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General Information: Overview: Press Clips: Life lessons discovered at Auschwitz

Diane Urbani
Deseret News
Feburary 15, 2003

On his ninth wedding anniversary, Mike Smith flew from Atlanta to Poland and Auschwitz . His wife, Marlise, flew home to Salt Lake City and their two boys. With Marlise's blessing, Smith went on a weeklong retreat at the site of the Nazi concentration camp; this month he talked about the experience in a presentation at the Jewish Community Center.

During his talk, Smith sought to show how people in Utah , Poland , and around the world share the experience of suffering due to their religious beliefs. When he asked audience members how many had been singled out or looked down upon because of their religion, 70 percent said that they had. To another question, "On a scale of 1-10, how much have you and your group suffered?" 76 percent answered 8, 9 or 10. Smith provided personal keypads so that audience members could give instant, anonymous responses.

Next Smith posed a question to himself, one that was probably on the minds of those who came to hear him: Why spend a week at Auschwitz ? Smith isn't Jewish; nor were many of the 100 retreat participants. The group included Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus from around the world; they were brought together by Bernie Glassman , a Brooklyn-born Jew turned Zen Buddhist. Last summer Smith heard about Glassman's Peacemaker Community, an interfaith activist network. When he visited its Web site, a pop-up window appeared, telling him of the "Bearing Witness" retreat at Auschwitz .

"I was quite shocked there was even such a thing," Smith recalled. "I wasn't planning on going at all." Then, last October, he was in Washington , D.C. , on business. He visited the Holocaust Museum there, and soon after exiting, he called Marlise.

"There were a million reasons not to go" on the retreat, he said. Yet, moved by what he saw inside the museum, he told his wife he felt compelled to go. She urged him to do it.

"On day one, I was absolutely numb. Nothing prepares you to go there and experience this, to see what man is capable of doing to man," Smith said. In the ensuing days, however, he went through a process of opening up to the others on retreat. They sat together at the Selection Site, on the railroad tracks that brought Jews into the camp. They prayed, meditated and read aloud names of those who died at Auschwitz . Their connection deepened through the week, and the retreat culminated in the kaddish, a Jewish prayer of mourning. "Everyone participated: the priests, rabbis, the Muslim clerics . . . we lit candles, we prayed, we cried."

The kaddish, and later a Jewish traditional dance, was an act of sealing each individual's commonality with the others in the group, regardless of their religious traditions.

Auschwitz 's 300 acres of barracks, crematoriums and graveyards were built on the Nazis' belief that they held the singular truth. Jews and others were seen as obstacles to Germany 's success. The Holocaust, as Smith and the other retreat participants saw at Auschwitz , was a drive to snuff out diversity.

More than 60 years later, you can still find religious groups and religious people who are sure they've found the one right way. Smith, Glassman and Peacemaker Community members advocate acceptance of differing traditions and beliefs -- that, they say, is the only path to global peace.

"Bearing witness," the name of the Auschwitz retreat, refers to an embrace of all people who have been ostracized for their religious or ethnic identity. Humans have suffering in common; we also have the capacity to accept each other's differences. By contrast, holding too tightly to our ideas as being the only correct ones has led to violent conflict.

Smith grew up LDS in Salt Lake City . He went to Hong Kong to serve his mission, but decided while there that the LDS faith wasn't for him. Since then, he's studied Buddhism, Judaism and other traditions -- yet he doesn't reject Mormonism. It is still "part of who I am."

It's not necessary, Smith says, to define himself within a particular faith. "As humans, we need to enlarge the definition of who we are . . . Has not one God created us?" read two of the slides shown during his JCC talk.

"Bearing witness," the name of the Auschwitz retreat, means slowing down your daily pace, consciously honoring people whose beliefs differ from yours, and cultivating compassion toward those outside your religious or ethnic group.

He asked his audience whether they considered themselves spiritually active -- working on themselves -- or socially active, as in working on the world. About 38 percent responded that they were primarily bent on spiritual development; 11 percent were socially active, and 56 percent said they are both. That kind of integration helped form the Peacemaker Community, Smith said. And it can create peace anywhere.

Smith's final question: "Is world peace possible, in your lifetime?" Twenty-five percent said yes; 33 percent no; and 42 said not in my lifetime, but one day.

 


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