Where was Christ during the Holocaust?

[palmharbor]

I must believe that the Jews prayed to God while they were in the death camps. Two of my Jewish relatives were worked to death in a factory in Austria. Sunday at Mass Christ as the Shepherd was discussed. So where was the Good Shepherd from 1939-1945? If God has a plan for all of us why was Hitler’s plan okay with God? I just don’t get this. Many of the same people who tortured and murdered the Jews went to Mass on Sunday and celebrated Christmas during these times.

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

In his foreword to Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, Catholic author Francois Mauriac wrote:

Let us try to imagine what passed within him [Wiesel] while his eyes watched the coils of black smoke unfurling in the sky, from the oven where his little sister and his mother were going to be thrown with thousands of others: “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.”

It was then that I [Mauriac] understood what had first drawn me to the young Jew: that look, as of a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed, stumbling among the shameful corpses. For him [Friedrich] Nietzsche’s cry expressed an almost physical reality: God is dead, the God of love, of gentleness, of comfort, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, has vanished forevermore, beneath the gaze of this child, in the smoke of a human holocaust exacted by Race, the most voracious of all idols. And how many pious Jews have experienced this death! On that day, horrible even among those days of horror, when the child watched the hanging (yes!) of another child, who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone behind him groan: “‘Where is God? Where is he? Where can he be now?’ and a voice within me [Wiesel] answered: ‘Where? Here he is – he has been hanged here, on these gallows’” (source).

Mr. Wiesel was more correct than he knew. God was indeed hanging on those gallows and shared in the misery and death of all who suffered during the Holocaust because God entered into human suffering and died on Good Friday. And in his Resurrection, he made it possible for all who died during the Holocaust to rise again on the last day. Christians know that because of the Incarnation that suffering has meaning and that death is not final. We must pray that this hope that is now ours may one day be the hope of God’s own people, the Jewish nation.

**Recommended reading:

Salvation Is from the Jews** by Roy H. Schoeman