Dursley Tabernacle URC

D U R S L E Y T A B E R N A C L E

Auschwitz Visit: Second Page

This building housed the crematorium and gas chamber at Auschwitz.

And the entrance to the camp – Arbeit Macht Frei. Work will set you free

This was the view that greeted new arrivals to the camp.

And this is the larger of the two camps – Birkenau – remember here it is what I didn’t see that affected me – and the train track stretching all the way to the end of the camp where the crematoria lay.

Looking right out of a guard tower, one can see the stables – housing 1000 people each when they were designed to hold 50 horses – stretching off to the horizon – and further back the chimneys, where one sees – and feels – emptiness. Great, vast, emptiness. The chimneys constitute all the remains of the buildings razed by the SS in an attempt to bury all evidence.

Here are the remains of crematoria 2. None of the Birkenau crematorium remains standing – one was destroyed by the prisoners in a short lived rebellion, the rest by the guards.

Here are the candles of remembrance left by us after an emotionally charged service by Rabbi Barry Marcus next to the ravaged remains of crematoria 2. In opening the service, Rabbi Marcus sang to us a prayer in Hebrew that I will now pray to you in its English translation: EL MOLEI RACHAMIM:

Oh, God full of mercy, Who dwells on High. Grant proper rest on the sheltering wings of Your Divine presence, among the holy and pure who shine like the brightness of the firmament, for the souls of all the holy the pure and the innocent who were killed, murdered, slaughtered, burned, drowned and strangled at the hands of the Nazi oppressors in Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and other extermination camps in Europe.

We now pray for those souls. May their resting places be in the Garden of Eden. And so may the Master of Mercy shelter them for eternity with the cover of His wings, and may He bind their souls in the bond of eternal life.

May the Lord be their inheritance, and may they repose in peace upon their heavenly resting places, and let us say, Amen!

I speak to you on a day of remembrance. But for the Holocaust, and for the people who died unjustly within it, we must do more than just remember. What happened in Nazi occupied Europe must never happen again, and yet today persecution is rife in our country and many others – for race, for colour, for religious beliefs, for secular beliefs, for sexuality, for social class. What good is remembering, if we stand by now as others stood by then? Einstein said “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” We must not look on and do nothing. We must aid those who need aid and protect those who need protection, feed the hungry and shelter the outcast.

In the words of Edmund Burke, an 18^th century British statesman:

“All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.”

I would like to leave you with a prayer by Abraham Shlonsky, one of the greatest Hebrew poets of the last century, written after a visit to the Nazi death camps:

With the sanction of my eyes that have seen the mourning

and burdened by heart which with wailing was bowed,

with the sanction of my compassion which told me to pardon,

so that days came threatening forgiveness,

I vowed: I will remember it all,

remember, and forget not a thing.