Harmeze - Harm&Harmony II (back to Part I)

I am surprised, that mentioning the fact, that I had no photo left for Edith Stein,
brought up all those feelings and understandings, which have grown over the last 45 years.

I could share nothing of this with Pater Manfred.
Instead - over dinner in the Center for Dialogue and Prayer -
I inquired about his beneficial work in Auschwitz,
exemplified best in something that was most relevant to me:
the pilgrimage of 150 Arabs and Jews from Israel to Auschwitz. [See documents]

Then he brought me to the monastery.
The "then" happened fast on the eight of November,
but now that I've been sculpting the experiences, feelings and thoughts of that day for so many hours,
it seems, as if I went through a very long journey.

 

Harmeze:

Harmeze: The villagers, expelled by the Nazis, returned after the war. One of the fish-ponds was filled up and serves as a football yard. Ten years ago the gigantic compound of the Franciscan monastery was built, the "Sanctuary of Victorious Love - Father Kolbe Center", which includes a huge building for the monks and another huge building for the nuns. There are only about 4 monks and 2 brothers present, and about 3 nuns. The buildings and facilities scream for groups to benefit from them. I was introduced to Pater Stanislaw Stoi, who talked some German. I was the only guest in that big house and was told, that except for the cooked meal at Sunday afternoon I would have to serve myself in the kitchen. I was led into a little appartment - 2 rooms with a common corridor, shower and toilet. Opposite the church. "What are those crosses?" I asked. "They were in Birkenau, but the Jews did not want them there."

"Do you find our church beautiful?"
"No", I said bluntly.
And how could it be beautiful if the belltower - as I learnt later - is meant to represent the chimneys of the crematoria.
"In any case - there will be mass at 5 and 3 times tomorrow."

I joined the few people in church rightaway and twice on Sunday.

Another aspect of the WAR, a war put aflame by my German Nation. Last photo with my soldier-father after my brother's birth, NOv.30,1942, in Stuttgart. Sometime in 1943 we evacuated ourselves to my mother's aunt near Leipzig. We didn't know that my father was killed already. We did hear, though, that the house with our flat in it, was bombarded and destroyed. In March 1944 we were instructed by the following postcard, to move to a tiny village in South-Germany, Wolfartsweiler, into a tiny house with a tiny kitchen and 2 tiny rooms, which my mother allowed to use only for practicing piano and for sleeping.

It was in the tiny Catholic church in the village to which we were evacuated in March 1944, where I first encountered "God", where I felt at home. The words spoken there at that time were Latin, as now they were Polish. But the chanting, the organ, the ritual interaction between priest and community the incense, the imagery all around for the eyes the constant body movement between kneeling, standing, sitting, walking to the altar, all this sensuality, physicality enwrapped me warmly. I had not much time to enjoy this home. In December 1946 the French occupiers expelled those from the American occupation zone, and we had to go back to Stuttgart, content ourselves with two rooms in the flat of a woman, whose husband was of a war prisoner in Russia and -- even more terrible -- "enjoy" the coldly intellectual Protestant Church, to which we "belonged". Once during those 2 1/2 years in that village, towards the midnight Christmas mass, I - a little girl of seven - waited at the door of the church, in the snow, for 3 hours. The info, that the mass was postponed to the early morning, had not reached me.. IN addition to my deep disappointment there came collective punishment: No Christmas celebration for me and my siblings "at home". [October 7, 2009: I discern much victimhood here! I am vibrating very differently now - see my present work!] While still in that little village, the only place where I felt home in my childhood, in a school where the 48 children of all eight classes were "taught" by one teacher in one room, I had to write an essay with a description of this picture. Death as a friend.... The essay was moving my mother and she kept the essay, and later I rediscovered the picture. I was not yet eight then...

Probably there is great exaggeration in the memory of a little girl.
But it explains, why - with all my anger against Christian ideology - I now did not miss the chance,
to tune into the chanting of organ, priest and community,
the more though, as the painting above the altar,
unique as the sculpture of that Jew hovering at the cross in Manfred's church,
radiated right into my yearning heart.

