It's Not End Times, So How's About a Bit of Matzah?

I have little interest in engaging in conversation about who is at fault in this conflict or in polarized and heated accusations, nor do I propose that I have any solutions to the terrible suffering on both sides during this war.  But what I do know is that the "us" and "them" perspective is getting us nowhere.  And my sponsorship of the fesitval was my effort to think of ourselves as a collective "us" - those of us who just want peace.

Those of us who just want peace.

What, pray tell, is peace - and what is it for?

This is an important question to ask because - ready for it? - there are far too many people who don't want peace.  In fact, a health chunk of our leadership isn't interested in peace.

Peace is the absence of hostility.  Peace is respectful debate, empathetic communication and the ability to put the interests of the whole before one's own tribe, or one's own position and brand.  Above all, peace is patient.

Politics, as it functions in most circles of the world, is the absence of peace.  Politics is competition, forcing one's position, picking strategic fights, building coalitions and of course, about gaining and holding power.  

There's no time for deliberation in combative politics - that's all a bit too much like committing sociology. Life has winners and losers and to be the former, you have to make some of the latter.  There's no time to be nice when winning is at stake.  Every ounce of cognitive, organizational capacity has to be dedicated to beating the other guy.  That's the primary objective; when they're destroyed, you've won.

Some people are impatient, narcissistic, power-mad or just plain mean.  Others have life experience that makes them so.  Societies or community cultures can be shaped one way or the other - under threatening circumstances people of any given tribe are more likely to think "them vs us" and focus on end-states instead of pondering the dynamism of social living.

The aggressive, winner-take all types who tend to force their way into positions of leadership want it that way.  They don't want us to think, to understand, to connect - they want us to follow.  It's as simple as that.

Do political leaders and their supporters demonize their opponents and push the envelopes of acceptable conduct?  Of course they do.  They want an ideological war, because that's how they raise funds and score votes.   

Aggressive politics is on the same behavioural spectrum as flat-out war.  "Picking fights" with a union or a community group is no different than lobbing bombs at one region or another; the only difference is the severity, and the confabulation required to justify one's actions.

In all cases, collateral damage is just one of those things.  Survival of the fittest, etc.

Because really, that's what it comes down to.  War is The Heart of Darkness, the most basic instinct that evolution has developed for us.  In our ancient past, the world was always a threatening place; we weren't the dominant species, we didn't have tools or infrastructure, we would only have interacted with other human groupings in competition for resources or maybe to exchange mates.

We have lived the vast majority of our existence this way; it's more natural for us to stand against than it is to stand together.  

Back then, it mattered who the alpha was and that they were tough enough to keep the collective us safe. 

That's why we have Alphas in the first place.  It's why we will be inclined to respect tough, assertive people. We're programmed to.

That was then.  Now, everything has changed.

We don't have to live in perpetual fear any more.  The threats we face aren't lions or tigers, or shelter, or the dark.  By and large we even have enough food for everyone, if it were properly allocated; medicine has reduced illness to a pale shadow of what once it was.

What is the opposite of hunger and the dark?  What is the opposite of fear?

It's easy - bread and candles.  Community.

This is the lost lesson of religion, which isn't about end-times, isn't about supporting a deity who will punish our foes for us.  In its most basic form, religion is the antidote to fear - it is faith.  It has built common ground and a shared mythology that unites people, no matter where they come from, who their family is or what they bring to the table.

Religion builds common ground and invites everyone in, equally.  It has done this throughout time and across culture through the usage of bread, candles and the stories which we create and share together.

There is no breathing creature called Hamas any more than there is an island called Israel.  There is us, there is space, there is the light that brings us together and the darkness that keeps us apart and afraid.

So it is with this war, or any other.  It is not for me to say who has been more aggrieved than any other, nor who deserves justice more than their peers.  To me, that's a bit like saying one family is more entitled to a seat at the common table than another.  It can't work that way.

When we focus on what drives us apart, we lose, and those who crave the spoils of war win in goods what they lose of their souls.

When we focus on what brings us together, what we can build together on common ground, there are no winners, nor are their losers - there is community.

