Who deserves to suffer?
This headline caught my eye: “Rabbi claims holocaust dead ‘deserved it’”. Read the article and you’ll see that the headline is only slightly sensationalized. The rabbi is Ahron Cohen, an Orthodox Jew from England who recently spoke at the controversial holocaust conference in Iran. Cohen isn’t a holocaust denier, but he holds a point of view that is at least as old as Job’s comforters - that those who suffer deserve it, and those who inflict suffering could not otherwise succeed. Cohen’s beliefs about suffering shape his view on Israel (and this is what makes him so controversial): He believes that the modern nation of Israel was formed as an act of rebellion against God, who wills that Jews live peacefully in exile.
Laying aside Cohen’s anti-Zionist doctrine, it strikes me that Christians inhabit an entirely different universe of ideas about suffering. On one hand, we all deserve it “in one way or another” as Cohen so loosely puts it. “The wages of sin is death” says Paul in Romans 6:23. Jesus talked about people who died in a much smaller incident of anti-Semitism in Luke 13, and then he said: “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:2-3, NIV)
On the other hand, at the center of our faith is the one true innocent man suffering without deserving it. The “punishment that brought us peace was upon him,” Isaiah says.
Grace is a wild, unlikely thing, isn’t it?
Anne Frank
I finished reading Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl last week. This seems like something that should have been on my high school’s required curriculum, as it is for many schools today. Anne Frank’s diary is so important because it puts a human face on the Holocaust.
Anne received a diary as a gift for her 13th birthday and she began writing in it almost immediately. For two years, Anne wrote detailed entries on her thoughts, feelings, likes, dislikes, conflicts, sexuality, dreams, plans and faith.1 During almost all of that two year period (1942-44) she lived with her parents, sister, and four other people in the upstairs sections of an office/warehouse in Amsterdam. These eight were in hiding because, of course, they were Jews in Nazi-occupied territory. For two years they could never leave their hiding place, never go outside and enjoy the fresh air, never see any friends or family they had left behind. They depended entirely upon the kindness of Gentiles who risked their own safety in helping the Franks and others like them.
Anne’s diary is an extraordinary account of a girl emerging into womanhood. She is honest about her dislike of her housemates, problems with her mother, and attraction to the one boy in hiding with them. And then, as the diary continues, she grows to see her own weakness and pride at work in these relationships.
With little else to do, Anne and her sister engage in nearly constant study during the two-year hiding period. They read classic literature and history, learn other languages, and study math. As her mind forms and grows, Anne discovers that she wants to be a great writer, to have an impact on the world. She writes:
“I’ve often been down in the dumps, but never desperate. I look upon our life in hiding as an interesting adventure, full of danger and romance, and every privation as an amusing addition to my diary. I’ve made up my mind to live a life different from other girls…What I’m experiencing here is a good beginning to an interesting life…I’m young and have many hidden qualities; I’m young and strong and living through a big adventure; I’m right in the middle of it and can’t spend all day complaining because it’s impossible to have any fun! I’m blessed with many things: happiness, a cheerful disposition and strength. Every day I feel myself maturing, I feel liberation drawing near, I feel the beauty of nature and the goodness of the people around me. Every day I think what a fascinating and amusing adventure this is! With all that, why should I despair?” (pp. 277-78)
The last entry for Anne’s diary is August 1, 1944. On August 4th at around 10:30 a.m., the hiding place was discovered (due to an informant who has never been identified) and everyone in it was arrested by Karl Josef Silberbauer who was simply following orders, the great justification for much of the evil that is done in this world.2
All eight occupants of the hiding place were sent to concentration camps, and seven of the eight died in the next eight months. Otto Frank, Anne’s father is the only one who survived. Anne and her sister Margot died sometime in February or March, 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen camp. Starvation and typhus killed them. They were probably buried in a mass grave near the camp.
There are several reasons why Anne Frank’s diary is so important. First, it tells us what was lost, what the Nazis stole from this world during their reign of terror in the 30s and 40s. Second, because this kind of thing is still going on in our world (in Africa, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere) it should remind us that evil never sleeps and that real people with minds, souls, hearts and dreams are being slaughtered wherever there is murder, genocide, even necessary war. Third, racial and ethnic hatred lives here in America. On our recent whitewater rafting trip, our guide told us about taking a group of young kids down the river not long ago who constantly told very offensive Jewish jokes. I urge you, readers, to have courage and don’t for a second put up with that kind of talk EVER, against any race, religious or ethnic group, etc., but in the name of Jesus expose it for the lie of the enemy it is!
