How Do We Talk About God After Auschwitz?

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How do we talk about God after Auschwitz? How is it possible to discuss God’s goodness after witnessing the brutality of the Holocaust? It’s a question our Jewish sisters and brothers ask more than Christians ever have. In the light of six million people systematically executed because of their religious identity; how is it possible to talk about God? It’s the ultimate modern expression of the theodicy question first posed by the writer of the Book of Job. Why do good people suffer?

If you’ve visited a concentration camp, toured the gas chambers, seen the mass graves, and stood where victims were hung and shot, you realize “How do you talk about God after Auschwitz?” isn’t a theoretical question. You’re not engaged in an ivory tower debate between academics, theologians, and philosophers, on something that may never happen without real-world implications. Standing under the gate which reads, “Work Will Make You Free,” on ground permanently contaminated by the evil that occurred in the buildings only feet before you, you realize this is a question that demands an answer, not just on International Holocaust Remembrance Day but every day of our lives.

I’ll ask again, “How do we talk about God after Auschwitz (or any concentration camp)?” I’m not sure there is an answer. Concentration camps have the power to rob visitors of words. Over 70 years later, the silent bricks, mortar, windows, and sidewalks are fully functioning thieves, and standing there, looking at the showers where the cyanide-based Zyklon B was used to kill thousands of unsuspecting men, women, and children, I was robbed of my ability to talk about God. I looked for words and found none. It was all I could do to breathe.

Have you ever felt punched in the stomach by gazing out at a sprawling complex brick buildings and manicured grounds? That’s Auschwitz. It’s almost like the opposite of the Holy Spirit descending at Baptism. It’s as if, with each step, you can feel God finding it harder and harder to breathe. God wasn’t in this place. These were rooms devoid of all goodness, mercy, and hope. In these rooms and the ovens beyond, God was dead. How do you talk about God after Auschwitz? Maybe you don’t. Perhaps, we say nothing at all. There’s nothing to say.

"Our concept of God, whether we choose to admit it or not, was forever altered by the concentration camps. There is nothing to say but 'never again.'"

Do we default to discussing Jesus and his death on the cross? Do we try to Christianize and co-opt the Holocaust to explain the tremendous suffering of the Jewish people even though the Holocaust’s roots are in a perverted form of Christian theology? No. We remain silent.

I’m not sure it’s possible to talk about God using any of our traditional religious language following the horrors of the Holocaust. We do an injustice to the survivors. We show how little we understand of the God we claim to worship. We cheapen ourselves and show our ignorance of history. Even the hint that the SS was somehow part of God’s will (or God’s larger plan) is grotesque, offensive, and evil.

Our concept of God, whether we choose to admit it or not, was forever altered by the concentration camps. Our struggle to comprehend the brutality in the Ukraine is a fight between the God we knew before Auschwitz (the God with whom we are more comfortable and can easily rely on and believe) and the absent God, still fully on display in places like Dachau, the Donbas and Mariupol.

There are no religious words to make this wrong right. The last chapters of Job are out of time and place. Some of Elie Wiesel’s works provide a degree of closure and allow his readers to glimpse the experience of living in such conditions. I’ve stood on the spot where Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer died. His ideas on religionless Christianity are good words but even they fall short. Other than that, there is nothing to say but “never again.” We must say those two words to each other over and over again. I pray God is listening.