Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (104 page)

My wish is different now, the product not of instinct but of this history. The cross at Auschwitz, transcending whatever benign intention attaches to it, embodies supersessionism, medieval absolutism, the cult of martyrdom, the violence of God, the ancient hatred of Jews, and the Christian betrayal of Jesus Christ. This is the cross that was stolen by the emperor Constantine, perverted by the crusaders, and blasphemed by the editors of
La Croix.
Pius XII, in the encyclical
Mystici Corporis Christi,
issued in June 1943 as the roundup of Jews was peaking, declared, "...but on the gibbet of his death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees, [and] fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross, establishing the New Testament in His blood ... On the Cross then the Old Law died, soon to be buried and to be a bearer of death."
¹²
In the name of the cross, even in 1943, Jews were implicitly being accused of causing death, and not just Jesus'. And in recent years, by self-proclaimed Christian friends of Jews, the cross has been imposed on them, whether they wanted it or not. "Like the cross of Christ," the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann declared, "even Auschwitz is in God himself. Even Auschwitz is taken up into the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son and the power of the Spirit."
¹³
The cross has thus been twisted into an apologetic tool and a source of slander. It has consistently been made to serve the purpose of power. Auschwitz is the final disclosure of this truth.

Therefore the Christian Church should come here and perform a simple penitential rite. This rite must be conducted in silence, to compensate for the sinful silence of the Church, but more, to push beyond all the words that have come too easily. The most precious Christian words—Golgotha, redemption, sacrifice—have no place here. Therefore, in silence the sin of the Church is acknowledged as the sin that was part of what led to genocide. There is no more talk that exempts "the Church as such" from this judgment. Instead, with Rahner, who wrote generally of the "sinful Church of sinners," the confession is made that the failures that brought the Church here are "the actions and conduct of the Church herself."'
¹⁴
The piety of the Church herself is renounced as the piety that has kept the structure of victimization of the other so firmly in place, even until now. Rivals in victimization no more. Rivals for the blessing of God no more. Rivals no more at Auschwitz.

Silence does not preclude expression. The acknowledgment of sin requires expression, but the proper word of acknowledgment here is an act. A sacrament of the Church accusing itself. The penitential rite would consist of a dismantling of this cross, a removal of the horizontal beam, an uprooting of the vertical, a reversal of the instruction Constantine gave his soldiers. In this way, the cross would be returned to Jesus, and returned to its place as the cause of his death, not the purpose of his life. For Jesus, the cross could have been nothing of conquest or power. For Jesus, therefore, the cross could not conceivably have become a symbol of triumphalism, nor a sign of the defamation of his own people. To remove this cross is to begin the reversal of all that we Christians here confess. And to remove this cross is to retrieve the cross as a sign that God has come to a failed and sinful Church, and only confessing itself as such can the Church fulfill its mission as witness to God's unconditional love for all.

More important, to remove the cross from Auschwitz, deliberately, reverently, and in the presence of living Jews, would restore Auschwitz to those who were murdered here, asking nothing of them in return.

Epilogue: The Faith of a Catholic

W
HEN OUR CHILDREN
were young, my wife, Lexa, and I traveled with them through Europe on a Eurailpass, which let us hop on and off trains with abandon. It was 1989. Lizzy was nine, and Pat was seven. Beginning in Amsterdam, we passed through Brussels, then made our way to Paris for the centenary celebration of the Eiffel Tower, which our children dubbed the birthday tower. In that pre-euro era, what we loved most was crossing borders, and we decided to cross as many as we could.

Lizzy had a preoccupation that tracked us like a cloud. In Amsterdam, we had visited the Anne Frank House. The small rooms of the hidden annex had left us all short of breath, but it was our daughter who carried away the image of Anne as a locating compass rose. Lizzy's identification with the young girl, whose diary she had begun to read, was complete. When our train crossed from Holland into Belgium, Lizzy asked, "Whose side were these on?" The Belgians, she meant. Were they on Anne's side or Hitler's? Anne's, we answered. Then, the same thing when we crossed into France. "Whose side were these on?" Anne's, we said again, giving France a large benefit of the doubt. At each border she asked again. And when we said, at the crossing from Switzerland, that Italy had been on Hitler's side, we could see judgment seize her gaze as she turned to look out the train window, as if surely the landscape itself would tell her how such a thing had been possible. All of history was present to her as she stared out at the Italian countryside. For the first time, regarding the fate of Anne Frank and her people, I felt completely ashamed.

