Nielsen’s Nook

Prescript: One of the most difficult and fecund projects I had during my time at Westminster Seminary was to write read Elie Wiesel’s Night and then write a pastoral response to him, as if he had come into my pastor’s study and laid out his story (that of a Jewish youth in concentration camps in Nazi Europe), desiring counsel and direction. In continuing with recent themes of Christ and suffering, I share this with you here and invite your reflection and comment. This is the first of five posts.

There are few eras of history that embody brutality and suffering more readily to a twenty-first century Western mind than that of Nazi Germany during World War II. Even more, there are fewer particulars that epitomize the basest form of suffering than Auschwitz or Buna, jagged cogs of Nazi annihilation machinery. Today, it would appear that the West in general, and America specifically, understands little of suffering. Having grown fat, we mark out hunger as enduring an hour longer to eat; pain, by the backache caused by our own obesity (for which we have an encapsulated solution). Consequentially gross proportions of the church have grown anemic, glossing over the decreed place of suffering in the world, minimizing the resolute hope, that the One who bled the ground purest red at Calvary offers to any who are struck down, suffering today.

The Fact of Suffering

Some may say that the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered, should not be compared to other instances of suffering, fearing that by doing so it is some how trivialized. However, if we do not recognize the Holocaust as one horror among many, it is then that we trivialize it. Stalin is reported to have slaughtered some 20 million of his own people, while Hitler slaughtered over a million Russians in the battle for Stalingrad alone. Millions of people die of AIDS in central Africa in our present day. In one day the English slaughtered more than ten thousand at the battle of Agincourt; and indeed the cry of the slaughtered was, “Disorder, that hath spoil’d us, friend us now! Let us on heaps offer up our lives.”¹ The Holocaust, in its unforgettable terror, is one rap in the iteration of suffering on this planet, being a commentary on the degree of the presence of evil in the race of men, which all must face.

Most of the suffering today is never voiced. It is the silent scream of piercing amplification that races through the air on a frequency that no one can hear. The Holocaust has been an exception in which people have talked, their scream has been heard, and even still, many do not know how to resolve such heinous cruelty with the orthodox teaching of God’s goodness. I believe this is the case not only for those who hear the wailing of a suffering soul but also for the soul itself that wails. Failure to find definitive resolution of these two facts will result in an impotence to counsel the bereaved and may result in the incineration of the faith of those who suffer.

After arriving at Birkenau, reception center for Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel wrote these words; the soot and fire from the crematorium having seared his depths:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.²

For Wiesel life had become a dying dirge, a condemnation that beats out its doom-drum rhythm, leaving him alone in a deafening darkness in which he had no answers, no faith, and no hope.

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¹ William Shakespeare, “Henry V,” in The Riverside Shakespeare (ed. G. Blakemore Evans: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974),962 [IV.v.6-23].
² Elie Wiesel. The Night Trilogy (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 43.