Photograph Source: Jaber Jehad Badwan – CC BY-SA 4.0
Those five days in November were cold, and seemed colder inside the gates of Auschwitz and of Birkenau. We were 90 retreatants from many nations – Israel, Germany, Norway, Italy, Palestine, the U.S., Australia, Switzerland and more. This meditation retreat was Interfaith and International, led by Buddhist teachers, a rabbi, an imam, Catholic and Protestant pastors, priests and nuns. Many retreatants were children and grandchildren of victims of the camps, bringing with them heavy burdens of trauma passed on to them.
There were teenaged retreatants, too, all of them from Israel and Palestine. They told the group that they wanted to meet separately as much as possible, in their own dialogue groups. We saw them leaning into their circles, intent, wearing each other’s Israeli flags and keffiyehs, exchanged in friendship. When I saw them, earnestly talking or laughing in their corner of the dining hall, I thought, “They will never be able to imagine how much we elders love them.”
I’m not Jewish. I call myself a student of Buddhism, the religious practice that best matches my wish for a kinder world. But my whole life, since I was old enough to realize that my Irish Catholic father had died in the Second World War, and later to find out about the holocaust, I had linked his sacrifice to his conscious drive to end Hitler’s regime, expressed in the letters he left behind. The retreat was another step on my long journey to understand the tides of history that shaped my father’s life, and mine.
I have never doubted that the holocaust took place, but meditating at Auschwitz made me realize how hard it is to truly believe that it happened. Just as I had had trouble believing my father was dead until I saw, in London, his name in a book listing the American fliers lost while bombing Germany, I needed to visit Auschwitz to see for myself the reality: a vast and efficient machine built by humans to murder other humans. I think that everyone who can should go to the camps. The part of me that did not deeply know about this, and did not want to know, was forever altered.
For five days we sat in meditation at the Birkenau Selection Site, where railroad tracks end at gas chambers and crematoria. Each day, we read aloud the names of people who were murdered there. Where the ages of the dead were listed, we read those too, the youthful voices of our teenaged meditators ringing out, fifty-seven; three; eighteen; twenty five, we heard.
There were Polish names, German, Italian, Romanian, and Roma names, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish and French names. In turn, through the hours, each of us rose from our cushion, read a list of names aloud and then approached a carved wooden box that lay on the gravel at the center of our meditation circle, made a bow and placed the page of names inside.
As we spoke the names aloud, our voices seemed to call back to life for an instant some of the million and a half people who perished at Auschwitz and Birkenau. The sound of our voices made them again, in some way, real people who had lived.
Every day too, we took turns chanting “Name Unknown,” as a sort of beat behind the sound of the names we were reading aloud, because so many thousands of names are unknown, never to be added to lists of the missing, the lost, the gone.
In the evenings, after dinner, we took time to prepare, doing our bests to correctly pronounce the names. The Poles among us taught us how to say the Polish names, the Germans, how to say the German names.
Was it possible to read each name as if its bearer could hear it, as if we stood in the place of all those who had known that person, all who had loved her or him? We did our best.
On a cold but lovely late afternoon, we walked in silence the Stations of the Cross at Birkenau. Father Manfred Deselaers, a Catholic priest with the Center for Dialogue and Prayer, led us on the walking service he had created, inviting us to speak at each of the Stations. At the Eleventh, the crucifixion, we gathered as rose-colored light from the setting sun glowed behind the yellow leaves of weeping willow trees.
Father Manfred, surprisingly, asked if we had any words for the perpetrators. Our focus, through all these cold days, had rightly been on the victims, with barely a thought for the killers. Father Manfred asked us to consider them now. He said that we know only a few of their names, and those names, he said, we do not speak aloud. He talked about forgiveness, and how hard it is to forgive. He said that no one has the right to ask anyone else to forgive, and so forgiveness was not our purpose here. There was silence in answer to Father Manfred’s request.
I know we cannot understand all of the complex reasons this group of people in the Hitler time came to the point where they carried out obscene atrocities. But I also know that many perpetrators – not all – suffer. I learned this doing legal defense work as an investigator for people living on Death Rows in the United States. From our soldiers who come back from doing violence in war we know that doing violence harms the soul. Doing violence hurts. I’ve come to believe that had my father lived, the bombs he dropped on German cities might have haunted him.
