What I Learned From Auschwitz

[Modem Butterfly]

I found this webpage a couple of years ago and for some reason found myself thinking about it today. It's my first day back at the office after a week's vacation which was spent moving house, so maybe the words "Arbeit Macht Frei" were rattling around in my brain. Anyway, the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors wrote this webpage, "An Auschwitz Alphabet" in an effort to make sense of the Holocaust and his grandparents' experience. It's an interesting read if only from a psychological standpoint, but the really stand-out exerpt is here:

http://www.spectacle.org/695/essay.html

Nevertheless, in compiling An Auschwitz Alphabet, I learned a few things.

There is no God

The most important lesson one can learn from Auschwitz is that God does not exist. Occam's Razor tells us not to search for a complicated explanation when a simple one is available. Ever since Auschwitz, theologians have had to go through major contortions to hold onto an image of God. There are only two possibilities: either God caused (or at least permitted) the destruction of the Jews, the Gypsies and the other victims, or God does not care. The first approach is unacceptable for two reasons. It means that entire groups of people may be indicted based on race or other identity, which is contrary to everything I believe. And it makes God out to be a mass murderer. On the other hand, if God does not care, why believe in Him? An uncaring God is either a cruel and negligent one, or, even worse, a God who is unaware of humans and their plight. This latter--the God of Spinoza and of Freud's psychotic Dr. Schreber--is really just a metaphysical formulation bearing little or no relationship to the popular idea of God as a being who intervenes in human history.

Although there are only two possibilities, there is a third approach to retaining belief in God: shut up and stop asking questions. Interestingly, this is the message not of God but the devil to the knight in Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Probably, the majority of those who believe in a Jewish or Christian God today-- at least I hope it is the majority--simply do not confront God with the question of how He could let Auschwitz happen. But this approach is not acceptable to those who believe that there is no area off-limits to human questioning.

By far the simplest explanation for Auschwitz is that there is no God to intervene in human affairs. No deity exists to care what we do to each other. All compassion and all hatred in the human universe is ours. We are on our own.

[beam me up scottie]

1. My mother lived through the hell

that was Germany in WWII.
I never needed to ask why she didn't believe.

[Book Lover]

2. For my money, here's the quote that stopped me

When crowds rescue a victim, someone has acted first, and others followed. When crowds stand by, no-one has taken the initiative. Most people are probably poised precariously on the edge between action and inaction, between good and evil. Everything depends on the one who steps forward.

[Modem Butterfly]

3. This is a person who has spent a great deal of time in thought...

If nothing else, this is the most thoughtful essay on the Holocaust in general and Auschwitz in particular that I have read in some time.

[Gelliebeans]

4. great essay

[fshrink]

5. Actually, there's a third possibility,

which is also sorta the "official" one. The god has "chosen" the jewish people , in a grander scheme of things (the "mysterious ways" just as it designed its "son" as jewish. Again, this rests on the systematic association of hate with love, pain with pleasure, freedom with slavery, etc... which serves so well when it's about controlling people.

[onager]

6. I remember seeing a TV interview...

...with a Jewish man who survived Auschwitz. When the war was over, he emigrated to the United Kingdom.

Just in time to hear the Chief Rabbi in Great Britain at the time publicly ask: "What did the Jews do to deserve their treatment by the Nazis?"

The interview subject said: "At that moment, when I heard that question, I became an atheist."

A friend's parents both survived the Holocaust, though both lost all their immediate family members. His mother finished the war in Auschwitz.

She was a German Jew. My friend said she tried to watch some TV movie about the Holocaust once. She got up after a few minutes and left the room, angrily giving the flick a one-word review in German: "Kinderspiel!" ("Child's play.")

[beam me up scottie]

7. My mom wouldn't

watch any WWII documentaries or movies.
She rarely talked about her experiences.
I can't imagine what it was like for a child to see such horrors.

[onager]

9. There's a small hint...

...in that Wim Wenders movie I've raved about, "Wings Of Desire." He uses some WWII footage of Berlin. The shots of the dead lined up in the streets after bombing raids include quite a few dead children and infants. It's hard to even LOOK at that, let alone imagine people living thru it.

That reminds me of another story in re: "The Great Sky-Pixie Sho' Do Work In Mysterious Ways."

