The Ashes' Pond

The few things, that deportees were allowed to take with them, probably always included photos of their loved ones and of experiences in their lives which they cherished. Some of these photos survived and are exhibited on two immense walls. This photo and its title makes me cry even now - me a grandmother of nine (since Dec. 2005: of ten!): "Schoen wie die Lewone und werden uns alle in Freuden, gesund und stark recht bald wieder sehen. In Liebe, Euer Enkelkind bis 120." "Pretty as the Lewone (yiddish for moon) , and shall see each other again very soon, in joy, healthy and strong. Love [from] your grandchild until 120." [Jewish birthday blessing, a ccording to God's promise in Genesis 6,13]

Did we give them breath and sound and movement for a few moments?

Our program announced "Services", Jewish Service, Christian Service, Buddhist Service.
Until the recent years I've been almost a freak of Ceremonies, many of which I've conducted myself.
The first day I didn't want to go to any service.
I was glad, Renate Rose suggested to sing,
and she taught me and Ruediger and Maja [=water in Arabic and Hebrew] some songs with messages that truly resonated with me, like this one:

Take this Moment
...
(Listen to the song in Song-Game 2007)

But the next morning Yanina said to me:
"I was told, that we missed something yesterday."
The Christian service is a walking along stations of a "Via Dolorosa".
We understood, that the Polish people had started to apply the Fourteen Stations of the Cross to specifi locations in BirkenAU.
Pater Manfred, who had improved on the choice and order of these Stations, led us that day to the seventh, eight and ninth station,
and we were reading meditations
which "come from the land and the Catholic traditions of the parishes of Oswiecim and Brzezinka,
that for many years have kept alive the memory of the victims of the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau..."

The twelfth Station was the Ashes' Pond.

There was a time, when I couldn't hear the sound of a train, without sensing as if physically tortured,
And I would look at the moon and scream: "How dare you to still shine, who you have watched all this."
But I never put the responsibility on God, even though my image of God then was like that of most people.
I told elsewhere on this site,
that I was deeply influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer's call "to grow up", "to come of age",
to become "muendig" in German, the official term for reaching the age of 18.
"Muendig", from the noun "Mund" = mouth.
I have my own mouth now
to scream "AU.... AU",
not to involve "God" here.
If to involve God, then why only in AUschwitz-BirkenAU?
Is it O.K. for your God to watch the billions of "little" victimizations and perpetrations every second on this planet,
and only when it comes to Auschwitz, he is suddenly accountable?

Bonhoeffer ( see puzzle piece 1b, and Song-Game 2007 ) taught me,
that God has created me in a way that I must live "as if God did not exist",
based on a sentence in Medieval Latin: "Utsi Deus non daretur".
i.e. as totally, wholly, entirely, absolutely responsible for my life and for the world on which I depend.
Bonhoeffer, a German protestant pastor and professor of theology, wrote this during his 2 years in a Nazi prison.
He was executed a few days before HItler left his game on this planet...

I couldn't take part in the readings and prayers,

but I felt an overflowing love for those, whose ashes had mingled with the water.

And if there had been any need to strengthen my determination of giving them breath and sound and life,

it would have happened there at the pond

I imagined them all in the image of Yanina's mother.
Yanina had - shortly before - found a bird's empty nest...

"Will there still come days in forgiveness and grace" - sung by Hava Alberstein in Poland on Holocaust Memorial Nov. 16, 2008