I had not expected to say anything, but suddenly the microphone that was being passed among us came to me. Spontaneously, wanting to recognize the terrible harm that perpetrators do to themselves as well as their victims, I offered these words:
For those who later could not sleep, Rest in Peace.
For those who later suffered nightmares, Rest in Peace.
For those who later hit their wives, Rest in Peace.
For those who later beat their children, Rest in Peace.
For those who later drank themselves to death, Rest in Peace.
For those who later died by suicide, Rest in Peace.”
After the Stations of the Cross, I found myself walking next to Father Manfred, thinking about belief in God. He asked me, “How do you know this, what you said?” I told him briefly about my legal work on death rows, where I learned that many killers twist in winds of regret and sorrow. “Of course,” I explained, “some live in denial, their psyches so shattered that a part of them can never admit what another part has done, no matter how strong the evidence is. Others feel regret, but really only that they are being punished. But many, as they mature, are truly sorry and wish they go back in time, wish they could help in some way those they have harmed.”
“I’ve met such people,” he said.
“Yes. Hurt people hurt people,” I said. There are causes and conditions behind people who do harm. And consequences. We can talk about the consequences for their souls without, as you said, asking for sympathy or forgiveness for them.” But I wanted to ask him about God.
“So many people here ask, ‘Where was God during the Holocaust?’ It was almost dark and growing colder as our feet crunched on the gravel path back to the gate.
“I’m a non-believer,” I told him, “so that question doesn’t bother me the way it does others. I sometimes wish, though, that I believed in God, so that I could pray for help.”
Father Manfred patted my shoulder, and said, “I think that to wish to believe is enough.”
I smiled at him. “Thank you, I’ll remember that. For me, to remind myself that there were people, like my father, who acted against the Nazis, and that today people all over the world work for human rights is enough for me to believe in Goodness, if not in God.”
That was November, 2010, long before October 7, 2023.
Around October 7, 2023, and during the two years of war that followed, one-by-one, the youngsters who were at the retreat have been turning 30. I worry for them. Are they safe? Whether they are soldiers or scholars, young parents, government workers, humanitarian leaders, musicians or artists, I know they are not safe.
Layers and layers of trauma have wounded everyone in Israel/Palestine, piling up as deep as the mountains of rubble in Gaza. By now we know that PTSD comes even for soldiers who have to kill at a distance. Soldiers operating computers on the East Coast of the United States who had to target people in Iraq or Afghanistan who blew up on their screens had to be transferred for treatment. By now we know that trauma can cause a kind of group madness among soldiers such as those who massacred a family in Iraq and those who tortured in Abu Graib prison. I think of Israeli soldiers who aimed bunker buster bombs __supplied by the USA, our own moral wound __into hospitals in Gaza, and those who fired at children. Volunteer doctors in Gaza say they have separately seen dozens of babies dead from single gunshots.
It often occurred to me, working with killers, how lucky are people who have never killed another human being. It was like a privilege my friends and I took for granted. The many killers I knew all had to live with what they had done. Soldiers of course and even jurors who voted to condemn someone to die did too. I felt lucky never to have killed a person, or even a dog or a cat. I dread the idea of accidentally taking life.
During the Vietnam era I learned about the moral wound opened when our nation sent its youth to a war in which so many civilians were killed. A memorial wall of their millions of names would wind many times around the national mall. Our moral wounds re-open every day when we cross paths with veterans wandering homeless, ill and hopeless. Many Vietnam veterans are in prisons and some are on death row. I worked on defense teams for several veterans over the decades of my career. A man who killed his wife. A man who killed his pregnant wife. A man who crept nights around his neighborhood dressed in fatigues, bandoliers of bullets crossed over his chest, who imprisoned his wife and children, shook the crying baby to death and buried him in the backyard.
Of course PTSD was not the only factor that led to these crimes. As I researched each man’s life to compile a complete familial, medical, educational and social history I found other risk factors – perhaps childhood head injuries, or a family history of mental illness. War had found a way into these men through bruises unable to withstand pressure.
