Israeli Students near at the Selection Site in Birkenau


Peacemakers Meditation & Prayer Vigil and the pond containing ashes of hundred's of thousands of victims near Crematoria IV in Birkenau.


 Youngest Peacemaker (17) Retreatant Reading Names of the Victims at the Selection Site

Post Retreat Reflections (Flying home from Poland, Sunday November 11^th)

How could they do it?  I just don’t get it.  I just can’t imagine that the perpetrators of these horrors and atrocities didn’t somehow wake up in the midst of this insanity and experience the horror and revulsion that I imagine to be the only natural, the only possible response to the specter of starving prisoners, burning bodies, smokestacks sending plumes of fire and smoke from the burning flesh of human beings into the sky.  I have studied the literature, I understand the psychological theories, and I still just can’t get my mind around this, much less any other part of my being.  How could they do this?  How dare they do this?  I believe that for this to have been possible, the capacity for such indifference to evil must be in all of us, must be in me; but I can’t imagine it. 

I can understand to a degree the atrocities committed by mobs gone mad, by soldiers on a rampage; but this was carefully planned out, systematically and calmly carried out mass extermination of human beings.  I know that the Nazis somehow convinced themselves and their soldiers that these people, the Jews. Gypsies, homosexuals and other unacceptable people in the new social order, were some kind of subhuman pests, vermin to be exterminated; but how does this happen?  How do you look at another human being, who looks just like you in so many ways, who has the same basic needs, and not see their humanity?  I know this happens constantly, I experienced it directly during my long years in prison, where as an inmate I was regarded as a substandard human, and expendable human, a thug by many of the guards; and yet I still just don’t get it.  Maybe I am just naïve.  That would be a surprise to me.  Naïve is not how I see myself given the tough places I’ve been in life, but maybe I am and maybe that’s a blessing or maybe it’s a curse.  I don’t want to be naïve, maybe innocent in a genuinely adult way, but not naïve.  I need to be able to see and stand up to truth not matter how painful, horrific or overwhelming.

From the first time I became aware of this Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau, from the first time I saw the film, Raising the Ashes, documenting the first retreat in 1996, and from the first retreat I attended in 2001, I always knew it was the perpetrator energy that I had to deal with.  I know in my gut there is no “them.”  I know this is in me, in our culture, and that I have to own it.   And maybe I am farther from owning it than ever.  My heart and mind scream out in agony … No oooooooo!

I thought I knew something about this retreat.  I pass myself off as one of the retreats leaders, holding space for others to plunge into this darkness, into not knowing, and into the deep shadow of evil.  I don’t know anything.  I have no answers.

Just the weekend before coming to Auschwitz for the sixth time, I led The Event with my friend & brother, Purna Steinitz, the founder of The Event--an extremely intense training, where we take people deep into their shadow, deep into the toxic inheritance we have all received to one degree or another, struggling together to shift something, to undo our victimization, undo our shame, and find a way to stand tall and vulnerable, owning our inheritance and its impact on us and others and clear enough to break the chain and not pass it on to anyone else, especially our children. 

I have done The Event and the Auschwitz retreat back to back for a number of years now; and it’s teaching me something.  I haven’t lost faith in humanity, my own or anyone elses, not even the Nazis, not even the father, uncle, brother, or grandfather who rapes the young girls we meet as adults in The Event, their spirits shattered from the age of 5 or 8 or 12.   In prison all those years, I was sure time and time again that I had found someone, a guard, a prisoner, who lacked humanity, who lacked basic goodness, who did not possess Buddha nature; and time and time again they would find a way to reveal their humanity to me, their hearts, their vulnerability, their goodness.  In the Raising the Ashes film, the naturalist, author and Zen master, Peter Mathiesson, raises his voice dramatically, calling us not to forget that man is an animal, that man is a terrible animal, as well as a beautiful animal. 

I’ve always cringed a bit hearing this, each time I watch this powerful film, feeling the implication that this evil is inherent in human nature.  This is not my experience.