The saddest part of this book for me was actually in the Forward. It says there that Anne’s diary was found in the hiding place strewn across the floor. When you read the diary and realize how much she loved it and leaned upon it, how much of her soul she invested in it…and then you picture her watching as it is dumped across the floor, just before she is led away to eight months of misery and then death without it… well, that’s what EVIL looks like, folks. And yet, it is a common, everyday sort of evil, isn’t it?
Which raises another reason to read this diary: To remember that evil is something very real, and that ordinary people who give in to it can do unspeakable things.
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1 One final note: If you read the diary years ago, you probably read a much shorter version of it than exists today. I read “the Definitive Edition”, first published in English in 1995, which contains some of Anne’s writings that were deemed inappropriate earlier, such as critical words about people in the hiding place and her thoughts on her own sexuality. I highly recommend this later version as it completes and humanizes Anne Frank, showing even more clearly how much like all of us she was.
2 Silberbauer served a mere 14 months in prison for his wartime activities, and was reinstated as a police officer in his native Vienna in 1954. When he was identified in 1963 by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, Otto Frank was remarkably forgiving of him, saying that the betrayer was the real culprit. Silberbauer’s superior who sent him on the raid committed suicide after the war. Silberbauer lived to the healthy age of 72.
Books I should have read long ago
My recent reading has helped me fill in a gaping void in my thinking. In the past I have spoken so carelessly, glibly, with much ignorance about “the Jews” in the world today, the Holocaust, and persecution they have endured (often in the name of Christ). My education has improved in this area lately, starting with Chaim Potok’s Davita’s Harp, which I mentioned in an earlier blog. I recommend that book to you, along with these:
My Name is Asher Lev (1972) by Chaim Potok. Can a father and son both love God, be devoted to their religion, love each other, and yet be so different that they cannot live together? Potok explores that theme in Asher Lev. The father is a missionary of sorts, traveling to dangerous parts of post WW2 Europe to plant congregations of his orthodox Jewish sect. The son is an artist with a once-in-a-generation talent. The father has no place for art in his world view, except to see it as something from “The Other Side”, the evil spiritual realm. Asher Lev touches deeply because sons need their fathers’ blessing and approval, the acceptance that what they do is worthwhile (something I have always been blessed to have with my Dad). Also, Asher Lev showed me clearly how much pain Christianity has caused the Jewish people. The father in the story can only speak of Jesus as “that man” and asks his son if he realizes how much Jewish blood has been spilled in the name of “that man”. This book was easy to read and very enjoyable.
Night by Elie Wiesel. John (our youth minister) recommended this to me about ten years ago. It was first published in the 1950s but just came out in a new translation and was selected by Oprah’s Book Club this year, so it is everywhere. Night is a short nightmare of a book in which Wiesel describes his experience as a teen of being ripped from his home and humanity and pushed through the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel lost his mother and sister, and finally his father, in the camps. He lost his faith as well: “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.” (Yet in spite of this passage, Wiesel still believes in God, as later writing and interviews confirm).
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Originally published in 1947, this book is the diary of an intelligent, ordinary Jewish girl of 13, 14 and 15 years old (she wrote it between 1942 and 1944). I’m only a few pages in and this strikes me: I could be reading the work of one of my younger friends at MHCC or on MySpace.
Anne Frank’s diary is that ordinary (as it begins), that human. It is beautiful with the wonderful innocent vain self-absorbed beauty of a young girl. Now, to think that Anne died along with her sister at the Bergen-Belsen camp in early 1945…just fifteen years old…and to think that she was probably buried in a mass grave near the camp, bulldozed in with hundreds of others…makes the rage boil inside me. We can never forget the crimes Hitler’s people committed and God help us if we turn a blind eye to such things happening elsewhere today…
And if ever I wonder how a loving God could allow a place called hell, Mr. Mengele, you remind me of the answer!
