A Gay Christian Reflects on the Holocaust

By Clarence

on 10 February 2005

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- the Nazi death camp that has come to symbolize the horror of the Holocaust. An estimated 1.5 million people were murdered there -- most of them systematically in gas chambers. Nearly all the victims were Jews. Others included Gypsies, Poles, Catholics, homosexuals and Soviet POWs (www.cnn.com/holocaust).

I wasn’t born then yet and have to admit I find it somewhat strange that just a week ago a young Prince Harry of England could have caused such a ruckus when he attended a private party dressed in a Nazi youth uniform. It was strange for me given that in Asia a number of horrific genocides have also happened e.g. Pol Pot’s Cambodia and then the brutality of Rwanda and yet we do not make much of it. Perhaps it is an Asian thing – we just consign ourselves to fate particularly when we do not come from a strong Judeo-Christian heritage where right and wrong and good and evil are often held in such stark contrast.

Perhaps also I am too divorced in time and space from the venue of Auschwitz itself to be able to connect with the horror that was perpetrated there. And yet one of the books that has emblazoned itself in my psyche is Night – a thin book I picked up from a second hand bookstore in Singapore written by Elie Wiesel the famed Holocaust survivor Nobel Laureate. It has been one whole decade since I first read Wiesel’s tragic biography - of his descent into a forced darkness, which stripped him layer by layer of his God given humanity till out sheer exhaustion he no longer had the capacity to love even his dying father. Yet despite the long lapse of time, a passage from that book has remained with me throughout these years. It Wiesel’s dirge – his funeral song written for his first night at the concentration camp having just escaped extermination by less than a hair’s breadth.:

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 the 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.

I am haunted by the beauty and the intensity of Wiesel’s language. Haunted by the desolation Wiesel’s cry. Haunted by the trauma a teenager like him must have experienced entering that black abyss that sucked up all life. Haunted by the fact that by divine design or by chance, had I been born a mere 30 plus years earlier in Europe, I might have found myself in no different a position from Wiesel except only that while he had a yellow star stitched onto his clothes, I would have had to walk around in the same sick premises with a pink triangle on mine. I shudder at that thought. And then I think of some of the things that have happened recently to gay people say in Mugabe’s Africa and a cold terror envelopes me.

But that fear is then replaced with a shame. A shame because I share a similar heritage to the perpetrators of the Holocaust obscenity. We are both Christian. It is easy to absolve myself and say as no doubt many would, that they were not “true” Christians. That a “true” Christian – a born again Christian – would never have become complicit in such horrendous atrocity.

But the fact is they were “true” Christians. No less truer than many who now read what I write. They – and like many of us today – just did not grasp the extent of the darkness of the human condition. In fact it was the Evangelical Church group called the Deutsche Christen who became the Christian voice of the Nazi movement. Citing submission to the state’s law barring non-Aryans (Jews, homosexuals etc) from the civil service, the Deutsche Christen proposed banning non-Aryans from becoming ministers or religious teachers. The rest is of course history.

It is easy to think that we would not perpetrate similar injustices yet I am haunted by a man called Milgram. After the fall of the Nazi regime, the key Nazis were put on trial. Reflecting on the trial of Lt Col Adolf Eichmann who had been head of the dreaded Gestapo, the famed philosopher Hannah Arendt, argued that this epitome of evil was just an ordinary human being – that Eichmann is just you and me. Arendt whose community had suffered greatly under Eichmann, was ostracized for the rest of her life.

But history shows that there was deep wisdom in Arendt’s thoughts. In 1963, shortly after the Eichmann trial, a psychologist by the name of Stanley Milgram set up his now (in)famous experiment. Milgram recruited participants from around the Yale University vicinity. When the participants reached the experiment site, they were introduced to a stern looking man in a white coat, the Experimenter who would be in charge of the experiment. The participant would be introduced to another person who pretended to be a participant. The two participants would draw lots so that one would end up as Teacher and the other as Student. Unknown to the true participant, the lots were always rigged such that the false participant would always get the Student role and the true participant would get the Teacher role.

