Humane Transcendence

In the spring of 2017, Birgitta and I visited Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp just outside of Munich.  Nothing prepares you for walking through the grounds and the museum.  It is a curated memory of human evil: desperate faces entreating you from the past, crushed under the boot of a brutal logic painted with avarice, the pleasures of cruelty, and fear.

When you leave the museum, there is an installation designed to hold a kind and human response: memorial wreaths.  This beautiful gesture appears both overshadowed by the edifice and insufficient in the space.  It echoed my own feelings: empathy and impotency.  In the face of the personalized horror here, the memorials seem like all humanity can do when facing evil – a human evil to which there seem no bounds.  The murder was a lesser crime than the utter degradation of those on their way to death and the preying on their vestiges of hope to further degrade them.  In this place, the power of evil gains ascendancy, and my reactions — rage, numbness, confusion, empathy — are reflected in the wreath and its context.

When I turned away to walk down the camp road past the restored barracks and the foundations of the demolished ones, I saw at the end a curious round building.  This appears like an afterthought.

The journey down the path lends a human scale to the horror as you pass foundation after foundation, each of which supported a building housing the desperate.  The regularity, careful organization, and scale enhanced my sense of the inhuman nature of the camp.  The memories of the faces from the museum are played on a multiplying scale of barrack after barrack.   In this rectilinear world of order and suffering, the circular building is a curiosity and almost a relief.

My memory of my feelings as we came to the end of the camp road was largely an urge to leave and a desire to be alone with my feelings.  I thought it was nice that they had built a chapel but had no great urge to pray – I’m not used to being angry at God.  However, Birgitta is made of stronger stuff and wanted to look at the chapel and the rest of the grounds.

Here you see the chapel:  a simple stone cylinder open to the camp road with a sculpture of the crown of thorns over the entrance, a plain altar at the center, and a stark wooden cross suspended above it.    I love churches – visiting cathedrals is one of my chief enjoyments while traveling Europe.  However, this chapel is different.  There are no seats in front of the altar and no place in which to take in the space comfortably.  In fact, standing in front of the altar with your back to the camp seems almost irreverent.  To consider God, even his suffering and redemption, with your back to such suffering is incongruous.  But, after a while, I noticed a curious detail.  There is a bench on the other side of the altar at the very back.  Vaguely interested with the sense that this has some purpose, I wandered around the altar, feeling at the same time a bit out of place.  Those of us with any Catholic background are not used to walking in the space behind the altar.  It is a reserved place in most Catholic churches and feels almost taboo.

After I sat down, the design of the chapel snapped into my vision.  Here I sat, for the first time in three hours, human again: able to view the camp road, barracks, and main buildings with a new viewpoint.

In this spot, there is no avoiding the camp.  On the contrary, it is an invitation to contemplate it from a new perspective.  This perspective does not avoid the horror or degradation.  It does not lessen the enormity of the crime but it is a place apart.  It is a place separated from the evil of humanity by the cross.  The journey from the outside to the inside of the chapel is a few steps but the distance is immeasurable.  It is the same distance transversed through baptism.  That place, at the back of the chapel, is a visual, architectural representation of our life set apart in Christ, brought into sharp focus by the horrific world immediately outside.  It is a life that enables empathy with all those victimized, even the actors in this camp whose hearts and humanity were degraded by their actions.

In contemplating this experience as I write about it, I am unsatisfied.  My anger, numbness, and subsequent peace through my experience at the chapel are not suffiently explained.  A skeptic would argue that this ‘peace’ on the bench of the chapel is a kind of spiritual escapism from the reality outside.

I have come to conclude that a component of the horror of the holocaust when faced clearly, is the small clear voice from history that the Nazis were not fully ‘the other’ and alien to us but were part of humanity; cultured, civilized humanity.  The simple knowledge that these humans had families, children, hopes, and dreams, yet perpetrated such horrors, is repulsive partly because of our shared humanity and culture.  There are of course many, many attempts to explain the Holocaust, but there is no escaping the reality that it was done by humans against humans, and that shared humanity is part of the horror.  The obvious conclusion is that humanity is flawed, and no veneer of civilization or culture can fully hide it.  The holocaust can be covered by anger, avoided by arrogance or purposeful forgetfulness, but my own internal sense of my sinfulness would not allow any of these solutions.

The solution — the only solution, as I was reminded in the chapel — is my new life in Christ.  As St. Paul writes in his letter to the Colossians: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

The cross is a symbol of salvation.  In Christian theology, salvation allows me to leave my sinful nature behind and become, in Christ, a new creation.  This is the death to self enacted in baptism, and in some corner of my heart, I was visually reminded of in that chapel.  I was reminded that insofar as I live in Christ (which I should do more of!), I do not share this seed of evil.  The only place for me to live in real peace is on the other side of the cross.