My gut tells me that human beings are basically good, and that absent the effects of neglect, abuse, and shaming, our natural goodness will always shine forth.   I do agree with Matthieson that there is something “terrible” in us, but I believe it to be more like a virus, a terrible and evil virus, that circulates in human culture, just like the flu or other viruses.  It is passed on through neglect, abuse, shame and violence, especially against children, at that time when we are most vulnerable.  When we did The Event in prison, inevitably 80 to 90% of the prisoners would in the protected space of The Event, held by their brothers, reveal, often for the first time, that they were victims of severe child abuse – emotional, physical and sexual abuse, often beyond the imagination.  One no longer wondered how these men ended up in prison, or how they had come to do the harm they had done to others in many cases.

Even though, I am all but lost in not knowing when it comes to understanding how the Nazis, how these otherwise ordinary men and women, could have planned, built, lived in and maintained this highly organized human extermination factory, where they systematically murdered millions of human beings and just as systematically harvested everything of value, from clothing and personal effects to gold from their teeth and human hair to be used for textile production; even though I cannot or will not bring myself to understand how they got there, I know it is part of this same cycle of abuse and shame, that it is this same virus, that plagues us with child abuse, violence, war and genocide.  And I know it can be stopped, it can be wiped out, or at the very least contained, just like we have been able to largely contain small pox and other viruses that killed millions in the past.  I have witnessed the breaking of the chain time and time again in The Event.  Just like the successful AIDS drugs keep the virus from replicating itself, the work we do in The Event training prevents this terrible human virus of shame from replicating.  I believe the Bearing Witness work we are doing at Auschwitz and other places also has this potential.

While the fight against AIDS and other biological viruses is critical, the fight again the virus of shaming, the virus that creates what we call evil in human society, is even more critical.  How do our national and world leaders make decisions to send thousands, millions to their death in war, to displace millions as refugees, to ignore the cry of the poor and disenfranchised?  We ask ourselves this again and again in disbelief, and yet the answer is simple. These men and women, mostly men, have been systematically hardened, they had been trained and shamed into not feeling, they have been trained to fear vulnerability as a weakness, they have been trained to be tough, to make the “tough” call, and most importantly to never cry.  They have also been trained to believe in enemies.  They are the victims of child abuse.  We are all victims of child abuse to one degree or another. We have all been raised in a shame based, punishment-reward paradigm based on the insane notion that we can shame each other into social goodness. 

There is actually a theory of constructive shaming, a theory that says there is a good kind of shaming that reinforces pro-social attitudes; and that absent that, we would all be uncivilized beasts.  This is nonsense.  Shaming of any kind is toxic and destructive.

Fortunately, just as with the biological viruses we have struggled successfully against, there is a powerful inoculation against this terrible virus of shaming.  The inoculation is Love.  Children who receive sufficient unconditional love and who are not directly abused can ward off the culture of shaming, the punishment-reward system that even benevolent parents and educators ignorantly foist on us as children.   And people can be healed with love as well.  However, just as with the successful Truth and Reconciliation process undertaken in South Africa, before healing must come truth telling--bearing witness. 

Both at Auschwitz and in The Event, we unflinchingly bear witness to the impact of evil on individual human lives, not just collections of people but individuals.  In The Event we journey with one person at a time into the very roots of their trauma and shame, holding them there with fearless compassion as they find a way to de-victimize themselves and rediscover and trust in their inherent goodness and the goodness of others and life.  At Auschwitz we do not just bear witness to the extermination of millions of innocents, we actually read the names of those who died there and bear witness to the truth of each murder, each loss of our individual and collective humanity.

In both cases, we refuse to turn away.  Bearing Witness is the practice of not turning away.

So I have what my gut is telling me.  I have a theory of sorts emerging from my ongoing experience in this work, the Bearing Witness Retreat, The Event, the street retreats, prison work …; but essentially I have no answers.  I just trust that the answer lies in facing this evil, not in turning away.  So as peacemakers, we will return to Auschwitz, where we hope to establish an ongoing center or institute for bearing witness and reconciliation work; and in the coming year we will go to Rwanda, because we must.