Researching the lives of my veteran clients, I tried to find witnesses — people who had signed the documents in their files. I interviewed staff of medical clinics, homeless shelters, food programs, methadone clinics. I decided to conduct my own unscientific, small-sample study of people who were caring for vets: I just asked, and I found, not surprisingly, that nearly all of these caregivers had opposed the war in Vietnam. I don’t mean they had chimed in with the opposition the end, when it was hard to find anyone who had ever been in favor of sending our youth half-way around the world with napalm and agent orange. I mean people who had opposed the Vietnam project from the beginning. I found it was the anti-war activists who were devoting themselves to caring for the wounded soldiers among us.
San Quentin death row’s most famous Vietnam Veteran, Manny Babbitt, was not my client. I didn’t know him well, but I would greet him in the death row visiting room with his attorney Jessica McGuire, whom I knew quite well. Manny’s appeals, I knew, were running out.
Jessica told me that Manny at 19 had been a U.S. Marine. He survived a terrible battle in 1968 at Khe Sanh, Vietnam, in which Marines were surrounded on all sides and died in large numbers from relentless night and day artillery fire. Manny was wounded, evacuated by being placed in a helicopter on top of the bodies of dead soldiers, briefly given medical care, then returned to his unit. As more and more of his comrades were killed, Manny was left alive to retrieve them, tie an identifying tag around their ankles, zip them into body bags and place their bodies into helicopters. When the battle ended at last, Manny was one the survivors.
He went home to the small town in Massachusetts where his parents, immigrants from Cabo Verde, had raised him, his sister and five brothers. hattered by the war, Manny seemed to live in his own world. He could not hold down a job. He committed burglaries and was in and out of jail. He had a girlfriend, fathered children. He spent two years in and out of mental hospitals, diagnosed with schizophrenia. The diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was not defined until 1980. Manny’s brother, who was living in Sacramento offered to take Manny in and try to help him. Manny’s brother and friends said he was triggered into extreme anxiety by the sight of garbage bags, and could not stand depictions of war on television.
Manny was walking home on a winter Sacramento night in 1980 when he entered the apartment of 78-year-old Leah Schendel. Mrs. Schendel was in bed watching TV with her door open for fresh air. Manny broke through the locked screen door, beat Mrs. Schendel, placed her on the floor, attempted to rape her, then covered her partially with her mattress, tied a leather belt around her ankle, and left. A neighbor discovered Mrs. Schendel, who had died of a heart attack caused by Manny’s assault. The next day, Manny attempted to rape another woman. His brother read about the crime, then found items a cigarette lighter with the initials, “LS” among Manny’s things. He turned Manny in.
Manny never denied his crimes, though he said he could not remember them. His defense attorney discovered that Mrs. Schendel’s TV, at the time of Manny’s attack, had been tuned to a channel showing a violent war film with Asian characters, but the judge did not allow this to be told to the jurors because it could not be proved that Manny had seen what was on the TV. A poorly-developed reference to PTSD was presented in court. No effort was made to describe the horrific things Manny had seen and done during the war. No one explained what it was like to see something that one cannot unsee and to be slammed back, unwilling, flashed into those sights, sounds, smells, to have one’s body seized with tremors, sweat, pain, terror.
The jurors voted to condemn Manny to death. He joined the other condemned men for the long wait in San Quentin as his appeals slowly proceeded. One after another, at each level, the appeals were denied. His case came to the attention of Vietnam veterans, who organized a ceremony on death row for Manny to receive the Purple Heart he deserved for having been wounded at Khe Sanh. Several thousand veterans, including 800 survivors of Khe Sanh, signed petitions calling for clemency. No one was asking for Manny to be freed. Manny’s supporters shared in Mrs. Schendel’s family’s pain. They were asking the governor to commute his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. One of them, retired Detroit detective Lynn Dornan, said that Manny had saved his life by shoving him into a trench during an artillery attack in 1968.
Several of Manny’s jurors asked California Governor Gray Davis for clemency, saying that they had been given inadequate information about the seriousness and debilitating effects of PTSD.
Nothing and none of this offered any solace to Leah Schendel’s grieving family. Her children and grandchildren pursued execution for her killer.
