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	When Enemies Meet By Virginia Jones Garden of Roses January 21, 2010 http://web.me.com/virginiajones/Compsassionate_Gathering/The_Garden_of_Roses/Entries/2010/1/20_January_21%2C_2010.html UNITED STATES -- My friend, Lupe, called me up today. "What are you doing"? he asked. "I'm working on my (financial) books and watching a documentary," I replied. He laughed because about half the time he calls me when my kids are not home, I am watching a documentary. Lupe and I have known each other since we were kids in our hometown of Colusa, California. He remembers well that I was the nerdy valedictorian of my high school graduating class. He still talks about me being "brainy." "Well, how do you think I got to be so brainy?" I asked. "I watch documentaries." The documentary I watched today made me want to write another blog. The movie was about a Jewish man whose wife's father survived the Nazi Holocaust by hiding with his two brothers under the floorboards of a barn belonging to a Polish farmer and his wife. The Polish family's neighbors suspected they were hiding Jews, and German soldiers came looking for them. Fortunately they didn't find the trap door in the floor of the barn, and the three Jewish brothers survived as did the Polish family. The Nazis would have killed or imprisoned the Polish family if they had found the Jews. This act of altruism on the part of the Poles did contain some self interest. The Jewish brothers promised to pay them back, but life after World War II was hard. The brothers moved to the United States. Communication between the two families dwindled to nothing by 1959. In the meantime the Jewish man and his wife raised their own sons as Orthodox Jews. When they grew up, these young men embraced Orthodox study passionately, preferring to associate socially with other Orthodox Jews and limit their contact with gentiles like me. Scarred by family memories of the Holocaust and a long history of persecution in Europe before the Nazis came to power, these young men and their Polish Jewish grandfather felt they could not trust gentiles and were better off staying within the Jewish community. But the Jewish man, the father in the middle generation, did not feel this way. He journeyed on his own path of forgiveness and reconciliation. Perhaps I need to explain for people who don't know the history of the Holocaust that many Poles remain anti-Semitic to this day. In addition, the Germans would pay for information on where Jews were hiding. Even for Poles who were not anti-Semitic, in harsh realities of hunger and poverty that accompany war, Poles would turn in Jews just to survive a little longer themselves. The Jews knew that they generally couldn't trust Poles to help them hide from the Nazis. While there were some Poles who took incredible risks to help Jews, many Jews in hiding in Eastern Europe during World War II tried to escape east, towards the Red Army of the Soviet Union. Although anti-Semitism remained a problem under communism, communism did play lip-service to tolerance and the equality of all peoples. The Red Army wouldn't shoot Jews or sell them to the Nazis. They fed them and sheltered them I have to paraphrase the story told by the documentary. I'd have to watch it again to get everything precisely correct. In 1989, the Jewish man took his first step towards understanding the other side. He went to Poland with a Jewish rabbi to give concerts of ethnic Jewish music. He thought they would be playing for the remnants of Poland's Jewish community and discovered they were being greeted enthusiastically by audiences filled with Christian Poles. He asked the rabbi why he was giving all these concerts for non-Jews. The rabbi said, "I have only one heart. If I had two hearts I could reserve one for hate and one for love, but I since have only one heart, I am going to reserve my one heart for love." The open heartedness of this rabbi helped the Jewish man open up his heart and mind. In the wake of 9/11, the man wanted to do what he could to ease tensions between people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds. I've been to the Middle East with a peace group called Mid East Citizen Diplomacy. The Arabs don't hate America because they hate our openness and our free society. They don't like America's single minded support of Israel. They don't like us for occupying their countries with tanks and Humvees and giant military compounds. They don't like it when our military accidentally kills their people in bombing missions and raids against terrorists. They believe that we want their oil and that we want it cheap. They are angry because Israel, quite frankly, is taking East Jerusalem and large parts of the West Bank from them block by block, house by house. Arabs hate us because life has become intolerable for many Palestinian Arabs, and their Arab brothers in other Arab countries side with them and not with us. We take Israel's side much more often in the conflict between Israel and Palestinians in part because we feel guilt for not doing more to save more Jews from the Nazis during World War II. One of the reasons that this Jewish family in the documentary has so much trouble trusting gentiles like me is because very few countries, including the United States, took any more than a handful of Jewish refugees during World War II. The stories are tangled. Wrongdoing is deep and wide and complex on all sides. The pain is deep and wide and complex on all sides. So back to the documentary. What dismayed the Jewish father who made the documentary, was that his own sons, who had not experienced the Holocaust first hand, adopted their grandfather's perspective of not being able to trust gentiles. In the wake of 9/11, he realized that he wanted to bring together people from different backgrounds and work to bring understanding and healing. He started with his own family. He and his wife took their sons to Poland to seek out the Polish family who hid his wife's father during the Holocaust, and they found them. The Polish family was now a wizened old man and a bent old woman, but they remembered the Jews they had hidden so many years before. The Poles also remembered not being