And hopefully we will find a way to bring this practice of bearing witness to my own country and culture – bearing witness to the holocaust we perpetrated against the native peoples in the Americas, bearing witness to our legacy of slavery and the truth and reconciliation work that has not even begun for African Americans who live with the horrendous impact of this trauma and unimaginably deep shaming; bearing witness to the havoc, trauma and shaming wreaked up upon the world and our own people by the self-perpetuating war machine known as the military-industrial complex; bearing witness to the racist and profoundly shaming and destructive prison-industrial complex that not only sends one out of three African American men to jail or prison, but destroys families and communities, while stealing the resources we must dedicate to children’s health and safety, to education, and to all the support services and resources that might actually detour a young person from a path to prison in the first place.

When I reflect on how we are so systematically structured and organized to perpetuate this culture of shame and virus of shame and evil, I flirt with hopeless; but my personal experience of rising above this myself and seeing others break the chain as well does not permit hopelessness.  Hopelessness is a cop-out, and understandable feeling and part of the journey, but a copout if we dwell there.  We can and must do better.  We must not turn away, we dare not turn away.

                   Beyond Auschwitz Dialog Session on November 9, 2007

Auschwitz Retreat Days Four & Five

I am sitting down to write this late on the night of November 9^th, after two very long full days here in Oswiecim, Poland.  Thursday was our last day at Birkenau.  We began as usual with our meditation period and then the reading of the names at the Selection Site, the train platform in Birkenau.  I missed the religious services taking care of retreat business and returned to Birkenau just in time to begin the interfaith pilgrimage through Birkenau.  This Pilgrimage was fist developed by our wonderful German Catholic priest, Fr. Manfred, originally basing it on the Stations of the Cross, from the Christian tradition, choosing various locations in Birkenau to serve as each station.   Over the last several years, Fr. Manfred has worked with us to develop this into an interfaith pilgrimage, in which all of our clergy, from whichever faith are represented, join in making various offerings – readings, liturgies, ceremonies – at each station on the pilgrimage, deeply connecting with the events that occurred at each of these locations in the vast Birkenau death and concentration camp.  Our pilgrimage finished at the pond between Crematoria IV and V, where the ashes of hundreds of thousands of victims were deposited.  There we offered prayers and memorial candles and finished with singing and dancing in a large circle, raising our spirits and the spirits of all the victims of this place, as we began our transition into the Beyond Auschwitz part of the retreat.

We returned to Birkenau after dinner and held council in one of the prisoner barracks late into the evening.   Our friend August, another survivor of Auschwitz and one of the very few successful escapees, now 82 years old, join our council and shared some of his experiences in the camp, exhorting us not to fall into hatred or blaming of the German people for what the Nazis did here.   About a dozen of our retreatants elected to remain in the barracks until midnight in silent vigil, being with those who died there.

Today, Friday November 10^th, we entered into our Beyond Auschwitz Dialog process.  I facilitated on Open Space Technology process and our participants enthusiastically convened many different dialog groups, including one on developing a Bearing Witness Retreat in Rwanda.  The results of this Dialog Process will be posted on our Peacemaker Institute online community site in order to continue the dialog online with other past participants of the Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreat.  We finished our day at 9:30 pm, learning a beautiful African song from our Rwanda friend and participant, Dora Urufeni.

Tomorrow, we continue our dialog process in the morning and end the retreat with a celebratory lunch here at the Center for Dialog and Prayer before returning to Krakow and heading home.