Jessica McGuire did her best, but every effort to save Manny’s life failed. In 1999, just before his 50th birthday, Manny was executed at San Quentin.
Manny refused a last meal and asked that the $50 allotted for the meal be given to homeless Vietnam Veterans. His last words were, “I forgive you all.”
Several members of Mrs. Schendel’s grieving family attended the lethal injection. Her son and a granddaughter spoke to the press, acknowledging that Manny’s death only brought a part of the tragedy to a close, and that their pain would never end.
Executions happen at midnight. Manny’s was delayed half an hour, waiting for a reply from the US Supreme Court, another denial. Outside, the sound of waves slapping on the little beach beside the prison parking lot came to the quiet people gathered there: a line of correctional officers stood across the road leading to the gate. About a hundred supporters of Manny, many of them veterans, were gathered to honor his life and bear witness to its end. A handful of pro-capital punishment demonstrators stood holding signs with vengeful quotes from the Old Testament. Veterans spoke. TV trucks with bright lights illuminated the scene. A few anti-death penalty activists, spoke. Representing the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, I spoke briefly about the currents of history that had brought Leah Schendel__, who had come to the United States from Romania with her father in 1905 at the age of 3, eventually to become the mother of two and grandmother of five__, to a fatal encounter with the very ill Manny Babbitt. Both of them, I said, were among the countless victims of the Vietnam war.
One of Jessica’s colleagues, an appellate attorney who was himself a survivor of Khe Sanh, attended the execution in her place. She could not witness it. “I already said goodbye to him,” she said. Then she kept the promise she had made to him. She accompanied his body back to Wareham, Massachusetts.
The plane was met by a hearse, which Jessica expected, but she was surprised when the chief of police placed her in his car and an escort of motorcycle police accompanied the hearse to the funeral home. The next day, over 300 people attended the mass and were at the graveside, including many veterans and members of the Cabo Verdean community. Manny’s mother, and his fifth-grade teacher, who had traveled to San Quentin to visit him, wept for him.
It is easy to transpose this funeral for a soldier to Israel, to Russia, to Palestine, to Ukraine. A town, a family, sends a son or daughter to serve in a war and she or he comes back, if he or she comes back at all, a different person. Manny had gone off to war and though he came back someone who had done unforgivable harm, his town took him in.
Two things are true: the wounds of war are never completely healed. And, the wounds of war can be partly healed, but only with years of time and care, and never by forgetting. I am 81, and the loss of my father when his plane crashed in Germany when I was a baby has never been anything but an unfillable emptiness in my life.
In the summer of 2025 Germany is marking the 80th anniversary of the last days of Nazi rule in May and June, 1945. Photos and accounts of Berlin in ruins looking very much like Gaza are on screens and front pages everywhere. Berlin of course has long since been rebuilt. The perpetrators I spoke of at Birkenau have died, and the last of the survivors are passing on.
Margot Friedlander, a German survivor of Theresienstadt, who educated two generations of German schoolchildren about antisemitism, died in May, 2025 at the age of 103.
I’ve never visited Israel. I have a young German friend who, a decade ago, loved to vacation in Tel Aviv where she could enjoy the beach, the night life, the happy youth culture of music, dancing, joy. She never saw the oppression of Palestinians, but she knew it was there, and it shadowed her holidays. That Israel, the sunny vacation spot dancing on top of a system of brutal, unlawful control of others, cannot ever be visited again.
At Birkenau, Father Deselaers and I had agreed: Hurt people hurt people. Are we seeing now that dehumanized people dehumanize people? Some Israeli soldiers have themselves tried for years to warn of exactly what I am pointing out. Former soldiers founded the NGO Breaking the Silence, which has published testimony of Israeli soldiers revealing the brutal ways the occupation is sustained. Today, they are saying that if anyone thinks they are being a friend to Israel by defending its actions in Gaza or by staying silent, they are not. Friends don’t let friends commit war crimes.
Eventually, every war ends. And when this one ends, Israel’s young men and women will return from combat bringing with them the wounds we can see and those that cannot easily be seen. They, and Israel, will be changed forever.
