Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “The animal is in the world; we stand before it by virtue of what peculiar turn and intensification which our consciousness has taken.” It is the animal without a sense of responsibility that produced hell on earth. Man without thought produces hell wherever he is. Nazi horror is only one of its kinds. Nazisim is not dead. Whenever men without thought dominate a culture, Hitler will come again. A victim in the Nazi concentration camp prayed before her death: “You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.” This is the expression of faith of young woman from Amsterdam who was killed by the Nazis in the concentration camp of Auschwitz on November 30, 1943. Her diaries became spiritual classics for men who want to live as humans with responsibility. Christ died on the cross and his God also abandoned him on the cross. He prayed: “My God, why have you forsaken me.” Still, he died defending God’s place in him. Good Friday is the day God was expelled from the times of Pilate, Hitler, Stalin and places like Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald et al. Abraham Joshua Heschel, a major figure in the Hasidic tradition who lost most of his immediate family to the Holocaust, rejects the notion of God’s absence during the massacre of the Jews. While acknowledging the hiding God of the Scriptures, he insists this is a function, rather than the essence of the Deity: “God did not depart of His own volition; He was expelled. God is in exile.” As far as Heschel is concerned, the question, Where was God during Auschwitz? is a signifier of humanity’s persistent tendency to blame the Other, in this instance, the divine Other. Rather than admit our own guilt, we seek, like Adam, to shift the blame upon someone else.

It is the animal without a sense of
responsibility that produced hell on
earth. Man without thought
produces hell wherever he is.
Nazi horror is only one of its kinds.
Nazisim is not dead. Whenever men
without thought dominate a culture,
Hitler will come again.

As Simon Weil observes, “Auschwitz commands me in a double bind of responsibility: the many lost faces of those with whom we could have shared unknown pleasures—a glass of wine, a loaf of bread—is what commands me. These lost ones command me to act ethically here and now, despite the overwhelming of human responsibility that occurred there and then.” God’s absence during the Holocaust only testifies to humanity’s failure to facilitate his presence; as Etty says, “It is not God’s fault that things are as they are at present, but our own.” Martin Buber was well aware of the qualitative uniqueness of God’s role in the Holocaust, that heaven was silent as one and a half million children were cruelly murdered and, more importantly, no angel was sent to Auschwitz to stop the burning chimneys…he nevertheless encourages us to keep living in this new existential mode, not as an awaiting mode, but rather as a mode which encompasses a sober reflection with the silence along with an uncompromising yearning for the voice. Confronted by the hellish wasteland wrought by the schismatic dogma and decrees of Hitler’s Nazis, Hillesum’s resistance bears remarkable symbiosis with the philosophy and liberating effects of medieval carnival. Hillesum’s spirituality and writings display a laughing outlook on the world. Grand Inquisitor professes a greater love for humanity than that displayed by the Christ he holds in chains before him, while Hitler cites his love for the German Volk as the sole motivation driving his efforts to institute the Third Reich. That the two men are the mouthpieces of official seriousness is unveiled by the fear they instil and the terror they inflict: freedom is stifled in pursuit of their own dystopian nightmare as those who fail to conform to their vision are purified in their hellish fires. By contrast, the Christ of Dostoevsky’s legend draws the populace to Himself through the sheer magnetism of His being: a Man of few words—two to be exact—His silence is not of the demonic kind; it, rather, opens an expanse for the inhabitance of the Other: a space they rapidly fill. In what is widely regarded as his greatest work, Welsh favourite son and poet, Dylan Thomas, concludes his poem, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ with the invocation: ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ It is a line that serves as an eminently suitable descriptor of Etty Hillesum’s life and writings, which, during her own times, and ours, rage against the dying of the light in the night of crucifixion of Man.