My first encounter with the horror of the Shoah, the "holocaust", of European Jews came in the face of Mira Kimmelman. Kimmelman spoke to our high school sophomore English class about her experiences at Auschwitz in 1944 and Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in 1945. A story later recounted in her autobiography, it was a story that brought me to the real questions of the Shoah: The so-called 614th commandment is true -- "Jews are forbidden to give Hitler posthumous victories". What are Christians, then, to say about the Shoah itself and about German evils during the Holocaust?
It would be easy, I'm sure, to trivialize those evils. I've seen and heard far too many do just that in the years since first hearing Kimmelman's story. But the question that hit me in 1989 is the question that remains with me today: Is it possible to comprehend the horror and then pray? That's a question that was honed for me when I first read Arthur Cohen's The Tremendum. Where is God in the Holocaust?
A few years after hearing Kimmelman for the first time, I saw Schindler's List. It's a movie that gives faces to the uncomprehended horror. Because, let's be honest, Christians can never get behind the Shoah. When we look at Auschwitz, we no longer see just Auschwitz; we also see victims.
This is why Christian theologians who want to "do theology" after Auschwitz can only do that theology by listening -- listening to God and to the Jews. These victims were not merely destroyed, they were blotted out of existence.
Schindler's List is a difficult movie for me to watch. Unlike some of its predecessor Shoah films, which begin with clouds, birds and other symbols of freedom, Schindler's List begins with the somber lighting of candles and the Hebrew blessing over wine. Spielberg and screenwriter Zaillian, basing their work on Thomas Keneally's book, didn't really wish to concern themselves with lives before, but only lives during the Nazi horror. To have "opened it up" might have lessened its impact. Even a cloud would have been too glamorous. From its opening scene, viewers know what they see can only be painted in the grainiest of ways. Because experiencing and explaining these horrors isn't left for the world we think we know.
The irony makes the film even partially tolerable. When the Nazi camp commandant Amon Goeth, played with chilling evil by Ralph Fiennes, admires Schindler's silk collar shirt at a party, Schindler states with casual abandon, "I'd get one for you, but the man who made it is probably dead. I don't know." But even the irony is overwhelmed by the banality of the evil: Jews with foolproof hiding places are suddenly caught because of noise they make when trying to sneak out; children don't give a second thought to hiding in latrines filled with human filth; Goeth relaxes in a chair on his balcony shooting Jews in the courtyard indiscriminately as if it were a carnival game. It is Schindler's List at its most uncomfortable.
At the end of the movie, appropriately gray and damp, there is a light that shines on Schindler when he talks to the soldiers ordered to kill the Jews before the camp is disbanded. "Here they are", he says. "This is your opportunity. Or, you can return to your families as men, instead of murderers." The soldiers go, without firing a shot.
Although it does not concern itself with the previous lives of the Schindlerjuden, the film does present them after this period of darkness. Several of them are shown at the end, as we read in a postscript that the group Schindler saved has more than 6,000 descendants.
"There will be generations because of what you did", Stern says to Schindler after presenting him with a ring the Schindlerjuden made for him. The ring has the inscription, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire".
I can't say Schindler's List gives any clear answers to the questions posed by the Shoah. But it certainly points to the way in which God might work through the terror to accomplish salvation.
It would be easy, I'm sure, to trivialize those evils. I've seen and heard far too many do just that in the years since first hearing Kimmelman's story. But the question that hit me in 1989 is the question that remains with me today: Is it possible to comprehend the horror and then pray? That's a question that was honed for me when I first read Arthur Cohen's The Tremendum. Where is God in the Holocaust?
A few years after hearing Kimmelman for the first time, I saw Schindler's List. It's a movie that gives faces to the uncomprehended horror. Because, let's be honest, Christians can never get behind the Shoah. When we look at Auschwitz, we no longer see just Auschwitz; we also see victims.
This is why Christian theologians who want to "do theology" after Auschwitz can only do that theology by listening -- listening to God and to the Jews. These victims were not merely destroyed, they were blotted out of existence.
Schindler's List is a difficult movie for me to watch. Unlike some of its predecessor Shoah films, which begin with clouds, birds and other symbols of freedom, Schindler's List begins with the somber lighting of candles and the Hebrew blessing over wine. Spielberg and screenwriter Zaillian, basing their work on Thomas Keneally's book, didn't really wish to concern themselves with lives before, but only lives during the Nazi horror. To have "opened it up" might have lessened its impact. Even a cloud would have been too glamorous. From its opening scene, viewers know what they see can only be painted in the grainiest of ways. Because experiencing and explaining these horrors isn't left for the world we think we know.
The irony makes the film even partially tolerable. When the Nazi camp commandant Amon Goeth, played with chilling evil by Ralph Fiennes, admires Schindler's silk collar shirt at a party, Schindler states with casual abandon, "I'd get one for you, but the man who made it is probably dead. I don't know." But even the irony is overwhelmed by the banality of the evil: Jews with foolproof hiding places are suddenly caught because of noise they make when trying to sneak out; children don't give a second thought to hiding in latrines filled with human filth; Goeth relaxes in a chair on his balcony shooting Jews in the courtyard indiscriminately as if it were a carnival game. It is Schindler's List at its most uncomfortable.
At the end of the movie, appropriately gray and damp, there is a light that shines on Schindler when he talks to the soldiers ordered to kill the Jews before the camp is disbanded. "Here they are", he says. "This is your opportunity. Or, you can return to your families as men, instead of murderers." The soldiers go, without firing a shot.
Although it does not concern itself with the previous lives of the Schindlerjuden, the film does present them after this period of darkness. Several of them are shown at the end, as we read in a postscript that the group Schindler saved has more than 6,000 descendants.
"There will be generations because of what you did", Stern says to Schindler after presenting him with a ring the Schindlerjuden made for him. The ring has the inscription, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire".
I can't say Schindler's List gives any clear answers to the questions posed by the Shoah. But it certainly points to the way in which God might work through the terror to accomplish salvation.