Zen Peacemakers retreat focuses on bearing witness at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Rabbi Eva Sax-Bolder describes her annual participation in the Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The retreat brings together diverse participants, including Jewish descendants of the Shoah, Buddhists, and Christians, to engage with the site through practice rather than historical debate.

The retreat is guided by three tenets established by the late Zen teacher Bernie Glassman: not-knowing, bearing witness, and loving action. Sax-Bolder emphasizes the importance of 'not-knowing,' which involves arriving without fixed ideas or the need to immediately interpret the experience, allowing the weight of the location to be felt directly.