Home   News   Article

Auschwitz was full of suffering, so does it make any sense to put ‘Jesus’ and ‘the Holocaust’ in the same sentence?





Entrance to Auschwitz. Picture: Wikimedia Commons/xiquinhosilva
Entrance to Auschwitz. Picture: Wikimedia Commons/xiquinhosilva

One of the year’s most powerful films is a documentary, ‘The Commandant’s Shadow’. The shadow was cast by Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camps during WW2, murderer of over two million Jews.

It fell on his son, Hans Jürgen, now 87, whose boyhood was spent in a house and garden adjacent to the camp, apparently unaware of what went on behind the high wall.

It fell on his grandson Kai, now a Christian pastor in Stuttgart; it fell on Auschwitz survivor Anita and her daughter Maya. These people tell their stories, and we see Hans Jürgen coming to accept his father’s guilt, revisiting Auschwitz, and meeting Anita in her London home.

The film has so many powerful themes. That wall separating the hell of prison camp from the seeming paradise of a childhood home symbolises the mental walls we build to numb us to the dark stuff and the world’s cry of pain.

That loving father, home from his day’s diabolical labours, the greatest mass-murderer in history symbolises the reality of evil on our side of the wall too. That mother, Hedwig pretending everything was normal reminds us of our complicity in systems which perpetuate injustice.

The film warns us of the danger of casting shadows on our children. Hans, spending a lifetime in denial; Anita’s inability through trauma to be the mother Maya needed; Kai, concerned that his grandfather’s iniquities might be laid by God at his door, before becoming a Christian and finding in Jesus freedom from this curse.

But does it make any sense to put ‘Jesus’ and ‘the Holocaust’ in the same sentence? Are our Jesus stories mere fables, walls of words and ideas holding darkness at bay?

Jesus Christ was there in Auschwitz, suffering alongside each inmate, present in the countless acts of love they showed. But if he is not big enough to address the Holocaust, if all he does is suffer with us, then he has failed.

Jesus’s death was of cosmic significance. He embraced the darkness, bearing our guilt, confronted evil and triumphed gloriously. The curtain of words which both point to and keep us from God dissolved. We are called by a living Jesus to a new way of being, enabled by his strong love.

Though there are still shadows in the house and garden, we’re conscious of a place of unspeakable joy lying beyond a wall which sometimes seems so thin, so transparent that we catch glimpses of loveliness, hear snatches of song. The Jesus who comes home to us each day is the Jesus who masterminds this heaven.

Shortly before his executed at Auschwitz, Rudolph Höss made a full confession to Polish priest Wladyslaw Lohn. And would God’s forgiveness reach even him?


Do you want to respond to this article? If so, click here to submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.



This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies - Learn More