Two significant if contrasting landmarks of the past week were the 70th anniversary last Sunday of Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass, and the visit to Auschwitz two days ago of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi. While the first may be seen to commemorate the nadir of Christianity’s rejection of Judaism, the image of the two faith leaders as colleagues and equals at the scene of man’s greatest inhumanity to man provides an eloquent counterpoint.
Recent research has suggested that the devastation of Kristallnacht was far greater than that indicated by official records. As opposed to figures of some 190 synagogues burnt and 96 Jews killed, it is claimed that more than 1,500 synagogues were burnt and at least 2,500 Jews murdered or driven by despair to commit suicide, as well as tens of thousands of Jewish-owned shops and businesses ransacked.
While it is clear that this contemporary “pogrom” was perpetrated by heathens — indeed it is believed by some that Hitler himself may have thrown a match into a tinderbox at one important synagogue — it is important to note the indifference, at best, of bystanders, even men and women of faith, to the destruction of the most visible symbols of Judaism.
Indeed, only one German prelate, Bernhard Lichtenberg, Rector of Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin, had the courage to publicly denounce the outrages.
In effect, then, Kristallnacht may be considered the culmination of the centuries-old Christian “teaching of contempt” towards Jews, the “Christ killers”, and their religion.
If Kristallnacht was a harbinger of the Holocaust, Auschwitz is, unquestionably, perceived as the ultimate symbol. Coinciding with the Kristallnacht anniversary was the discovery in a Berlin flat of blueprints of the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz under the imprint of Heinrich Himmler, indicating that the genocide of European Jewry was planned before the Wannsee Conference in 1942, when the Final Solution is held to have been launched.
The impetus for the extermination at Auschwitz and other camps of anyone with Jewish blood, even those who had converted to Christianity, was not, however, the teaching of contempt but the racial anti-Semitism propagated in the 19th century by Wilhelm Marr.
Away from the extermination camps, the suffering and terror inflicted on the Jewish population throughout Nazi-occupied Europe evoked the compassion of a number of “Righteous Gentiles” — ordinary individuals and families and also men and women in religious orders — who risked their lives to shelter Jews. Despite the controversy surrounding the record of Pope Pius XII, research has shown that the Vatican was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish lives and hundreds of Italian Jews were given shelter in the Vatican precincts.
These instances of humanitarianism may be seen as a precursor of Christian-Jewish relations which developed in the aftermath of the Second World War, inspired in great part by leading figures in the Christian world, anxious to make amends after the full horrors of the Holocaust became known.
In the summer of 1947 a conference of the newly formed International Council of Christians and Jews was held at Seelisberg in Switzerland, leading to the publication of The Ten Points of Seelisberg which, while making no reference to the Holocaust, validated the Old Testament as the word of God and emphasised the Jewishness of Jesus and His followers, thereby nullifying key factors intrinsic to the “Teaching of Contempt”. Eighteen years later Nostra Aetate, a declaration by the Second Vatican Council, acknowledged that the Jewish people could not be held responsible for the death of Jesus and that Judaism was a valid faith with its own path to salvation. This was undoubtedly a high point in the history of Christian-Jewish relations.
Goodwill between the faiths was threatened when, in August 1984, a group of Carmelite nuns moved into the “old theatre”, a building adjacent to the walls of the Auschwitz camp where the Zyklon B poison used in the gas chambers had been stored.
While it is common knowledge that the Nazis’ victims at Auschwitz had included Gypsies, political prisoners and others as well as Jews, Jewish opinion throughout the world was inflamed at the concept of a convent at the site where more than a million Jews were murdered — a site that, in Jewish tradition, should not be sacralised but left desolate.
It may not be surprising, however, that many Poles saw fit to claim Auschwitz for themselves since the virtual annihilation of European Jewry had been barely acknowledged in Eastern Europe during the communist era, with Jews — Zydow — invariably at the end of any list of Hitler’s victims. The ground was now laid for the 15-year “Battle for Auschwitz”.
Landmarks include declarations at Geneva by well-meaning Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders stipulating that the Carmelites should be relocated at a new centre to be built some 500m outside the confines of the camp; the erection, in defiance, by the nuns of the 7ft cross used by Pope John Paul II at a Mass at Auschwitz in 1980; demonstrations near the convent by activists on both sides and the field of crosses erected by Catholic militants to “defend” the Cross.
The Polish Primate, Cardinal Glemp, fuelled anti-Semitism by evoking the theme of Jews controlling the world in a sermon at Czestochowa and seemingly recanted by signing a letter affirming the Geneva accords.
The Pope himself was obliged to intervene at a later stage when the Carmelite Mother Superior proved particularly recalcitrant. In the end, the Carmelites moved, the field of crosses was dismantled but the “Papal cross” remained.
The visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi, a significant testimony of harmony and healing, was under the auspices of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz project.
“The Holocaust did not happen far away, in some distant time and in another kind of civilisation,” said the Chief Rabbi. “We cannot change the past, but by remembering the past, we can change the future.”
Accompanied by representatives of all the religious communities in the UK and by 200 schoolchildren, the faith leaders demonstrated their solidarity against the extremes of hostility and genocide of which Auschwitz is so potent a representation and which have recurred in more recent times, notably in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. As the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, put it: “Our hope is that in making this journey together, we also travel towards the God who binds us together in protest and grief at this profanation.”
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(Source: TTO)