That's the big secret, the thing which eludes us when we forget how to look beyond ourselves or our tribes to something bigger.

Peace belongs to everyone.  Until we learn to live as though the whole were more than the sum of its parts, we'll never have it.

Break bread, people - dip it in some soup, tell a story, laugh.  

None of us is going anywhere any time soon, so we might as well learn how to live together.

Back to Buchenwald

Every man for himself is not going to work.  It's time to start organizing.  We need to figure out how we're going to survive here.

Last week most of us were strangers.  But we're all here now.  And God knows how long we're going to be here.  But if we can't live together - we're going to die alone.

   - Jack Sheppard

This weekend an international group of survivors, family members, organizers, politicians, ideologues and media will be congregating in the small, historic German city of Weimar.  My grandfather Ed Carter-Edwards and I will be among them.

We will be there as invited guests to commemorate the liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camp Buchenwald.



My grandfather, as you may know, is a survivor of Buchenwald.



As ethnic hatred and political violence grows like a cancer in European countries like Greece, Hungary and Russia warns of war in the Ukraine as bigger players start to resume Cold War posturing, we will be remembering the tragic human toll hatred caused the last time Europe went to war with itself.

I've been to Buchenwald several times.  My first visit was in 2001 as a backpacker;  I remember vividly the first time I walked down the steps to The Hanging Room beneath the crematorium.  On the walls are meat hooks from which inmates were hung with piano wire.  

The first time I walked into that room, I couldn't breathe; it was like air refused to enter a space where such horrors had been committed.

Before that visit, Buchenwald had just been a name I'd heard associated with my grandfather - we'd never really talked about the Camp, or what he had been through while he was there.


The chill I felt just walking into that execution chamber was the catalyst that made me want to learn more.  As I've come to understand the significance of the space and its place in history, and as I've come to learn countless personal stories covering the spectrum from desperation to determination, Buchenwald has woven itself into my life as well.

Buchenwald is a cold place in April.  A damp, chill wind blows across the Ettersburg, always bringing a frigid rain with it.  It isn't hard to imagine how miserable a place it must have been for inmates in any season - no winter clothes, often no shoes and for some, no shelter to escape the invasive cold.

Many people died of the elements in Buchenwald; countless more died from starvation, illness, overwork and of course, by being intentionally killed by the Gestapo guards who ran the Camp.  The total recorded death toll of Buchenwald is 53,926.



But it's just a number.  Numbers can't convey human loss; they only numb us to the people and stories lost to man's inhumanity.

Every single survivor of Buchenwald can tell a heart-breaking story of their time in the Camp; of the horrors they experienced, the pain and humiliation they felt, how they were completely dehumanized or how they banded with others to fight back.  I don't think I've talked with a single survivor that doesn't carry the terrible, sometimes debilitating burden of survivor's guilt.

While Buchenwald is still the same physical location and even some of the original buildings still stand, it carries a different air about it now.



This is especially true at times like the commemoration, when survivors return, as they do in fewer numbers every year, to be celebrated for their endurance and embraced for their stories.



It becomes a bit of a media spectacle, with people like my grandfather getting scrummed by international media outlets all wanting a piece of their story.

The Memorial puts survivors up in nice hotels, buys their food, takes them on tours, has specially-trained guided to help make their visit as enjoyable as possible.  It's surreal; people who were dehumanized as inmates of Buchenwald get celebrity treatment when they return for related events today.

There are obviously and understandably part of these survivors who look forward to going back, to the superstar treatment they get and to see old friends.  At the same time, there is something validating about having their story actively listened to.



I know that for many survivors, including my grandfather, they were told to forget what they went on and not talk about it.  Telling a horrific story like that might scare off friends and hurt one's chances of employment.

Conceal, don't feel, keep calm and carry on.  It's a bit like expecting someone to ignore being hit by a car and carry on their lives no matter what injuries they've sustained without a proper healing/restorative process.  It just doesn't work.

One of my strongest memories from my visits back to Buchenwald is of another survivor, a friend who has since passed on.  He was a quiet man, friendly and funny in an understated way.  He loved to tell a good story and loved to pose for pictures with his grandchildren around the Camp.  We all got to know each other over repeated visits - it's like a community, the survivors, their family and friends.



