Even 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, visitors describe the effect of this place as a speechless Mach horror. There is a lack of voice, the witnesses through the near Silence of the last time is larger rather than smaller seems. The Shoah, the murder of six million Jews, and the Lessons we can draw from this is to have a fundamental importance for our understanding of ourselves as citizens of this state.
Auschwitz, is a hallmark of what today we understand humanity and human society. It remains, therefore, an urgent task is to integrate the memory in the memory of our society and our faith communities. On this meaning, we want to make our joint visit to the concentration camp memorial of Auschwitz-Birkenau at the beginning of August to the attention of.
How can we deal with the speechlessness and disbelief that triggers the crimes of the Shoah to today in the us? On the one hand, the monstrosity of the Shoah, which is comprehend for the human mind hardly is. On the other side of the order, to remember the Horror of this crime. Only those who know the past can’t help, that it is not repeated.
Remember means, with Auschwitz to deal with its history, to the Victims, but also perpetrators, our own family stories with us. For Christians, this involves the painful realization of ecclesial failure, such as Martin niemoeller said: “It is not that we have made as a Church in the past, this and this wrong, it is a bug, but we have basically failed, the us applied the office in disobedience and thus become guilty of all.”
In the center of the Jewish as well as Christian Tradition, a culture of memory, which realizes its own existence from history and as a history with God suggests is. The escape from Egypt, the Babylonian exile, the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, but in the Christian context, the cross of Christ belong to the basic data of the two memory cultures. The commandment to Remember (“Zachor”) is a Central part of Judaism, like the commandment of Jesus: “This do in remembrance of me!”, the core of the Central Christian rite in the sacrament is.
this is very different due to the contrasting experience of the Shoah. Because it must not be forgotten that Auschwitz stands between us as Christians and Jews. The Knowledge that our families were in this terrible place, and touched both of us in completely different ways. The history of Auschwitz is on an almost opposite way, our history as Jews and Christians. The joint Recall is so difficult. To stand in silent remembrance together, in this place something, what we perceive from the Christian side as an undeserved gift.
We are experiencing today, that the dehumanization and promoted hatred that made Auschwitz possible has not disappeared after 1945. He returns with a terrifying Power, and from the taboos in the public space. Anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsyism and racism are again on the agenda. In the social media haters spraying their poison: they deny and relativize the Holocaust. You threaten, insult and berate all those who do not conform to her image of human beings. Why this hatred can lead to, have led us to the attacks of hall and Hanau, as well as the murder of Walter Lübcke clear.
