Birkenau

I stand in front of the entrance to Crematorium III, looking at the dark walls, parts of a roof that has collapsed, the stairs to the undressing room. The whole thing seems like a black monster, gloomy, full of horror, still alive. 
Like a deep, great wound that has not healed to this day. Even if nature would cover this wound under itself, the wound would be like a volcano that can erupt again at any time.... and has erupted and will erupt in many places in this world here and now....

What helps??? How do we get out of this madness, out of this vicious circle???
The words of Peter come to my mind "open your heart"...then the wound can heal, layer by layer, trauma by trauma...to the very ground....

And finally people can live in peace with each other and their habitat...I am ready....

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Normality

How normal the men look from the Wannsee Conference. Peter's question is also mine: I can't put this together with what they did? Thomas' answer in the online call: To be and to stay with these unsolvable questions, with this struggle, that is the courage it takes.

Displacement
I think the heavy black cars on the rails leading into the furnaces are coal cars. But my subconscious knows very well - because without any further information I realize later - that they were used to push the corpses from the gas chamber into the ovens.
Like Henryk Mandelbaum, Polish Jew and former prisoner of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. His report is so direct and honest, his commitment to pass on what he experienced so deep, that he told his story everywhere until shortly before his death at the age of 86. And: He affirms that he never had anything to do with the corpses of children. "After all, I would have remembered that, how children would have gone into the gas and then been burned."
No one survived the gas chambers, no reports from inside, no witnesses. That leaves only us, all of us on the outside trying to feel our way in, to be as best we can with it, to bear witness.
 
Perpetrator
I walk quickly across the ramp, perhaps I don't want to miss a meeting ... Suddenly I am one of the perpetrators, the wagons have arrived, everything must proceed in order and smoothly, no disorder, perfection is required ... 
From then on, it is this spot on the ramp where, even in the next few days, I am most likely to connect with the perpetrators and feel them inside me. And the hurried step with which I consciously walk a distance now and then also opens this channel. In addition, there are associations with effectiveness and functionality in my everyday life, and how they come at the expense of connected contact with myself and others, actually at the expense of humanity. Is that where it starts?
 
 
God
Allen's struggle to find a faith in God. His mother, like many other Jews, lost her faith in the camp - "God is not here." Others say they survived by their faith. The whole thing keeps me busy. Already back home, I tell about it, and my Triad partner then gives me the following story: Someone sits with Jesus on a bench and asks him: All the violence, the killing, the inhumanity, how can you allow it? And Jesus answers: Interesting, that's exactly what I was about to ask you.
 

Feel
Today, all day long, it's as if I feel nothing. We have been meditating on the wagon, I sit leaning against one of the wheels and feel dull. Because I can't think of anything better to do, I take a few selfies with my cell phone - and am stunned when I look at them ... I almost can't bear the sight. My body, my face and especially my eyes show how much what has happened here passes through me, even if I consciously notice almost nothing of it. 
 
Glimpses of light
I see her photo in the House of the Wannsee Conference - one of the few rays of hope I look for everywhere - and photograph it. Only afterwards do I read the name and story: Andrée Geulen, a teacher, saved the lives of over 1000 Jewish children in collaboration with a Belgian resistance group. 
 
At all the children ...one million 5 hundred thousand Jewish children were murdered. I stand in front of this number for a long time, and I still stand petrified in front of it. The children touch me the most in all the places, photographs from their intact lives and then ...for example, when they get out of the wagons. Their drawings on the walls, documented letters, fates. Their innocence. 
 
My 93-year-old father, with whom I speak on the phone beforehand and also from the road, says: "I won't make it to Auschwitz, the journey is too far. But let's go to Bergen-Belsen (a great uncle of mine was murdered there as a political prisoner). I am surprised and very happy about how deeply he shares in my journey.
 
The House of the Shoa is heartbreaking. It begins with Jewish life and culture in Europe before the Holocaust in pictures and videos ... and ends with the "Book of Names" that takes up an entire room, closely printed are the names of the murdered Jewish women, men and children. The inconceivable number 6 million comes a touch closer through the 4 million names collected and documented here.
 
The group
How quickly already in Berlin, although most of us hardly know each other, a common meditation space of great depth emerges. And I - usually rather on the side of less group and not so much meeting - need here the contact, the sharings, the open look between our eyes, to feel, to understand myself better by speaking out, to be able to cry.

And when we see each other online again a few days after the trip, the intimacy is palpable.
 
Witnessing
Each of us struggles in our own way to feel with, to witness, and in this I feel our strongest connection. 
In the only gas chamber in Crematorium 1 in the main camp that has been preserved as a room, a spontaneous toning emerges, a groping singing in tune, while we stand all around the walls. There, for the first time, I can feel the closeness of deadly horror and mercy, of strong feelings at both ends of the scale that are there almost simultaneously. 
A brilliant late summer day with brightly colored autumn leaves frame the walls and chimney of the crematorium against a bright blue sky.
 
Fear of death and love
Three of us walked through the women's camp, were once again in some of the worst barracks. Three women in silence for long stretches, each for herself and yet together, then sometimes an exchange of words and touches. Then I stayed behind a bit and stood alone at the steps that led down into Crematorium 2. And felt a kind of fear in my body that I had never felt before. It creeps from the floor through my feet up my legs into my pelvis and from there everywhere. I know fear as a bodily sensation in various parts of my body, but not what I experienced here, nothing remotely comparable. For a long time afterwards I am as if on the run and largely switched off. The common meditation rushes past me. Only when I go out, eat something there, and decide to go back to the camp, back to the place by the crematorium where we meditated, do I become a human being again. A person filled with deep love. I collect leaves and a few pieces of wood and leave (at least for this trip) the Birkenau death camp.
 