The Student would be sent to another room, which the Teacher (true participant) could view through a mirror. The Student would be strapped up with some electrodes, which were connected to a machine operated by the Teacher. The Experimenter sat in the same room with the Teacher. The Teacher was instructed to say some words. The Student was then asked to repeat the words. Each time the Student got a word wrong, the Teacher was to administer an electric shock. The intensity of the electric shock was to increase each time the Student got an answer wrong. The shocks were to range from a mere 75 volts to a life threatening 450 volts.

Of course we now know that the electric shocks were not actually administered. But the true participants did not know that at the time. The Student (who was acting out a role) would respond to each electric shock administered for a wrong answer starting with a grunt to a low level “shock” (75 volts), insisting that he refuses to continue with the experiment (150 volts) to a piercingly painful scream (200 volts) to losing consciousness (330 volts). Everytime a voltage was increased and the Student responded appropriately, the Teacher (true participant) would indicate his concern over the Student’s condition to the Experimenter. The Experimenter would respond with instructions that ranged from “He’s fine. Go on” to “It’s absolutely essential to go on” to “You have no choice. Go on.”

Alarmingly Milgram’s experiment showed that 68% of the true participants were willing to render the life threatening electric shock of 450 volts to the Students despite the screams and protest of the Students. Milgram theorized that ordinary people would resort to behavior tantamount to atrocity when the conditions are right e.g. when there is an authority figure who claims to take responsibility for their actions. Frighteningly Milgram’s experiment has been replicated by other experimenters.

While Wiesel haunts me with his humanity, Milgram haunts me with my own potential for inhumanity. That had you and I been heterosexual Christians in the Evangelical Church in Nazi Germany, there is a 68% chance (and possibly more) that we would have participated as perpetrators in the Holocaust. Milgram forces me not to hide behind the “true” Christian façade but to confront the possibility of my own evil.

Perhaps because of this, one hero I cling to with almost dear life in my spiritual pilgrimage is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I first encountered Bonhoeffer in “The Cost of Discipleship.” His call to radical discipleship fired my then youthful imagination. I still remember his thoughts, which proclaimed that while grace was free it would cost me my life.

I learnt later that when the Protestant Churches in Germany complied with the Nazi pogrom of extermination, a few from within the Confessing Church stood up against this tyranny. One of these was Bonhoeffer. While he disagreed with the theology of the Jews, yet he believed that they like anyone else had the right to be treated justly and with dignity. That as a Christian, he had the obligation to ensure that his society treated minorities with justice and dignity even when he disagreed with them.

For his association with the resistance movement, Bonhoeffer was arrested, interrogated and eventually executed by the Gestapo in the concentration camp at Flossenburg. I feel the tragedy of his execution knowing that he was hanged just days before the Allied victory in Europe – I have sometimes asked why God could not have stayed that execution. If you have read Bonhoeffer you would sense the tremendous loss to Christian theological development that was caused by the cutting short of his illustrious life. And yet, you get a sense that Bonhoeffer would not have had it any other way – it was his Golgotha and we have no right to take it away from him – because his theology and his faith were intricately tied in to ensuring that even the marginalized are treated with justice and dignity. That even when we disagree with others we need to give them space to thrive. That the grace of God and according dignity to another human being (even someone whom I vehemently disagree with) cannot be separated because the God who became human created the very humanity which carries His divine image.

So as I sit here late inside of my own night reflecting over an event that seems so very far away, as I allow myself to feel crushed by Wiesel’s tragic life, as I force myself to be crushed by the terror of the evil the Milgram so decisively showed lurks even in me – a “true” blue born again Christian, I pray that even if it is in a small way, God will in his grace nurture Bonhoeffer’s spirit to live a little inside of me so that when my time comes, I too will be able to hold up my head to the heavens and say like he did: “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life,” as he walked to the gallows that fateful morning in 1945.

If you are reading this, can I just ask that you take a minute to be silent to remember the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals and anyone else who suffered and died simply for who they were because others became gripped with prejudice and needed someone to blame for their troubles.