of those forced into producing music at the death camps, and this terrible thing has clearly left deep scars in their lives as they spoke on the programme, the fact was that the music somehow in itself enabled them to go on. That even in the unspeakable evil and horror of what was going on, the music enabled these few survivors to endure, even though at a deeper level they asked the question – how could music happen in Auschwitz?
That in turn reminds me powerfully of the book I read at University as a theological student which dealt with a very similar question. It was written by Ulrich Simon, whose Jewish father, James Simon was a composer who perished at Auschwitz. Ulrich had grown up knowing Thomas Mann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but he left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. In Britain he was attracted to Anglican Christianity. He converted and was soon ordained deacon and priest, before spending most of his ministry at King’s College London as a lecturer and finally Dean. His book A theology of Auschwitz dared to look at the horrors and to seek to discover a way of atonement, forgiveness and reconciliation. A way, he concluded, that only God has the power to achieve, a way that we see in the via crucis, a way that we see in the Paschal Victory of our Saviour, though none of this is a ‘quick fix’. The reality of evil seen at Auschwitz, and tragically the genocide seen again in Bosnia, in Rwanda and Burundi, in Syria, the Central African Republic and alas elsewhere, albeit on a less industrial scale, denies any possible quick fix along the lines of a shoulder-shrugging what’s a little sin among friends?
Today we celebrate Candlemas – the end of the Christmas season, the season of the Incarnation. A time when as Christians we are forcefully reminded of our own Jewish roots as we hear of Mary and Joseph’s Presentation of their Son in the Temple. Traditionally, the feast is kept with a procession with candles – tiny flickering flames which represent the light and life of Christ, his illumination of our being. I couldn’t find enough candles for all of us today, so we’ll have to manage with just this one. Its flickering flame is such a good symbol for us. It is easily extinguished. The darkness is always there ready to take over again when the candles go out. Ulrich Simon questioned the very title of his book A Theology of Auschwitz asking whether such a thing was possible. Could theology – concerned with the light of the glorious God – actually be in such a place as Auschwitz – where the darkness was unremitting, where human depravity had sunk to its lowest possible depths?
The book is not an easy read – it wrestles with mighty problems, problems which can so easily be glossed over by so much of our modern, supposedly enlightened, liberal thought. Simon argued until his death against the trivialisation of faith and religious practice – rightly – because to trivialise is to blow out the candle of the light of Christ, and to extinguish the possibility of light – to allow the Auschwitzs of our world to be the final solution of the rule of enslavement to death and destruction.
But in the face of this world’s darkest places, Christian people are to hold their candles symbolising the light of their Saviour. A light which is to penetrate our very being to the core – judging, exposing, purifying, healing. If we let it. And there is the problem for us. For before we can be healed, we have to accept the judgement that letting the light of Christ into our lives brings – even when it is not a pleasant vision. As one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, W H Auden, had it towards the end of The Age of Anxiety where one of the four strangers who meet in a bar in New York on All Souls’ night muses
Yet the noble despair of the poets
Is nothing of the sort; it is silly
to refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry – ‘Miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am.’
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
The candle is only a candle, only a light, because of its willingness to change from the pristine piece of wax we light down to something progressively smaller, though with no less molecules at the end than at the beginning, just in different places. It is only a light because it gives itself away – and so such a good symbol of Christ our Light and our Lord.
Christ saved humanity from its pagan madness by first submitting to that madness, even unto death, and turning it on its head. The victims of Auschwitz also died because of an evil madness that wished to extinguish the light and rule the world in a dark nihilism. But they also died because a certain way of thinking about the Jews and their part in the passion of Christ had developed at a popular level, and was enacted throughout medieval Europe – particularly at the time of Holy Week and Easter. It was easy enough for the dark genius of Hitler to turn that ancient suspicion to his advantage – to turn a whole race into the scapegoat upon which German sins could be unloaded. Folk memory, painful economic times and high unemployment combined with an humiliating history did the rest.
Today, Candlemas, we call to mind the words of Simeon, the priest, who rejoiced to see Christ’s birth. He acclaimed him as the Light to enlighten the Gentiles. It was indeed an inspired description, but one that was the fulfilment of Israel’s destiny. Israel was chosen by God to be the light to enlighten the Gentiles – the Temple was to be a place of prayer for all the nations – as Jesus was later to remind some of his critics. He also predicted how a sword would pass through Mary’s heart.
We cannot ascribe meaning or purpose to something as dark and dreadful as the Holocaust. But it has changed Israel’s relationship with the rest of the world, and certainly it has changed the relationship of Judaism and Christianity. I doubt that Nostra Aetate – the decree of the Second Vatican Council on other world religions which gave special place and prominence to the Jewish faith as Christianity’s parent – would have been published before the Holocaust. If that is so, it is a terrifying reminder of just how blind our supposed faith can be.
It is all too easy for Israel, with such a history, to feel that the Holocaust lies like an irredeemable weight on the land, a vast unseen burden that cannot be shaken off and that colours everything that happens now and to the future. More positively though, such a burden could be a reminder to Israel to be, as Simeon prophesied of the Anointed One from God’s Ancient People, a light to the nations.
And being a light brings with it responsibility – as we think today of our Christian pilgrimage. Just as the Holocaust was an act of the darkest evil barbarism that the world has ever known, it began by identifying a scapegoat. Today’s leaders of Israel have a difficult task in balancing national security against the irrational paranoia which again is all too ready to identify and eliminate scapegoats. Just as other world leaders, and potential ones, need to beware of the tendency to repeat the dynamic towards, amongst others, the followers of Islam. We need to remember Auden’s words:
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
Christ is our light – his light scatters all darkness. And all of our illusions, whether they are about ourselves or about identifying scapegoats, belong to that realm of darkness. We know where those illusions will ultimately lead us if we follow them. To climb the cross of the moment is never easy – but it is to live in the Light and Obedience of Christ.