In my house is a broken pair of scissors that is corroded and tiny. Children’s scissors. I found them beside a mountain of rotting clothing outside of one of the seven Crematoria in Birkenau, the main death factory at the Auschwitz Concentration camp in Poland. I remember seeing it lying there on the frozen ground with snow lightly falling. Already full of emotion from merely being there, I knelt on one knee as though in prayer and picked it up.
I held it up towards the frozen sun but there was no warmth in this place. I looked at the mountain of clothing and it was mostly dresses and kids clothes. Mothers with their babies had been ordered to disrobe while standing outside on frozen days like this one and then marched into the gas chamber. As soon as they were dead, the Crematoria incinerated the bodies; mothers still holding their children.
The mountain of clothes belonged to the very last groups that were murdered by the Nazis. I picked up a tiny moldy blue dress and cried.
Bill Berry found me this way. He and I were the only ones there. We had jumped off of a British tour bus that had carried us from Krakow, the nearest town, sixty kilometers away. We had no idea how we were going to get back.
I showed him the tiny broken scissors before shoving it in my pocket. Neither one of us could talk. I remember Bill putting his arm around me, shaking his head and then wandering off … somewhere.
Back in Groves High School a thousand years earlier Wayne Sears was trying to introduce enthusiasm to history class. He got hold of a recently declassified movie of the liberation of Auschwitz and showed it to us. And my mind woke up that day. I asked for more and Mr. Sears got them for me to watch after school. I became an expert on the concentration camps and can rattle them off by their strange and foreign names. I know what made them different from one another.
I was in Prague with Bill to talk to a group of clergy about working with homeless people. Bill had other things to do but I’d already completed the assignment. Standing in the train station, I surveyed the map and saw we were a day’s train ride from the most infamous of the camps.
There was no question that I had to go. I remember buying a ticket before even talking to Bill. He is my friend and while it took him a bit to rearrange commitments that he’d made, he bought himself one too.
After he stumbled away I knelt their holding that moldy blue dress for the longest time. I hugged it to my chest. And I thought of Chelsea, my daughter back home who would probably have fit in it. I thought of her cherub face and tiny hand clutching my finger. And I could picture her being told to take off her clothes and march inside.
I sobbed for a long time clutching that dress.
When there were no more tears I made my way towards the back of the camp and came upon a rock monument that had been built. A circle of stones had been constructed and leaning against them was this slate with Hebrew written on it. I learned Hebrew in seminary but it was too faded to read on the stone.
Something flickered and I peered behind the stone. Underneath were two candles; one lit and the other untouched. They were Jewish prayer candles. I surveyed the miles of Birkenau and there was no one there other than Bill and I. He was nowhere to be seen.
“Who in God’s name had lit that candle? How did it remain lit in this wind?”
I stared at the lit votive candle, a tin with a flaming wick floating in melted wax. It would soon burn itself out. Again on my knees, I took the unlit candle then held it above the flame. The moment the new one was lit the other was extinguished.
And holiness came over me. I knew in an instant that I had traveled around the world, made a last minute spontaneous decision to go there, jumped off of a bus with no idea how we were getting back … to light this candle.
I hold the tiny broken scissors in my hand this morning and all of these emotions and thoughts flood me. And I think to myself, sometimes it is the tiniest of things, the simplest forms of worship, that are the most significant to God. And to us.
Then Bill found me. And we could find no words to speak as we walked the railroad tracks out of the camp.
The same tracks that had brought in precious little girls in shinny blue dresses.