Auschwitz Retreat Day Three, November 7, 2007: Birkenau

As we boarded the bus this morning at the Dialog Center for the short ride to Birkenau, it looked like we were in for more of the same, sub-freezing temperatures and freezing rain.  As the bus made the final turn and the eerie and in some ways bizarrely beautiful landscape of Birkenau came into view, I felt the familiar heaviness descend on my spirit, a kind of sobering seriousness that says, Pay Attention , or as the line in our Zen Peacemakers Gate of Sweet Nectar liturgy says, “Attention … Attention!”   As we gathered the meditation cushions and entered the gate of Birkenau, beneath the famous tower one sees in all the pictures, the sky began to clear a bit and we were blessed with several rain free hours, allowing us to do our meditation and read the names of those who perished here at the Selection Site, the train platform between the two sets of rail road tracks, where the Nazi doctors sent people to their immediate death in the gas chambers or to a slow death by starvation and overwork in the forced labor camps.  

We formed our meditation circle around an altar, the center piece of which is a beautiful wooden box where we place our sheets of names after reading them, bowing in respect before returning to our seat.  We sat in silent meditation or prayer for the first 30 minutes.  It was bitter cold with a strong wind, but at least it was not raining.  Flocks of big, black crows flew about adding to the eerie and strange beauty of this place of unspeakable horrors.  It is not just the killings, rapes, experiments and tortures that happen here, horrific enough, but also the daily relinquishing of humanity that it took to survive in the camps that created the dreaded legacy of this place. 

After a short break to stretch our legs and warm our bones, we sat down again and the designated readers for this session, positioned in the four directions each in turn read their names, four participants reading at once, one standing in each of the cardinal directions – the tower gate to the south, Crematoria I & II to the north and to the east and west, the vast landscape of barracks, most in ruins, with their brick chimneys standing like rows of sculptures against a grey sky and framed by the barbed wire of the once electrified fences.  As we sat down, our brother Andrzej Krajewki, leader of the Polish Peacemaker Community and principle host for the retreat, arrived assisting our dear friends Marian and Halina Kolodziej to their seats.  Marian is survivor of Auschwitz and a national treasure in Poland for his amazing art, the most graphic, visionary representations of the Holocaust imaginable.  His wife, Halina, is a renowned Polish actress.  Both frail and in their 80’s they sat there with us in the bitter cold and wind.  Halina rose to read here names, and bowed deeply at the altar after placing her names in the box there.  The rest of us sat in silence, bearing witness, each in our own way, to these human beings who were murdered here, to the energy of this place, to the barbed wire, ruins and black crows, to whatever arose in our hearts and minds … sorrow, agony, communion, fear, peace … no emotion is out of range here.  As the last readers finished honoring the people whose names were all we knew of them, one young woman with a painful family history here at Auschwitz began sobbing, and just cried and cried as others gently held her and her sorrow.

I called out the names of our clergy, asking those who wished to attend the Christian service to follow Fr. Manfred, our old friend, a German Catholic priest, who lives here in Oswiecim, ministering to those who visit Auschwitz.  He has labored her for more than 10 years, living and witnessing to the truth of his country’s terrible burden as the builders and executioners of these camps.  I asked those who wished to attend Jewish services to follow Rabbi Phyllis Berman, here at Auschwitz for the first time, and those wishing to attend Buddhist services to follow Sensei Genro Gauntt, who is here for the 12^th time.

I followed my fellow Zen Peacemaker, Sensei Genro and small group to the back of Crematoria I, at the steps descending into the dressing room, where the unsuspecting victims left there clothes and all their belonging, thinking they were about to shower, only to find themselves trapped in a gas chamber and gasping for air in the final moments of life.  Genro led us in the Gate of Sweet Nectar, our Zen Peacmaker Liturgy, adapted from the Kanromon, in which we make offering to all the hungry spirits, seen and unseen, including ourselves.

We were able to complete our afternoon sessions at the Selection Site as well, though now in a freezing rain, just light enough to not send us to the barracks for cover.  We finished our day with a Kaddish service their at the Selection Site.