I went to Berlin not long after the Wall came down (I was working in Saudi Arabia at the time). My hotel was on the big shopping/fun street, the Kurfurstendamm (or "Ku-damm" to the locals).

The Ku-damm is anchored by the burnt-out hulk of the Kaiser Church, its walls left standing after WWII as a peace memorial.

Almost EVERY building in the area was flattened or burned out by WWII bombings. As you walk along the street, you occasionally see an old pre-war facade that was saved and used during the postwar rebuilding.

But in the same area is a private club originally opened for Nazi bigwigs, the Club Dorett. Its advertising boasts that it never closed, even during the war, and has been open continuously since 1943. It provides...cough..."gentlemen's entertainment."

So the Awmitey Gawd who sees every sparrow fall also saw every building in that neighborhood collapse on the heads of the residents during WWII. All except one building--a brothel.

Dammit, there MUST be a Profound Theological Lesson in there SOMEWHERE.

[beam me up scottie]

10. Just shows how evil you

you are for even questioning his wisdom...
I was in Germany just before the Wall came down.
If I would have been smart, I would have left my husband's ass then, quit my job and moved to Europe with my parents.
But I loved him.:eyes:

[Warpy]

14. The only part my dad ever talked about

was how he was a civilian engineer in Italy and got his draft notice when he was sitting in a trench during an air raid.

He never talked about the horrors he saw. I'm sure he saw plenty, even though he was kept behind the lines doing his engineering job.

[beam me up scottie]

15. Makes me want to

wrap the fucking chicken hawks in flags and drop them in the middle of Faluja.

Victims of war, veterans and refugees, do not brag about their experiences.

They don't romanticize the killing or pretend they were heroes.

And they don't condemn others to the same fate for greed or power.

I am normally sickened by violence but if somebody were to mount the emperor, cheney, rumsferatu and the rest of the chicken hawks on the gun turrets of tanks (preferably by anally impaling them on flagpoles) and then sent them out into the streets of Baghdad, I doubt I'd feel even a nanosecond of pity.

[Modem Butterfly]

8. When I first discovered this website...

...I kept this idea in my backpocket to use on Xians who would invade Atheist chatspace and bulletin boards. I would ask them how their god, who is supposed to be the literal embodiment of love and justice, would allow this to happen. I would ask them to explain how the Holocaust fit into their religion. The answers I got appalled me at first, then just became depressing in their repetitiveness and latent anti-semitism.

[onager]

12. Not to mention Gawd's Official Mouthpieces...

I just posted this in an R&T thread. In response to some whining about poor ol' Pope Pius XII being the victim of a "smear campaign:"



The cover photo shows two-year-old Fiorella Anticoli, seized with her entire family in the infamous roundup of almost 1,300 Roman Jews on 16 October 1943.

The arrests were carried out by units of the S.S. specially trained for such "actions" and sent to the Italian capital for the purpose.

Working under the very walls of the Vatican, the operation had to be carried out as efficiently and with as little tumult and commotion as possible.

http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/dpf/Fascism/Images/FRY63.html

[Warpy]

11. Few people east of the Suez believe in the personal, accessible

god of the Sunday School crowd in America and most find the belief both arrogant and laughable. The god of these peoples (whether Allah or what the Hindus see as the true force behind their panoply of gods) is completely unknowable and inaccessible. One never knows why things happen on earth because the will of this god works in ways no mortal can possibly understand. There's none of this mawkish stuff about a god who is all good and tolerant and forgiving, either.

Personally, I think the Taoists may have come closest to the truth with the characterization of the entire universe as a living organism that doesn't know it's alive.

In any case, I remain an insignificant being on a small planet on the outer rim of an ordinary galaxy in a completely impersonal universe.

I certainly can't reconcile the horrors of the past century with any sort of loving being who is minutely concerned with events on earth. I can't even reconcile it with things that have happened in my own life.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

13. Taoists

"Personally, I think the Taoists may have come closest to the truth with the characterization of the entire universe as a living organism that doesn't know it's alive."

The interaction between its parts is too basic and feeble. OTOH, I've thought the same thing about biospheres. (I believe they call it the Gaia Hypothesis)