Guilt, Forgiveness and The Shoah: A Personal Journey

In this narrative, I occasionally express conversations I have had with the Lord. My own participation in the dialogue was as written, and sometimes was even audibly spoken. However, I want to clarify that the dialogue expressed as the Lord’s voice speaking to me represents the impressions and Scripture that He brought to my mind and heart at that time. How the Lord speaks to our hearts is a mystery. I neither deny that He spoke to me in this account in a very real way, nor claim He has revealed anything to me that I am to communicate authoritatively or prophetically. I merely speak of that “still, small voice” that those who know Him recognize above any other.

In this Jewish History course, I read the assigned material on the terrible events of the Shoah, and realized it was an entirely new experience for me. The information was not what was different. I have visited Holocaust memorials and museums in five US states, four European countries and in Israel, have walked twice through Auschwitz and once through Dachau, have carefully digested every exhibit in the infamous Haus on the Wannsee, and have read more books and seen more films on the events of the Shoah than I can remember. The information was very familiar. What was unique about my time in this class was that for the first time that I can remember since I was a ten year old girl reading The Hiding Place, I was able to study the Holocaust, feeling appropriate grief and even anger, without the tremendous guilt that I usually experienced in remembering these events. I was able to read and discuss the terrible events of mass extermination of six million Jewish people without being plagued by nightmares. For me, this was a very new experience.

Some might wonder why a non-Jewish girl who had no personal connection to the experience of the Holocaust, either as a victim or as a perpetrator, would be so deeply affected by these events. I have often wondered this myself. From my very first exposure to the reality of the Shoah, I had struggled with feelings of guilt and terror. I was very afraid, but not of suffering as God’s beloved people Israel did at that time. Rather, I was terrified of who I might have been in 1940. You see, today, I am a woman in love with the God of Israel and with the Jewish people. I support Israeli independence and fight anti-Semitism actively. But I struggled deeply with wondering if I might have been different if I were born in a different time. My blood is English and German. In the war, many German Christians participated in the deaths of millions of defenseless Jewish people. The English, in many cases, merely did nothing to stop it. I am American nationally. The Americans were not any better toward the Jews than the English during the war, and anti-Semitism was in huge force even in the church in America. What haunted me for so long was not what I had done, but what I might have done. Would I have been any better? We all like to think we would have been Corrie Ten Booms and Dietrich Bonhoeffers. Perhaps this would have been true of me, by the grace of God. Yet the guilt of what non-Jewish Christians of my heritage and nationality had participated in, or at the very least, over-looked, was something that I struggled with in a very personal way.

Dealing with guilt in anyway other than turning to the merciful Lord always leads us to bizarre behavior. As a teenager and young adult, I exposed myself to much to the facts and footage of the horrors of the Holocaust. Somehow, I felt that if I remembered and allowed myself to constantly experience the discomfort and grief caused by this exposure, I could atone for my guilt, though it perhaps be only by association. My mother actually forbid me to watch anything related to the Shoah at one point, because I was being disturbed by nightmares nearly every time I fell asleep. Every once and a while, for a period of months, I stopped watching, stopped reading and tried to stop remembering. And then I felt guilty for that. The people who died in the gas chambers had not been able to escape their fate, and here I was, refusing to remember.

Some of my response to the Shoah was appropriate and perhaps even righteous. I was especially sensitive toward Jewish people, who are, everyone, affected by this hellish period of their history. I apologized for the atrocities committed at every occasion and educated others about the dangers of anti-Semitism and indifference toward the plight of the persecuted. Yet, I sensed that something in my heart was not entirely healthy.

During my first trip to Auschwitz, co-leading a group of Messianic Jewish teenagers in 2006, I walked through that place of death, and was physically ill. My nightmares began again. Soon afterward, I recognized my own battle with guilt and the Shoah. I also recognized that I had serious issues with God and how He had acted (or seemed not to act) while His people suffered. My feelings were not something I could explain to anyone. Spending the majority of my time with Jewish people, all who had lost family members in the Holocaust, my own “issues” seemed terribly insignificant. I was also conscious as a follower of Jesus that it was not right for me to struggle so deeply with guilt that I had supposedly accepted as wiped clean by the atoning work of the Messiah. So I tried to swallow the feelings. But the Lord seemed to keep prying open this area of my heart. I began to question if my love for the Jewish people was somehow tainted by the guilt I felt. I even questioned if any Jewish person could be expected to believe in God after this had all happened.

Over the next couple of years, the Lord in His mercy let me walk through a dark time in my life spiritually. I did not feel close to Him, even when I pursued Him with diligence. I doubted things I had always known to be true. I questioned my own election, seeing so many areas of fruitlessness in my life. I could not have known that it would be at Auschwitz that the Lord intended not only to heal me from the guilt I had regarding the Holocaust, but also to bring me back into the light of His love in a newly restored way.

In 2009, as part of a young adult Messianic conference in Berlin, I was expected to go back to Poland and again walk through the concentration camp. I had no intention of going with the group, instead planning to hide out in Berlin and stay away from my unexplainable ever-looming sense of guilt. Just before the group left for Poland without me, the Lord prompted my heart with these words from 1 Peter 2:24, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree”.