This evening the group visited Marian’s art exhibit at a Franciscan Monastery near Birkenau, one of the most impactful parts of the retreat, a descent into the psychological hell that was Auschwitz.  Having seen the exhibit many times and not feeling so well this evening I stayed behind to rest and work on our program for the next several days.  Just a little while ago, they returned with many variation of awe and wonder in their eyes, softly talking about the amazing world they had just entered with Marian, who after guiding them through his extensive art installation at the Monastery, talked with them for several hours about his first hand experiences, as an Aushwitz survivor, who was one of the first prisoners sent to Auschwitz and one of the few to survive.

 

Marian Kolodziej:

http://www.auschwitz.org.pl/publikacje/index.php?language=EN&ksiazka=217&mode=ksiazka&submode=info

Auschwitz Retreat Day Two, Nov 6, 2007: Birkenau

As always, we began our morning with the small group councils at 7 am.  I am facilitating Group 2.  There are only six of us right now, five women and myself, because the three other men assigned to our group did not arrive.  So I’m doing my best not to get in the way of the wonderful feminine energy and wisdom in the group.  The sharing this morning was deep, both painful and nourishing to the spirit.

We all arrived together at Birkenau around 10 am and followed our official guide from the back entrance to the “sauna,” the building wear prisoners destined for the labor camps were registered, listening to her description of the camp and how things functioned, how the people were systematically murdered, tortured and worked and starved to death.   At the “sauna” building, our retreat rabbi lead us in Kaddish, a Jewish memorial prayer/service that we do every day of the reatreat.  We then had two hours to wander our way back to the front gate of Birkenau.   

The camp is huge, covering some 700 acres.  My friend and fellow Zen Peacemaker Genro and I walked way into the woods at the back of the complex to do a service at the tree where Roshi Jishu Holmes’ ashes were place years ago.  Roshi Jishu co-founded the Bearing Witness retreat with her husband, Roshi Bernie Glassman.  We then wandered through the woods and finally through the gas chambers, crematoria to the railroad tracks, following them back to the famous tower and gate at the entrance to Birkenau. 

By the time we finished the Kaddish service at the sauna, the weather had turned to freezing rain.   After our traditional lunch outside the gate of Birkenau, soup and a piece of bread, we entered one of the barracks for silent meditation and reading the names of those who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.   The rain was falling too hard and people were already too wet to sit outside at the Selection Site as we normally do. 

Back at the Dialog Center this evening we spend two hours in deep council after dinner, hearing the stories of those who lost family members here and sharing our hearts with each other. 

Finally late into the night we listened to Dora, an amazing woman from Rwanda, who joined our retreat this year Bear Witness with us and to share her experience of the genocide in Rwanda.  We are working with Dora and others to bring a bearing witness process of some kind to Rwanda.   It’s very late now and I cannot begin to do any of this justice.  I feel like my heart his beating right through my chest in agony and my eyes are way in the back of my skull in awe and overload.   I am tired and grateful to be allowed to rest in not knowing.

 

Auschwitz Notes

Monday, November 5, 2007

Forty of us, from 11 different countries began the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat this morning, leaving Krakow early
by bus and arriving mid-morning at the Auschwitz
I museum.  We are a diverse group along
many dimensions, including age, our youngest participant 17 and the oldest
among us, 82.   Our retreat begins with
watching to documentary films at the Auschwitz I museum theatre, one
documenting the liberation of Auschwitz by the
Russian troops and the other the liberation of Bergen Belsen by British soldiers.   This is my sixth time on the retreat and if
anything these horrific films are harder to watch each year.  After the films, we step out of the darkened
theatre into the Auschwitz I camp and walk
through the famous camp gate, its archway emblazoned with the slogan, Arbeit
Macht Frei, “work makes you free.” 