The next summer, we began in Amsterdam again, but now we went where we hadn't gone the year before, which was Germany. I had to overcome Lizzy's implicit objection—I wanted my family to see Wiesbaden, where I had been as a boy. The previous November, the Berlin Wall had been breached. Large vestiges of it still stood, and Lexa and I agreed that for history's sake we should all see it. We began our tour of Germany with a dreamy cruise down the Rhine, but soon it became a grim trip. As we sailed upriver from Cologne, passing Koblenz and the confluence of the Moselle, I thought of Maria Laach and Trier, but my family was already impatient, and I didn't tell them my stories of those places. When we disembarked directly across from Mainz, we turned our backs on that "Rome of the North" to go the short way to Wiesbaden. Its elegance no longer stood out from the ruins of the rest of the Rhineland's cities, as it had in my day, and so neither Lexa nor the children could see it. I insisted on the extravagance of staying in what had been the best hotel in town—in my time, reserved for senior American officers. But it was adjacent to the famous spa, and its rooms reeked of the sulfurous hot springs that Germans still regarded as an indulgence. When I showed my family the mansion in which my parents, brothers, and I had lived, no one was impressed.

We took the train from Frankfurt to Berlin, as I had in 1959 with a group of chums, traveling on a U.S. Army train, with gun mounts. On that trip, at the East-West border, we had seen Soviet tanks, and the train had been searched by "Vopos" (
Volkspolizei)
carrying machine guns. Even in 1990, the trip felt adventurous. The German Democratic Republic was not quite dismantled, and at the old border between East and West Germany our train was halted. I told Lizzy and Pat about the tanks I'd seen there once, explaining about the Iron Curtain. Pat spied an old rusting corrugated fence bordering the railyard, and cried, "There it is!" And I thought, What the hell, he's probably right. A new crew got on the train, and their shabby blue uniforms and peaked hats marked them as last-gasp functionaries of the GDR. One was a ticket-checking conductor who, when I showed him our Eurailpasses, snorted, "
Nein, nein.
" He seemed to be threatening to throw us off the train, and for a minute I felt the blast of a Cold War fear. I gestured pathetically at my wife and children, asking for mercy. The East German waved me away in disgust, and soon the train was moving again. I looked out the window from then on with a feeling of relief and wonder.

In Berlin, the railroad station was swarming with people hauling televisions and mattresses and small refrigerators, cartons and baskets containing all kinds of consumer goods. These were Poles and Silesians and Prussians and Pomeranians, until recently prisoners of the East. Their first rush of freedom was to go shopping, although to us they looked like looters. We checked into our hotel on the Kurfürstendamm, then went right away to what I remembered of Checkpoint Charlie. Its metal shed was there, but the barriers were gone. The infamous wall—cinderblocks and cement with a large concrete sewer tunnel on top—was still standing, but in ragged, graffiti-covered pieces. Huge gaps had been opened in the wall, and across the way lay a wasteland several hundred yards wide, stretching half a mile or more between the Brandenburg Gate at one end and Potsdamer Platz at the other. This dusty vacancy was what remained of no man's land, the barrier zone between East and West Berlin that had, until the previous fall, been spiked with tank obstacles, laced with barbed wire, and studded with concrete pillboxes from which unmanned machine guns were trained at the level of the human heart.

Berliners, tourists, refugees from the East, and military personnel variously uniformed; punk rockers, hawkers in purloined Soviet officer caps with sleeves full of Red Army pins and medals for sale, and waif-like girls smoking cigarettes—a defiant chaos of strangers milled about in the acreage once known as the death strip. I saw the remnant of an isolated wooden platform and recognized it as the lookout staging onto which Westerners had once climbed to gaze out over the wall. Bellevue, it had been called, I remembered suddenly. I had mounted that platform myself, in 1980, when I had come here to write a magazine article. But now the section of wall in front of the platform was entirely gone, and the platform looked like a beached wreck.

