“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. ..
For more than half an hour [the child in the noose] stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
“Where is God now?”
And I heard a voice within me answer him:
“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . .”
Elie Wiesel (recounting the day he was forced to witness a boy hanging at the gallows in a Nazi concentration camp.
Pete talked about the AFL journey starting in the foothills and moving to the mountains. I think today, we moved to the mountains.
I wish I could have cried again, but today was not the first time I heard this story. Today was not the first time the horrors of my ancestral homeland raced through my brain. I am not a stranger to the stories of WW2. I grew up around three German Canadians, my Opa, my Oma and my Dad, who had their own horror stories of the war. Those were a different kind of horror. But their stories didn't matter. They were seen as the enemy even through they were abhorrent to regime in power that caused so much destruction and tyranny to their neighbours and their home.
I remember my Dad telling me there were things he couldn't tell me as long as a certain member of his family was alive. After that man died, I was finally told that he was one of the soldiers that worked in the concentration camps. I had never met my great uncle, but his presence and identity weighed heavily on me in my growing up years.
When my family got to Germany in 1937, it was my great uncle that told my Opa "Why did you come here?". It almost seemed like he had hoped to spare my Opa the hell he was going to experience himself. And what kind of hell was it for him? I realized later that the only reason my Opa didn't wind up in the SS like my great uncle did, was because he had gone to Canada with a Polish passport because he worked on a farm in Poland during his youth. When he got to Germany they were going to war in Poland, so his passport was taken away and he was sent to Norway to guard airplanes. Something about a conflict of interest.
My Opa was spared from a decision that would be his death (he and his family would most likely have been killed if he refused to sign up with the SS) and spared from being that person that everyone would hate for his involvement. Who spared him? God? I won't believe that anymore... he was spared because of a passport... nothing greater or less.
As I listened to the music that came after the reflection by Elie Wiesel, I wrote something. I'm a poet... It was all that came out of my soul in that moment.
And God is dead again. How many times does God die? At the hand of that which God gave life... God dies.
And will there ever be an end to God dying? May God die in all of us one day.