One visit, we all decided to take a walk to the old Camp quarry to see what it looked like.  My friend's granddaughter had never been but knew he'd worked there and wanted to experience it first hand.

We got about half way there when my friend the survivor stopped dead in his tracks, almost like he'd bumped into a wall.



"I can't," he said, and burst into tears.  Thinking about the quarry had triggered a memory of pain and torture he'd probably suppressed for decades.  He seemed to shrink on the spot, physically reverting to the starved, beaten form he must have been when he worked there.

He could go no further.  His granddaughter brought him back to his hotel room, where he stayed the rest of the day.

At the height of its operation, Buchenwald became a very tribal place, and that by design.  The Nazis understood the value of that age-old mechanism of oppression - divide and conquer.  They separated and branded inmates by ethnicity and specifically targeted "undesirables" like Jews, Gypsies (Sinti-Roma) and Gays.  These were the minorities every oppressed tribe could look down upon, giving them an outlet other than rebellion.

Of course, the notion of "each man for himself" - Jedem das Seine, the phrase on the Camp's gate - didn't stick.  Even in the worst of conditions and faced with a constant struggle for survival, or perhaps because of this struggle, people came together for common purpose; to regain their humanity.



I stick to this point, because the reality of it haunts me.  Each man for himself was engraved in the door of a Concentration Camp where divide-and-conquer was a method of control.  Are divisive, partisan politics and micro-targeted campaigns not on this same spectrum?  Where will the path we're on lead us?  What state will we leave our nation in for our children?

I'm lucky my grandfather survived Buchenwald.  



At one point in his stay, he became very sick with pleurisy and was sent to the "infirmary" which, in practice, was really just a place of dying.  It was through the efforts of another inmate, a doctor, that my grandpa survived.



The doctor, at great risk to himself, found a syringe and extracted fluid from my grandpa's lungs.  That, and he helped him connect with the Camp resistance who got him out of the infirmary, got him listed as "deceased" and then hid him in one of the barracks.  It's really an incredible story - one of risk, redemption and heroic deeds in a dark time and place in history.

Stories like my grandpa's are common to Buchenwald - among the inmates, but even in some cases among the guards.  I've heard more than a few tales of Gestapo who conveniently missed when they were ordered to execute prisoners.



Why they did it, we'll never know, but part of me likes to think that those guards recognized that they were losing their humanity too and decided that was something too valuable to let go of.



This will likely be the last time I visit Buchenwald with my grandfather.  I don't say that with certainty, because my grandpa is one incredibly resilient man.  I've made the mistake of thinking "he won't be well enough to return again" a couple of times and he always proves me wrong.



Ed Carter-Edwards have proven  a lot of people wrong in a lot of ways.  He has every reason to be bitter, resentful and even hateful to Germans; he isn't.  Equally, he has every reason to despair the heart of darkness that many lies just beneath the surface of the human condition; he doesn't.



Most importantly, to me - he has never lost his belief that the world can and must be a better place and that only by working together can we, as people, make that happen.




Despite everything he has been through, Ed Carter-Edwards has escaped the horrors of Buchenwald unjaded.  I think of this every time I hear a tough-minded political operative or business person justify cruelty by saying "that's just the way it works."  It may be the way the system functions, but it doesn't have to be that way.



This weekend, a dwindling group of survivors will be going back to Buchenwald.  With them will be family and friends - people like me who have come to know and become part of the inescapable presence that is Buchenwald.



We will trade stories and develop new memories for the sharing.  Most importantly, we will remember the lessons that Buchenwald and all places of human atrocity echo throughout time:



Each to their own doesn't work.  What makes us resilient isn't our ability to compete against each other, or eavesdrop on each other or bomb each other from a safe distance - it's our ability to survive the ravages of history through the stories we create.



The past cannot be forgotten, but we are not doomed to live there.

The future?  Let's write that story together.

O Buchenwald, ich kann dict nicht vergessen, Weil du mein Shicksal bist.