Lizzy and Pat had run ahead, and I called after them. They ignored me, cavorting away, taking no man's land to be a playground. I began to be afraid even before I realized there was a reason. It was not the ghosts of Soviet machine guns that frightened me, the Vopos' klieg lights, the dogs. It was the shadow of a memory of what my guide had told me for that article in 1980. We had been standing on the lookout platform at Bellevue. Here is how I recounted it then:

"Do you see that mound?" Jorg asked me. He pointed to a low dark hill, a weathered pile of dirt, really, halfway across the forbidden strip. "That is what remains of his bunker."

"Whose bunker?" I stared at it. I could see the vestiges of streetcar tracks and pavingstones and I imagined ladies with parasols and vendors and the great coaches of Potsdamer Platz, not this wasteland. Then I tried to picture the Nazi headquarters and that bunker, but couldn't.

"It's where he killed himself," Tramm said.
¹

The memory brought my head up, and my eyes went right to a low hill in the middle of the death strip. The mound that my official guide had pointed to in 1980 was still there. And now so were my children. There they were, in their yellow and red, their blue, Pat in his flashing Michael Jordans, Lizzy in her barrettes. My children were heading right for Adolf Hitler's bunker. I screamed "No!" and began to run. Lexa called after me, then began to run too.

The
Führerbunker
was a tunnel complex below the Reichskanzlei. Hitler, his new wife, Eva Braun, a few trusted aides, and a guard made up of an elite SS unit had watched American movies while the city above them was battered and torched by the storming Russians. The rooms were well furnished. There was a wine cellar. Precious paintings lined the concrete walls. I knew all of this. But to me the
Führerbunker
was a chamber of hell. And like hell, I hadn't been sure until now that it existed.

"No!" I screamed again, and I closed on them. They were at the mound, and like beagles going after prey, they had zeroed in on a small opening at the base of the low hill. Pat was already nosing into the hole. I saw a slab of concrete protruding from the dirt, and I thought, Pat is now going to touch what Hitler touched. "Get away from there," I ordered, swooping down on them, grabbing each one by an elbow and dragging them back.

"What's wrong with you?" Lexa demanded. My children looked up at me, mystified. And it seemed ridiculous, what I had to say by way of explanation. I said it, hardly believing it myself. "This was Hitler's place!" And I led them away.
²

What was I afraid of? My children falling into the hole? My children sucked into the vortex of an abyss? Why is it that the innocence of our children is what finally forces us to face the flawed condition of our lives? I had never sensed how thin the membrane is between us and death until I watched my toddlers crossing the street or skied after my teenagers down the double-black-diamond slope of a mountain in Maine. In the former death strip of Berlin, I saw that I had brought my children into the zone of evil from which I had always assumed I would protect them.

Hitler is our Prince of Darkness. We would have liked to go on thinking that he alone was responsible for the monstrous crimes committed in Europe between 1933 and 1945. When I inadvertently took Lizzy, Pat, and Lexa to the very threshold of his lair, I think I still hoped to protect the illusion into which I had been initiated as a conqueror's son in the Rhineland, that the Nazis were of another species entire. I think that was why I screamed so, to keep my children on this side of the other Berlin Wall, the one I wanted to remain intact forever, the one that ran between the innocent and the guilty, the good and the bad. The Cold War had imposed its dualism on our minds, and we could still think that way, even though it was already clear that Mikhail Gorbachev was no Joseph Stalin. Perhaps in 1990, I needed Hitler's moral isolation from the rest of humanity more than ever, his abject evil as proof of our relative virtue.

The virtue of my children was absolute, of course. Part of what I wanted to protect us all from, in my panic, was the threshold of knowing that my own virtue was anything but. Now I see what I was afraid of that day: the shock of my own complicity with evil. How to protect them from that? I do not mean here to wrap myself in a blurring guilt, as if the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish genocide are not uniquely to be condemned. I have taken pains throughout this book to observe the distinction between the crime of the Nazis and the attitudes of Christians that prepared for it. But to accept responsibility for those attitudes, as a Christian, is to go much farther along the road of moral reckoning than I ever imagined I would have to. Having faced the anti-Jewish content of beliefs in which I was raised, and in which my Church is still entangled despite itself, I have had yanked away from me the right to imagine that I would have certainly behaved "virtuously" if confronted with choices at almost any point in this long chain of consequence.