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Our Past in Present Tense

 “Why, Lord, Did You Remain Silent?

Dr. Yehuda Shabatay                                                                            .
San Diego Jewish Times, June 30, 2006

On Sunday, May 28, Pope Benedict XVI passed by a barbed-wire fence as he entered the Auschwitz death camp that was set up by his countrymen, and asked God why He allowed such an “unprecedented horror” to occur. Then he walked under the infamous wrought-iron sign declaring Arbeit macht frei (Work makes one free), and past red brick barracks that once housed mostly Jews, but also Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other victims of the Nazi Third Reich. That place of infamy in which two million men, women, and children were exterminated, was silent “except for the tolling of church bells and the chirping of birds” — in the words of a Los Angeles Times reporter who followed the Pope. As His Holiness reached the Wall of Death, a concrete slab where entire groups of prisoners were summarily executed, Benedict stopped to greet 30 elderly survivors of Auschwitz and the neighboring Birkenau concentration camp. Then he declared: “In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: ‘Why, Lord, did you remain silent?’”

With all the due respect to the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, it is far too easy to take God to task when clerics, as well as lay leaders who claimed to speak in His name, not only condoned, but even encouraged the slaughter of other human beings. As a former “unwilling” member of the Hitler youth movement, and then of the German army during World War II, Pope Benedict should have known what led to the “Final Solution” of the Jewish “problem.” In a highly respected scholar’s opinion: “Germany during the Nazi period was inhabited by people animated by beliefs about Jews that made them willing to become consenting mass executioners” (Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, page 455).

As to the Pope’s emphasis on his own “unwilling” participation in the Hitlerjugend organization, I cannot help but recall the defense a large number of citizens in my native Hungary parroted after the war: “I was only a small Fascist.” That defense was accepted in Germany, too, because the country’s post-war leadership found it impossible to take to task millions of their fellow citizens for being enamored with the Nazi ideology and acting in accordance with their leader’s every wish. But in far too many cases even the ordinary soldiers were clearly culpable. In Goldhagen’s conclusion: “Suffering and torture in the German camp world was not incidental, episodic, or a violation of the rules, but central, ceaseless, and normative. Gazing upon a suffering or recently slaughtered Jew, or, for that matter a suffering Russian or Pole did not elicit, and, according to the moral life of the camp, should not have elicited sympathy….” (p. 457).

As a former Hitler youth, Pope Benedict ought to have remembered the Nazi doctrine whereby the human race consisted of Uebermenschen (Supermen), i.e., Aryan Christians among whom the Germans occupied the top rank. At the bottom of humanity stood the Jews, whose eradication was an absolute necessity. Therefore, the Pope’s description of his fellow Germans as “victims of the Nazis” is far from accurate and it serves only one purpose: to excuse all “willing executioners” among them from guilt. It certainly does not help the present generation of his faithful followers to find a proper spiritual path that leads to the love of their neighbors, which is commanded in the Bible over and over again.

I must confess that I myself, and many of my fellow Jews, have also asked: “Where was God in Auschwitz?” But at some stage I realized that it is far too easy to take God to task for remaining silent while millions of His creatures were tortured and exterminated, tens of millions expelled from their homes, deprived of their livelihood, and enslaved. The answer I found was in the Psalms: “The heaven belongs to the Lord, but the earth He gave to human beings” (115:16). Thus, whether we like it or not, it is our obligation to speak up when we witness criminal acts in our society, and to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God” (Micah 6:8).

I am sorry to state that, to my knowledge, the first time the present Pope’s predecessor, Pius XII, made an effort to help the Jews was in June, 1944, when he joined President Roosevelt, King Gustav of Sweden, and the President of the Red Cross in an appeal to the Governor of Hungary, urging him to halt the deportations to Auschwitz. (Leni Yahil, The Holocaust, page 514). Unfortunately, that appeal came far too late for millions of our brothers and sister in Nazi-occupied Europe, including all the Jews of Hungary who lived outside Budapest. But prior to that date, the Vatican and the overwhelming majority of the Christian clergy were silent – if not supportive of the idea to make the world Judenrein — free of the accursed Jews.

Therefore, if I were in Pope Benedict’s place, I would refrain from asking why God remained silent in the midst of all that tragedy. On the contrary, I would recite mea culpa (my fault) daily and urge all my followers to take personal responsibility for fighting injustice whenever and wherever they may witness it. For it is our task — not God’s — to make this globe a pleasant place for all its inhabitants today, rather than wait for a heavenly interference that may occur at some future time.

Dr. Yehuda Shabatay received rabbinical training in Budapest, a master of jurisprudence degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his doctorate in Hebrew literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. He was engaged in Jewish educational administration over most of his career and now teaches Jewish studies and history at Palomar College and San Diego State University.