“Why then”, the Lord impressed on my spirit, “do you keep trying to bear your sins and the sins of others yourself? Is my sacrifice not sufficient for you?”

I was convicted by my self-righteousness and so agreed, in fear and trembling, to go with the group back to Auschwitz. The night before we walked through the camp, the Spirit of the Lord made His presence known to our group in a remarkable way. We remembered the Shoah, but we remembered His grace and love most of all. We cried and worshipped late into the night. My heart was encouraged in a place where I thought I could never know anything but guilt and dread.

The next day, as we went through Auschwitz, we did remember. We said the Mourner's Kaddish, shed tears and struggled individually and together with emotions and fears. I was aware from the moment I set foot on the grounds of that place that I would not leave without the Lord dealing with some things in my heart. As we trudged through snow in Auschwitz-Birkenau and I again listened to a tour guide try to explain the inhuman conditions of that camp, I wrestled with the Lord. He seemed to have two things He wanted to accomplish in me that day. First of all, was my sense of guilt. He had begun to work on this with me by reminding me that He was my sin-bearer. He illustrated this truth in a profound way. A young German man, a committed Christian and lover of Israel, was traveling with our group. The bravery of this man and his companions was striking. They travelled through death camps with Jewish young people, seeking reconciliation in Jesus’ name. On this day, at a moment of my own deep despair, this young man came and put his arm around me and walked with me for sometime quietly through the camp. I was blessed and convicted.

“If this man, a German, can understand forgiveness enough to boldly face anger, tears, projected guilt and everything else that must confront him in this special ministry, who am I to allow guilt to swallow me up? I am witnessing with my own eyes that the grace and forgiveness of God is sufficient to heal the relationship between Germans and Jewish people-and in Auschwitz of all places. Who am I to question His sufficiency to forgive me and make me strong enough in Him to do the right thing when I am called upon to do so?”

From that moment, my guilt was lifted, and the Lord began to heal me completely.

However, there was something else the Lord wanted to change in my heart that day. My guilty feelings gave way to a deeper and more honest accusation.

“I don’t know what I might have done if I were here, Lord. But I wasn’t here. You were! Why didn’t you do anything?”

Behind my entire struggle, I recognized at the root of my difficulty was that I did not know if I could trust God anymore. In the cold snow, standing alone and trembling, I heard the Spirit speaking too my heart.

“I was there. I suffered with my people more than you can understand. I did more than you will ever know. But it’s true. I did not do what you think I should have. I did allow these things to happen. You may never understand why. But I am God. You are not.”

I was not God. I knew this. But if this was who He was, could I trust Him anymore?

Over the next two days, I seemed to be sinking into a pit. I doubted my calling and that I had ever heard from God. My own failures and insufficiencies overwhelmed me and I could no longer effectively shove those emotions to the back of my heart. Doubts, fears and feelings I had never dared express flew out of my mouth to the ears of the Lord of Heaven and Earth. I wondered if I might be struck down where I stood. But the Lover of my soul, in His grace, pushed me toward honesty with Him. Sitting alone in the dark as Berlin toasted the coming of a New Year, I wrestled with the Lord. He pressed me to open my heart to Him.

“I don’t think you want to hear what I have to say, Lord. It’s not too pretty.”

It almost seemed like He laughed at me.

“Don’t worry. The spirit of man is the lamp of the LORD, searching all his innermost parts (Proverbs 20:27). I can handle it.”

I poured out my heart to my Lord, and let Him know that I had failed in every way- performance as a Christian, as a minister of the Gospel, as a woman of faith. I was nothing. Then as I humbled myself in His sight, in His marvelous way, the Lord lifted me up. The words of Psalm 40 sprang into my heart and began to transform me.

I waited patiently for the LORD;
he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
and put their trust in the LORD.

In that moment, I was comforted that the Lord was indeed with me and for me. Over the next months, He continued to heal my broken and weary spirit. He showed me that He had indeed put a new song in my mouth, and that He would use this to bring many to trust in Him. I began to see His restoring and redeeming work in beautiful ways. My struggle with guilt brought me to a renewed love for His mercy and gift of life. My open hearted confession of doubt opened the door to greater intimacy with the Lord and transparency with others. My journey to the pit of my own failure and insufficiency humbled me and brought me to a new understanding that it is the Lord who works in me, both to will and to do of His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13). And my love for the Jewish people was confirmed, as I recognized that this part of who I am is something the Lord took particular delight to create in me.

Coming to this section in this course on Jewish history on the Shoah, I was newly inspired in my commitment to the Gospel, to the Jewish people, to fighting anti-Semitism and to support of the state of Israel. Unexpectedly, God also used this study to bring me back to the amazing transforming work of the Messiah in my own life. Perhaps, someday I will have a greater understanding for just how He worked in the lives of His people Israel in this tragic part of their history. For the moment, I am learning to trust Him, even when He doesn’t make sense, waiting for a day when He redeems all things and restores Israel, His Beloved.