It was not God who was murdered at Auschwitz, but man.
Sometimes people ask: where was God during the Holocaust?
But as far as Western culture was concerned, man had already killed God before the Holocaust. In Germany Nietzsche proclaimed His death, in Russia they called Him the “opium of the masses,” and in the West the god of capitalism replaced Him.
It was the great age of faith not only in man’s power but also in his natural morality. Man discovered unlimited powers — electricity, steam, the atom — and decided that he could manage without God not only physically, but morally as well. Our own Tchernichovsky sang with feeling: “For I still believe in man, and in his spirit, a spirit of might,” and it seemed that now, having freed ourselves from God’s shackles, the wars would end, and man’s good spirit, rid of the benighted men of God, would bring peace to the world.
And at Auschwitz it was not God who was burned, but faith in man. The great powers fought without God. Germany shook off Christianity entirely, seeing it as tainted with Jewish morality. Stalin replaced it with the communist religion. Together they began the greatest bloodbath in history, next to which all the wars of religion looked like child’s play.
In the Holocaust and the World War we received an answer to humanity’s most fundamental question — is man “very good,” or is “the inclination of man’s heart evil from his youth”?
The Holocaust proved that both answers were true:
When he wills it, man can sink below the level of a beast, as in the deeds done by the Germans and their helpers; and when he wills it, he can rise above the level of an angel: the exemplary deeds performed in subhuman conditions by the Jews and the Righteous Among the Nations in the camps and the ghettos.
Faith in man alone carried humanity to the heights of our era, but it also led to man being ground into human dust, in the crematoria of Auschwitz.
Hannah Szenes, the paratrooper who dropped into Europe to rescue Jews, knew that she was searching not only for Jews but also for the image of man, which was being trampled ever deeper amid the horrors of the war:
In the bonfires of war, in the blaze, in the flame,
Among stormy days of blood,
I kindle my little lantern
To seek, to seek a human being.
