Auschwitz
September 6, 2001

I want to feel vulnerable. I want to experience the energy, pain, suffering at the very core of my being. I want to go to Auschwitz hollow and empty. All who were imprisoned in Auschwitz were hollow and empty, and all were vulnerable. When I say "all" I really mean Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Hungarians, old, young, male, female, and Nazis. All hollow, vulnerable and fear-full. I will not eat today.

Gstalt-L, An email discussion group devoted to Gestalt therapy and the community of its practitioners (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-l). Gstalt-J, An email discussion group devoted to research on Gestalt therapy, theory and practice (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-j). Supported by the Gestalt Research Consortium (GRC) (www.g-gej.org/grc). Gestalt Bookmarks, a place to begin researching the field of contemporary Gestalt therapy on the world wide web (www.g-gej.org/gestaltbookmarks).

This issue of Gestalt! constitutes a special invitation to explore the Gestalt Forum at Behavior Online, where discussion of issues related to the field of Gestalt therapy take place, but where the topic of spirituality in Gestalt Therapy is, for this time, especially explored.

The day I leave Poland, six days after I walked out of Auschwitz, I am able to put my pen to paper again.

September 12, 2001

I am flying. It is ten minutes after take off and I notice I am breathing again. I have put a merkevah of light around the plane. Let this plane safely reach its destination. Let the souls of all those whose did not reach their destination yesterday be guided and comforted.

My mind is drifting back to the eyes of a baby whose picture is on the wall in the children's block in Auschwitz. She must have been around six months but very thin, and so very small. She was one of triplets and therefore well known and well used by Dr. Mengele, whose experiments were mainly with twins and triplets.

The inscription under the photo said her name was Ruth and that she died in1942. Having given birth to twins, I can imagine the joy her parents felt when she was born. I cannot imagine the depths of anguish they felt when she was removed from their arms. What struck me as I looked into her face was the unspeakable despair in her eyes. I simply could not fit those eyes with such a tiny young body. Such eyes belonged to an old person who had seen a lifetime of suffering and had eventually lost all hope. I could not connect these eyes with this tiny curled up body. They stared into a void of emptiness seeing only the secrets of darkness. Old, old eyes on a very new body.

Auschwitz shocked me for many reasons but it was the size, the precision and structure of this mammoth organisation that left me speechless. But if Auschwitz shocked me, Birkenau stunned me. This was extermination beyond all imagination. A cynical expression comes into my mind - State of the Art Extermination. Organised, orderly and darkly secret. I realised that seeing the emaciated bodies of Jews who had escaped death at the time the Russians liberated them, I had never fully connected them with their individual beingness-not until I saw a movie made in 1935 in an old Synagogue in Cracow.

In this movie, taken by someone who may have been making a home movie, I saw round women selling fruit and vegetables in the street market. All wearing scarves for that was the tradition. I saw Jewish women, wearing lipstick and beautifully dressed, pushing strollers with round, chubby babies. I saw men laughing, chatting and arguing on the street. Men wearing hats and their traditional black gowns who saw their clothing as an aspect of their identity. These were healthy people, Jewish people, whose history in Poland goes back for over seven hundred years.

The unique clothing was a part of who they saw themselves to be and this was the first thing removed from them when they arrived a few years later to Auschwitz. Underwear was forbidden in Auschwitz. Modesty, an integral aspect of Judaism, and dignity, were stripped away in huge raw sheets.

All this, and much more, fills my mind as I fly to Prague. This was the physical reality, but what of the emotional, the mental and the spiritual. I know that the Holocaust was Karmic. The depth of this karmic debt is well beyond me, but I think I understand one aspect of it. Two thousand years ago a people rejected and condemned one Man. This Teacher spoke of unconditional love for self and other. Two thousand years later one man condemned a whole people. That man spoke of hate and evoked mass fear, and, through this, created pure destruction.

The Jewish People have always carried a wound. It is a very deep sorrow. So deeply rooted that it could be said they came to believe that they need to suffer. How many of us believe that in order to learn our lessons of life we need to suffer. Auschwitz was a place where the need to suffer and the need to create suffering came together. It is also a place where two aspects of superiority came together. For the Chosen People and the Aryan Race, both believed that they had answers to deep and important questions. They both stood tall in the 'knowledge ' that they were Teachers for the World. And indeed, they have been. However this is not a concept many people would recognise for we have persisted in focussing on the pain and the suffering.

What occurred in this place called Auschwitz, was a means by which the Jewish People could release some of this sorrow and some of this needs to suffer. By dying in this place, they were choosing to release racial Karma and grief for the whole. Just as the Master Teacher Jesus did two thousand years before. And they did it. They did it tremendously. The soul energy of these beings rose triumphant and in perpetrating the myth of the victim the ones that are perpetrating and doing a disservice to the ones who gave their lives.

Jesus and Hitler can be seen as Polarities without any problem however both came to alter human consciousness.

If we have all, on a soul level, agreed to our physical experience, for the sake of our evolution towards Thesis, and ultimately that means Global and Galactic healing. Then I would say that every person who gave his and her life during the holocaust is a hero. They offered their lives to raise the consciousness of the Planet. Every soul that completed their journey of believing they must suffer rose triumphant as they moved from physical existence back into spirit. They did it by being in the same place as those that believed in creating suffering.

I believe they knew on a soul level that as long as our People, my People, stay enmeshed in their beliefs that they must suffer, then they always will. I believe that to transcend such a racial belief they allowed themselves to go through suffering and out of in like matter through a black hole. It becomes transformed in the experience and becomes anti matter. Anti matter is Unconditional Love. It has no matter because it has transcended all aspect of matter.

In saying this I know that for there to be 'so called' victims there must also be 'so called' persecutors. I say 'so called' because this is only the personality's way of seeing this phenomenon, not the souls way. And given that all experiences of a karmic nature are created on a soul level, then it goes without saying that the SS and Nazis also agreed to participate in raising the consciousness of the World.

For out of this emerged a re-newed passion and commitment to embrace human dignity. Out of this most shocking time emerged a new vision for gender and racial equality. I look at our world today and wonder how much of this excruciatingly hard work still benefits our World. I can only pray that as we continue to evolve more and more souls see the Light as Unconditional Love for All That Is and can hold on to this Knowing, inside and outside every
situation.

---

Call for Papers for Gestalt!:

We are always looking for good writing, interesting developments to share with the Global Gestalt community, and ways of sharing the wealth of Gestalt therapy with a wider audience. If you have an idea for an article, a piece of news, or if you have a bug in your bonnet and need to unload with a letter to the editor, please contact Philip Brownell, Sr. Editor, to discuss it (phil@g-gej.org).

Authors will find useful information at the Masthead for the journal, located at http://www.g-gej.org/masthead.