Suffer the Children

Last week in my reflection on the movie The Zone of Interest, I wrote about my experience visiting the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem when I was in the Holy Land in 2008 with other clergy from the Diocese of Huron.  The experience left a lasting impact on me and has been on my mind frequently in the past week especially as I reflect on what is happening in Gaza and the war between Israel and Hamas.

The horror of the attack by Hamas on Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023, was the most devastating for Israel since the horrors which were depicted in the Museum.  It is helpful in understanding the response by Israel to that day.   Here are some of my reflections in response to that visit.

·         Children’s memorial - devastating in its simplicity and stark realization that 1.5 million children died before they could really live.  The building is in the shape of the pyramid.  Inside the stars shine in the sky to represent the children.  The names, age and nationality are recited over the loudspeaker in English and Hebrew.  We are asked to remember one child, Shomo Klien, age 14.

 

·         We are led through exhibits, documentaries, and testimonials of those who survived.  The starkest was the mountain of shoes – a dark testimony to what became of the people who wore them? 

 

·         Lodz Ghetto – Mordeci Run Kowski, the Ghetto President, was forced to choose.  Anyone who could not work lost the right to live.  Anyone under ten lost the right to live.  The elderly and the sick lost the right to live.  They were chosen, thousands demanded by the Nazis.  Mothers are forced to give up their children.  Many didn’t. The agony of having to make such a choice and forcing such choices on parents.  If he did not decide the Nazis would and chose more.

 

·         Dream of Abramek Kaplowics age 14 murdered at Auschwitz:

When I grow up and get to be twenty, I’ll travel and see the world of plenty.  In a bird with an engine, I will set myself down, take off and fly into space, far above the ground.  I’ll fly, I’ll cruise and soar high above the world so lovely in the sky. And so delighted by all the world’s charms, into the heavens I will take off and not have a bother.  The cloud is my sister, the wind my brother.

·         Flames in the Ashes, an excerpt from a film by Chaim Guriand Jaque Erlich.  A carnival with acrobats performing over a beautiful Sunday afternoon outside Auschwitz.

 

With all this that must overwhelm visitors with the impact of that horror, I cannot help but ask, what if another name was added to names of the innocents broadcast at the entrance to the Museum – the name of one of the Palestinian children killed in the war on Hamas: Abdul Rahman Alaa Imad Al-Ajl (age 2 years)? 

May all the innocent who have died in war be remembered and be blessed. 

The Banality of Evil Beyond the Wall

The banality of evil; writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt used this phrase to describe what she witnessed at the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was one of the leaders of the Nazi regime in Germany and an organizer of the Holocaust. 

That phrase came to mind when I experienced the movie, The Zone of Interest, last week.  To say that I “saw” the movie would not do justice to the experience.  The Zone of interest is an historical drama adapted from the 2014 novel by Martin Amis.   It is based on real events of the protagonist, Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp.  The movie opens with a rather mundane scene of family life in what appeared to be the 1940’s in Europe – probably Germany based on the language the family spoke.  As they live their lives there seems to be little out of the ordinary – the very ordinary.  They go about the routine of living ordinary lives in a nice house which is surprisingly sparse – few pictures on the wall or decorations of any kind.  A servant girl who does not speak and goes about her duties without comment by the housewife.  The children go off to school. A family pet, a black dog, wanders around without interacting with the people in the house.  A little peculiar but a life not particularly out of the ordinary. 

Slowly signs creep in that perhaps not all is well.  We see a wall in the well cared for garden which is eventually revealed as the concentration camp.  We hear sounds of what is happening behind those walls; occasional gun shots, cries of pain and anguish, dark smoke pouring out of the many smokestacks.  The father takes the children to play in the river that runs through this landscape.  All is well until the father discovers something in the river and panics and pulls the children out of the water, rushing home to have them sanitized.  This turns out to be a jawbone, apparently of one of the prisoners in the camp who was exterminated.  Reality encroaching on an apparently banal family life.