compensated for their efforts, but they were most hurt that the Jewish family had not stayed in touch with them. However those feelings were secondary to feelings of gratitude at being reconciled with long lost..... I am not sure what to call it....friends doesn't seem to be the right word. Well, anyway the Polish family welcomed the Jewish family in to their home, and they all talked late into the night. A year later the Jewish family came back with more members of their family and with the Israeli ambassador to Poland, who presented the Polish family with an award for being "Righteous Gentiles" who hid Jews from the Nazis. The whole group then presented the Polish family with an education fund for their children. The Polish grandmother started to tear up during the ceremony. More than fifty years passed before she received compensation and thanks for risking her life to save these Jewish brothers, but it came. Her Polish granddaughter smiled broadly, obviously very proud of her bent and wizened and very brave grandmother. A reconciliation between a Jewish Holocaust survivor and a Nazi is even harder to imagine than a reconciliation between a Jewish Holocaust survivor and a Pole, but it has happened. I have already mentioned that I learned Compassionate Listening from The Compassionate Listening Project. The Compassionate Listening Project was founded by an American Jewish woman, Leah Green, who stayed on an Israeli kibbutz while a teenager. One day an old Palestinian man in a kaffiyeh approached her. She ran off in terror. Later she started to think about her actions. She had no reason to think that the man was a terrorist, but she had reacted as though he was. During college, while studying Arabic at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she started bringing Jewish and Palestinian students together for mutual understanding. Later, after college, she started the peace group, Mid East Citizen Diplomacy, with which I went to Israel, Jordan and Palestine in 1991. That group later morphed into The Compassionate Listening Project. After several years of working to heal the wounds in the Middle East, one of Leah's Israeli friends told her that it was time for her to make peace with the Germans who, of course, had slaughtered many of her Jewish relatives too. Leah's first reaction was discomfort, but she embraced the idea and started leading groups of Jews over to Germany to meet with Germans for mutual healing and reconciliation. I have never taken part in one of these groups. I have some German ancestors, but they left Germany in the early 1700s. However, I heard stories about these groups during my Compassionate Listening training. One elderly German man who was a part of these groups served as a Nazi SS soldier during World War II. After the war, he put the events of the war aside and went on with his life. He did not try to come to terms his own wrongdoing. However, as he grew older, he started having dreams. He dreamt that he was lying on the ground and people were kicking him and calling him "Nazi pig." He knew he had to work on his conscience and sought out the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who has done so much work on reconciliation, deep listening, apology and forgiveness. You have to understand what all of this feels like to be a Jew. Even before the Holocaust, Europeans forced Jews forced to live in ghettos and restricted their education and livelihood. Jews suffered periodic violent pogroms for a thousand years before the Holocaust devastated their European communities. I can't say as I understand. Although I converted to Catholicism, I was born into a nominally religious Anglo Saxon Protestant family. I have dark blond fair, fair skin, and grey blue eyes. Discrimination is something I've mostly experienced vicariously. The Compassionate Listening Project says not many Jews wish to reconcile with Germans. A Jewish friend of mine said that she felt Germans need to apologize but since she hadn't committed the offense, she didn't need the reconciliation. However, some Jews who feel this way, have still ventured on these trips to Germany to meet Germans. One woman on one of these trips was a second generation Holocaust survivor. Her parents suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Although she was born after the war in the United States, her feelings of pain for the persecution of her people were overwhelming. One day during a German/Jewish reconciliation session this Jewish woman, this child of Nazi Holocaust survivors, started screaming, "It is not OK; it will never be OK." The former Nazi SS solider was part of the same group. He went over and lay prostrate before her and apologized as a former Nazi soldier for what he and other Germans had done to her family and to other Jews. The woman did not embrace him, but she stopped screaming. I think about that story often because many clergy abuse survivors feel the same way as this woman felt. Children have endured sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests, nuns, monks, teachers, choir directors.........for more than 1700 years. It is not OK. It will never be OK. Never. Never, never, never. Way too little has been done to tell the painful truths in publics and heal the wounds we all carry from this abuse, but genuine apology and true reconciliation have happened, and when they do happen, they are transformative for everyone involved. Our little group, Compassionate Gathering, facilitates apology and reconciliation. Usually we just facilitate reconciliation between clergy abuse survivors and other Catholics because our group doesn't have the backing of anyone high up in the Catholic Church, but we have helped a survivor who was abused by a Franciscan priest reconcile with a Franciscan brother of the priest who abused him Everyone in the room cried tears of joy. We can't tell anyone to forgive. Forgiveness is a journey each person makes in their own time and their own way, but we can help the wounded on their journey of healing with hospitality and compassion and genuine apology. The rewards in good feeling are the highest high I have experienced except for the birth of my two children.
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