This Peacemaker Bearing Witness retreat is a “plunge”
practice, designed to plunge us into not
knowing, the first of the three Peacemaker Community tenets.   The other two are bearing witness and loving
action.  Coming out of the theatre I
found myself in fractured state that I had no words to attach to, unable to do
anything but bear witness in deep silence.  
We spent the next several hours touring Auschwitz
I, the former Polish military barracks the Nazi’s turned into a concentration
camp and punishment barracks, where they first imprisoned members of the Polish
intelligencia and resistance, and later Russian prisoners of war.  Eventually, they began bringing the Jews and
Gypsies there as well, and when the camp was overflowing, the Nazis began the
immense project of building Auschwitz II, known as Birkenau, with prisoner
labor.  Birkenau is 25 times larger than Auschwitz I, stretching over 600+ acres.  It was planned to be twice a big, but
expansion was eventually cut short when the Germans started losing the
war. 

Auschwitz I was crowded as usual, with bus load after bus
load of visitors, many of them school children begin guided through the camps
many exhibits, often jostling other groups for space as they pass through the
narrow passageways in the barracks.  Most
striking were the Israeli school children, many wrapped in Israeli flags.  It’s better to visit Auschwitz I in the early
morning or late afternoon, so one can actually connect with this place and the
presence of its past. 

We finished our day with a large gathering of the entire
group, followed by the first meeting of our small council groups, our first
chance to share deeply with the 8 or 9 people we will meet with in this way
every morning.   Having slept badly for
two nights now, I find myself somewhat on automatic pilot as I write this.  In the morning we head for Birkenau, which is
for me where the retreat really begins, sitting in meditation at the “selection
site,” outside on the railway tracks, where Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors
would people, mostly Jews, either to immediate extermination in the gas
chambers or to death by starvation, cold and overwork in the labor camps.  We will sit there in silence and then read
the names of those who perished there, honoring their memory and bearing
witness to this human tragedy, so representative of the genocidal aspect of our
human culture that continues today.  In
between sittings and readings, we will wander about the camp along or in small
groups, making our own way into the depths of this place, perhaps discovering
yet another layer of the unhealed human shadow, personal and collective.

12 Annual Interfaith Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, November 4 - 10, 2007.  See www.peacemakerinstitute.org

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Denver Street Retreat - Day 3:
I just wrote and extensive blog that some how disappeared on this Denver Public Library computer where I am writing like any self-respecting street blogger would do. I'm very tired and space out from lack of sleep, so losing that entry and starting over again is just about throwing me over the edge.  I'll persevere though.  I did get about 5 hours sleep last night after only getting 15 minutes sleep if that the night before.  The first night out we all froze in colder than expected temperatures.  Last night it was a little warmer and I managed to score another blanket at the church where we had dinner last night.  Great dinner, great place, very friendly volunteers.   A fight broke out while we were there and it turned into quite a  melee for a few minutes while volunteers and visitors jumped into pull the combatants apart.  I had talked to one of them earlier that day.  He had been telling me about getting kicked out of his rented sleeping room for beating up his landlord in some kind of drunken dispute.  He seems to be a walking fight waiting to happen and probably is destined for jail.  Must be a hard way to live.  I knew a lot of guys like that in prison.  The various soup kitchens and church meals we visit all have a different energy to them. Mostly the volunteers are very kind and friendly.   Some of these places remind me of prison thought ... lot's of edgy, not so conscious male energy ... well I've been there ... in prison and before, so I can relate.  I think it's a very tough place for women to be though.  The few women we seen in these places look very beaten down, literally in some cases.  It's all so sad and so real.  Some times funny too, not the pain and suffering, but just the humor and the absurdity that arises in such circumstances.  We are 7 now.  Joanne left last night because she had to work today in Moab, Utah, leaing an Outward Bound group.   That's ans interesting parallel and contrast with the street retreat.  Maybe the street retreats could be billed as urban outward bound program.  I've been seeing more and more people I recognize out here from past street retreats in Denver. THis is this is about the 6th or 7th street retreat we've done in Denver.  Some of the men I recognized look much the same. Others show signs of physical and/or mental deterioration.  It's tough out here, especially if you are suffering with mental illness or addiction.  Okay, I'm going to stop here before I lose another batch of writing, which would push me over the edge at this point.  Time to go begging.  I've got to panhandle $3.75 for my bus fare back to Boulder, which is harder than  you might think. Most years I've had to ask hundreds of people to raise my bus fare. Don't let any body tell you that panhandleing is easy money.  For more info on the Street Retreats visit: www.peacemakerinstitute.org and click on "Street Retreat."
Peace

