** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 664 27 January 16 AUSCHWITZ

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY & AUSCHWITZ: IS THERE ANY LIGHT IN THAT DARKNESS?
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I possess eight shiny Auschwitz camp postcards. One shows a crematorium. Another displays electrified barbed wire. One has the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ main gate inscription. Another, a pitted execution wall. And so on.

I bought my postcards from the Auschwitz souvenir shop during a visit to Poland. Items so bad taste that I could not resist it. Today, holocaust memorial day, memories of the trip flood back.

Holocaust is a peculiarly troubling word. Because it signifies the extermination of millions of innocent Jews and others. Jewish film maker Claude Lanzmann spoke of its ‘unbearable’ echoes of religious sacrifice. He was right. A holocaust in the Old Testament means a whole sacrificial offering performed by priests in the Jerusalem Temple. To whom? To God, of course. But what kind of deity would demand millions of innocent human victims? Not a righteous, holy God, surely, but a satanic chimera, a monstrous Moloch. An intolerable, blasphemous thought. Still, the word has stuck.

Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945. A bit of a paradox. As we were guided around the camp, my nice Bielorussian friend Valery muttered: ‘Fancy the bloody Russians freeing the inmates! Because that swine of their chief, Stalin, had committed as many genocides as Hitler. Murdered millions. As the Communists entered this place, there existed plenty of Soviet concentration camps in which the prisoners were starved, tortured and done to death. Camps that kept going for years after the war was over. And Stalin’s troops raped and pillaged wherever they went. Some liberators!’ I could hardly contradict him, could I?

Another bitter irony is that remembrance of the Jewish holocaust is sometimes cynically used to justify the expropriation and oppressions of Palestinians in the Holy Land. But how can two wrongs make a right? The descendants of those who have suffered and been persecuted should have learnt the lesson. Have the roles been inverted? Even PM David Cameron, not quite an ‘extremist’, described the beleaguered Palestinian enclave of Gaza as ‘a prison camp’. All right, Israeli crimes lack the magnitude of Nazi crimes. (Is it because the world is watching?) Still, to paraphrase Jewish writer Gertrude Stein, a crime is a crime is a crime.

The Hebrew people of the Bible were a holy nation. Sanctified by their awesome covenant with their Lord, the God of Israel. A faithful God who saw them through thick and thin. From slavery in Egypt to flight into the wilderness, to a new life in the Promised Land. But the fullness of redemption could only be attained through the coming of the awaited Messiah, Jesus Christ. Another paradox: many of his own people rejected Jesus. So…what of Judaism now? St Paul’s in Romans provides the perfect answer: ‘In the end, Israel will be saved.’

The grimness of Auschwitz was overwhelming. However, for me that darkness was transfixed by a ray of celestial light. When I saw the cell, and heard the story, of Father Maximilian Kolbe. A Franciscan priest, a writer and journalist, Fr Kolbe was imprisoned in Auschwitz for scathingly condemning the German occupation, as well as saving Jews’ lives. Undaunted, in the camp Kolbe continued his ministry by secretly hearing confessions and also by smuggling in the bread and wine necessary for the Eucharist. In July 1941, following the escape of a prisoner, ten men were picked in retaliation. They were to suffer slow death by starvation. One of them broke down, wept and lamented his fate. He begged the SS to spare his life but to no avail. Fr Maximilian heard him and offered to take his place. ‘He is young and has wife and children. I am old, Take me. I will die for him’. In fact, he was only 47.

SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Karl Fritzsch, Auschwitz deputy commander, agreed. So Fr Kolbe was taken to the death chamber of cell 18, along with the others. There he prepared his fellow sufferers with prayers, psalms and readings. Two weeks later only four men were still alive – Kolbe fully conscious. Two days later his jailers injected the priest with a lethal dose of carbolic acid and he died. His sacrifice was not forgotten. Pope John Paul II proclaimed him a ‘martyr of love’ and made him a saint in 1982. And the man whose life Fr Kolbe had saved was present at the ceremony in St Peter’s.

Liberal-minded writers have rhetorically claimed that theology after Auschwitz has become difficult, almost impossible. A lazy argument and of course the priest disagrees. Theology means the science or knowledge of God and neither atheism nor ignorance is an option. Indeed, the Hebrew people suffered exterminations and massacred many times in history but God never allowed them to perish as a race…

In my parish I once organised a debate with some atheists. The hoary problem of evil raised its ugly head. A godless woman tried to score a point by asking me: ‘How can you worship a God who allows the murder of six million Jews?’
‘Ask the victims’, I replied. ‘Have the Jews given up their faith in God? They have not. The Nazis are kaput but the Jewish people and faith live on and prosper. The God you don’t believe in is trying to tell something, lady.’

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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