The experience of watching the movie brought to mind one of the things I saw visiting the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem when I was in the Holy Land in 2008.  There was a short film on continual loop, showing a scene of people enjoying a carnival outside a concentration camp, probably in prewar Germany.  The carnival was typical of the type of carnival that used to be set up for short periods in a local park with rides and carnival music and games of chance.  I spent many happy hours in that carnival enjoying the rides and games to the extent my limited funds would allow.  The film showed people having fun and apparently oblivious to what was happening on the other side of the wall.  The Zone of Interest showed a display of hundreds, if not thousands of pairs of shoes taken from prisoners when they arrived at the camp.  This was similar to a display at the Holocaust Museum which could not fail to move those who saw it as did many other exhibits.

The question we are left with is, how could ordinary people sit by and allow such evil to grow and thrive and infect the world.  To draw on the poet W.B. Yates, do we have eyes to see the “rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”  Today, there is evidence of that rough beast at work in Ukraine, in Israel, and in Gaza, and who knows where else in the world.  It is easy to not be moved when it is not on the other side of the wall in our back yard and not be moved by the news in the media that inundates our lives.  People can be convinced that it doesn’t matter, that the ones affected are not actually human beings like us. The appearance of evil may be banal but the effect of it is not. 

On our journeys, may we be blessed to have eyes to see what is happening on the other side of the wall. 

 of the wall.

Whose Amazing Grace

I was driving the car last week and listening to a program on CBC Radio 1 – The Next Chapter.  It was an interview with Christina Sharpe the author of Ordinary Notes.  As the on-line material for the program states, the book “explores the everyday complexities of Canadian Black life in her work as a professor and shares those experiences in her new form-defying book.” 

Sharpe provides an interesting and evocative perspective on the ‘black experience’.  One statement that particularly caught my attention was her critique of the song Amazing Grace.  Here is part of Clarke’s critique of this iconic song of redemption discussing Barack Obama singing the song during the eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a mass shooting at a Charleston church:

And then, of course, when he sings it’s the opposite of Glover’s tapping. He had to sing “Amazing Grace” because “Amazing Grace” is precisely that unhearable Black suffering. It’s precisely that song of romance and redemption because we know John Newton’s history. We know that he keeps working on the slave ships after his conversion and it’s only later that he writes “Amazing Grace.”

To sing “Amazing Grace” is to mispronounce the song. And it’s always trying to articulate. It is to insist on a romance of salvation in which the grace is for Newton. The grace is not for us. It is to misunderstand the genesis and the subject of the song and the violence that the song never begins to deal with. The song has long elided its origins and attached itself to the fascia of Black spirituality. When we sing this, who is the wretch? Who was lost? Who was found? Who is in need of redemption? It is about Newton’s journey; it has nothing to do with the horrors and terrors of slavery for the enslaved.

Amazing Grace has become the iconic theme for freedom and redemption.  Sharpe’s critique of the song made me figuratively, if not literally, sit up and take note (remember I was driving in my car, so I was already sitting up).  As Sharpe states, the song expressed the redemption of the composer, John Newton who was a slave trader and recognized the wrong he had committed and was redeemed.  It was not about the redemption of black people who had been enslaved.  Sharpe states, the song has “attached itself to the fascia of Black spirituality.”  It has become an iconic ‘spiritual’ anthem in black culture. 

The question that I have when considering this is, can this song be an anthem for black people given that is all about the redemption of the composer who did go on to fight to abolish the slave trade?  That cannot be answered by me, an old white guy.   But it is legitimately for me to ask, is it appropriate for people to use a song which expresses the universal truth of the experience of redemption and forgiveness, if it is written by someone who is expressing experience which is not one you share?  I can think of the Israelites being freed from slavery in Egypt.  I am not Jewish and was never enslaved in Egypt.  Can that story of a people being freed from slavery not be true for me and represent the breaking of metaphorical chains which enslave each of us?  One definition of sin which resonates with me is, the things which chain us to the past.  That is a common experience which people can relate to, and it is, in part, why the story of Moses leading the Israelites to freedom has resonated through the millennia. 

So, was Obama wrong to sing Amazing Grace at the funeral of a black pastor who was murdered in a mass killing?   Can the song legitimately represent the fight against the continuing legacy of slavery in the United States?  It certainly resonated with people and the song, it seems, is the anthem of freedom for black, at least in the United States.  Sharpe gives a thoughtful critique of that event and, by implication, how the song is used more generally.  It is worth deeper reflection on the questions that it poses.

May we be blessed on our journey to have those chains which enslave us broken.