Denver Street Retreat - Day 3:
I just wrote and extensive blog that some how disappeared on this Denver Public Library computer where I am writing like any self-respecting street blogger would do. I'm very tired and space out from lack of sleep, so losing that entry and starting over again is just about throwing me over the edge.  I'll persevere though.  I did get about 5 hours sleep last night after only getting 15 minutes sleep if that the night before.  The first night out we all froze in colder than expected temperatures.  Last night it was a little warmer and I managed to score another blanket at the church where we had dinner last night.  Great dinner, great place, very friendly volunteers.   A fight broke out while we were there and it turned into quite a  melee for a few minutes while volunteers and visitors jumped into pull the combatants apart.  I had talked to one of them earlier that day.  He had been telling me about getting kicked out of his rented sleeping room for beating up his landlord in some kind of drunken dispute.  He seems to be a walking fight waiting to happen and probably is destined for jail.  Must be a hard way to live.  I knew a lot of guys like that in prison.  The various soup kitchens and church meals we visit all have a different energy to them. Mostly the volunteers are very kind and friendly.   Some of these places remind me of prison thought ... lot's of edgy, not so conscious male energy ... well I've been there ... in prison and before, so I can relate.  I think it's a very tough place for women to be though.  The few women we seen in these places look very beaten down, literally in some cases.  It's all so sad and so real.  Some times funny too, not the pain and suffering, but just the humor and the absurdity that arises in such circumstances.  We are 7 now.  Joanne left last night because she had to work today in Moab, Utah, leaing an Outward Bound group.   That's ans interesting parallel and contrast with the street retreat.  Maybe the street retreats could be billed as urban outward bound program.  I've been seeing more and more people I recognize out here from past street retreats in Denver. THis is this is about the 6th or 7th street retreat we've done in Denver.  Some of the men I recognized look much the same. Others show signs of physical and/or mental deterioration.  It's tough out here, especially if you are suffering with mental illness or addiction.  Okay, I'm going to stop here before I lose another batch of writing, which would push me over the edge at this point.  Time to go begging.  I've got to panhandle $3.75 for my bus fare back to Boulder, which is harder than  you might think. Most years I've had to ask hundreds of people to raise my bus fare. Don't let any body tell you that panhandleing is easy money.  For more info on the Street Retreats visit: www.peacemakerinstitute.org and click on "Street Retreat."
Peace

48 of us, Jews, Christians and Buddhists, either by birth or current practice, Poles, Germans, Israelis, Americans, Tanzanians, came to Oswiecim, Poland for the 11^th annual Interfaith Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau, hosted by the Zen Peacemakers, bearing witness to the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust and these Nazi concentration camps and death camps; to the very depths of human shame, humiliation, degradation and suffering; to the virus like cycles of trauma, shame and violence that still plague our human kind; to our own personal suffering, shame and violence and finally to the hope and even joy we can find in entering into this darkness holding each other with loving kindness, compassion and deep community. More photos will be posted in my photo gallery here at zaadz.

I had the great pleasure this evening of reuniting with my friend, singer songwriter Nancy Cook, after a hiatus of some 22 years.   Of course, I was away in prison 14 of those years.  Nancy played tonight at the Rock and Soul Cafe in Boulder, Colorado along with Cari Minor and Rebecca Folsum, two wonderful singer songwriters in their own right.  If any of you were in Boulder back in the 1980's Nancy was a regular performer, both solo and with bands like the Mercenaries, at clubs like the Hi Lo and Arapahoe Ranch in Boulder as well as the Little Bear up in Evergreen.
Check out Nancy's website and music at: http://www.picklehead.com/nancy.html