 

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The trip to Berlin and Auschwitz has been a profound and meaningful experience for me—

more than I expected or even hoped for. As I contemplated making this journey again, I thought about what witnessing in empathy meant and how I would practice it. When I began the process I recognized that I was doing more than just witnessing, more than repeating an experience that I had two years earlier. I felt something shift in me, and I came in touch with feelings that have been dormant or unacknowledged for many years, especially hatred and fear. Because of the safe environment I felt I was in I allowed myself to go deeply into those feelings and to accept them as part of me, without wanting to reject or apologize for them. This acceptance is still alive and working in me. I feel profoundly changed, and my wife and triad partner’s experience me in a new way. So much so, that Eve-Marie and another person are very interested in making this trip in 2 years time.

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A depth of connection and love

The gift for me of slowing down in the presence of others to the horrors of the past was that I experienced a depth of connection and love that I did not experience before.

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Healing journeys are thus differently for every individual

For me, who had learned to hold emotions inside, there is healing in expressing them. I'm thankful for the sharing circles we had during the week. Thank you for the facilitation. I need more of these spaces. And I find myself creating them already. I initiated one with my flat mates last week.

In the camps, I was most of the time overwhelmed or numb or in thoughts. There were a few moments, when while looking at pictures or reading about the fate of (a few) individuals, I felt anger or sadness. I'm thankful for the invitation to just be with whatever is. This invitation pops up in my everyday life more often now than before. I find I have more love for myself now.

Coming home, I felt incredibly nourished from the deep connections we created during the week.

In the beginning and throughout, you asked us what our intentions were. My answers varied over time. At times was wasn't sure at all. I was confused when one participant said, during the preparatory zoom calls, that there shouldn't be any intention to heal anything but instead only to witnes in empathy. I felt a bit guilty for wanting to join the journey to know myself better, to get to know the people who facilitate collective trauma healing, to use Ausschwitz as a catalyst for my personal healing. Then I remembered to witness myself and my intentions in empathy.

You asked us many times to sense and set intentions. For a meditation, for the whole journey, for a visit to a particular place. I notice now how powerful it is become aware of and state my own intentions. It creates trust and connection with the people I interact with. And I notice that by stating my intentions, if they are truly mine, they seem to realize.

I was incredibly moved by the beautiful spaces of shared humanity we co-created that week. The singing. The laughing together. The listening to another. The taking time in a rushed world.

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My heart is so full from our time together

This was a magical journey, and considering our destination - to the graveyard of Auschwitz - that is saying a lot. For me, what made the trip magical, was your skillful, loving, safe, and playful holding of our group. It was abundantly clear to me how much intention and care you put into your planning and leadership - from all of the logistics, to the way that you selected our groups, to the space you created for all of our sharing, to your gentle and rhythmic facilitation of the many processes we experienced together. You did such an amazing job and it is through your labor and love that I personally feel compelled to dive into Thomas’ work, hopefully take TWT, and shift many priorities in my life. Thank you so much for showing me the way.

As a second-generation holocaust survivor, I had no idea that so much aliveness and healing might come from a trip to the death camps of Birkenau. Or that I would have a story and a funny joke to tell from my experience. On our final day in the camps, Carina and I decided to walk to Birkenau instead of taking the bus; she didn’t want to pass by the bunkhouses through the main entrance and had a plan for entering the camp through the back of the camp across from the Birkenau HQ that became a church; we were going to climb in through an opening in the gate, essentially breaking into the place. A Polish security guard caught us as we made our way and ended our escapade; he yelled at us, so we apologized and made our way back to the right entrance. So the joke is, ‘why did the German Millennial and the 2^nd Generation Holocaust Survivor try to break into Auschwitz? (answer) to get to the healing side.’

Humor aside, this trip was so deeply meaningful to me because I have never been able to get within miles of my river of Holocaust tears. I’ve only been able to process my people’s and family’s trauma in my head & the idea of healing my Holocaust trauma has never been an achievable dream or even a possibility. In your skillful and loving hands, you held me to begin to feel my pain, to honor my ancestor’s snuffed-out lives, to heal the divisions that have frozen this trauma in my heart, and to introduce me to a healing path that I am now choosing to walk. You also helped me to see that where there is death and sadness, there is also the possibility for aliveness and joy; to conclude that my way in healing the heaviness in the loss may be through the gentleness of the light.

I found that light in nature all around Birkenau - in the trees many of which bore witness to the atrocities, particularly the old Oak Tree that literally leaned over to witness the horrors of the Gas Chamber where we meditated the last two days of our visit.  The beauty of the trees gave me some hope, some pathway and protected me from the traumas that I was not prepared to experience directly. I don’t think this trip will be my last to visit Auschwitz and I hope to join Witnessing in Empathy on a return visit.

I will close by relating my experience from a deeply moving meditation with Thomas just yesterday. He talked about hosting experiences internally as a way of creating mutuality between our inner and outer worlds. I found that doing this ‘hosting work’ gave me a deeply moving and higher quality experience of presence. When I think about how you held us, I get the feeling that you hosted us throughout our experience. At least that’s how it felt to me. A million thank you’s to each of you for your love.