Yearning for "the Mother's" sensual presence, after so much "Spirit" on the Retreat.
There she was, in her voluptious purple and indigo garments,
surrounded by light and eight baby angels
standing on the moon sickle, that metaphor of femaleness,
arising from the dark earth.

Probably no other visitor would have been taken by the kitschy painting,
but I drank it in, delighted in it, talked to the voluptious Maria Immaculata
"Your time has come! "
To heal the split between spirit-mind and body-feeling,
is my overall vocation on this planet - NOW.

After his death at the age 27, my brothers' pupils told me: The last thing he did in the morning, was to tell us a story: When Jews had to wear the yellow star, grownups didn't dare to go to the street. They sent a five year old boy - to buy some food. "But don't tell anyone your name!" The woman in the shop was nice. She asked him what he wanted. And also: "What is your name?" The child - confused, terrified - said: "Jesus". I sob, whenever I tell this story.

That brother once had been in opposition to my "spleen", as he called it. On Christmas 1959 he saw me standing next to the radio crying. "The first smearings of swastica on a synagogue since the war!" He ridiculed me. But he worked in a Jewish summercamp in 1961. And after he had been with me in Israel in 1969, he started to sit in with the villagers in their pubs. "To make people change their thinking", told a friend, when I came to Germany to the funeral. And: "I want to follow in the footsteps of my sister." On February 19, 1970, I got a telegram, that he was dead. A drunken American soldier had collided with his car. American soldiers had killed my father during the invasion to Sicily. I myself at the age of ten, ran straight into a car with an American soldier.. How often was I sorry, that he didn't kill me then...

After the mass on Sunday morning I stayed on.
I walked and I tuned, voiced, sounded, sang.
I had not experienced such an extended, encompassing echo in a building,
ever since I used to visit the little St. Anna church in Old Jerusalem,
when it was still possible to walk there safely, in the early seventies.
The heavenly music produced by my voice exhilarated me.
And with this happiness in heart and body
I descended again to the "Labyrinth" underneath the church,
to Marian's AU-schwitz-Birken-AU.

 

The night before:
I declined the offer of a monk to eat with them,
and instead started to walk into what I understood was the direction of Birken-AU.
I thought of spending the night there, the night of Harmonic Concordance.

HARMonic Concordance?
Only today - 2003_11_24 - while I'm so agitated by the compositions that create themselves on this website,
I saw that "Harmeze" invokes not only the painful "HARM" in German and English,
but also the ancient Greek HARMonia,
untranslated even in Hebrew- like in one of the first modern Hebrew writer's sentence:
"as long as there is harmonia between humaneness and nationalism" [Aekhad Ha-am],
harmony as most sensually experienced in music,
when individual sounds play together in mutual attunement.

I once more internalized what I had excerpted from the Internet before my voyage,
and walked out into the darkness.

"The unity-progression signifies a time to shift individually as well as collectively,
... work on challenges and opportunities for self-realization...
a collective picture of resurrection.

Focused I certainly was.
I walked fast,
it was cold,
car lights blinded me,
I had to step off the road, let them pass.
My stomach started to ache like mad,
I walked faster, an hour and a half.
Then I had to admit, that I was lost.

Consider the qualities of the planets as they are represented through the metaphors of astrology:

The Sun the prmial energy; the cause for being; masculine in nature; the basic will and vitality that inspires life; our creativity and conscious aim; that which expresses the best of who we are,

The Moon - the archetypical feminine; the mother; the personal subconscious mind, memory and imagination the tidal ebbe and flow of emotion; the avenues of habit and instinct; the shelter of home..

Chiron the crystal rainbow bridge between physicality and spirit, the inner and outer planets; the wounded haler; Christ consciousness; initiation; the interface between God and Godling.

Mars the courage, desire, energy and willingness to act; the stimulation of passion; the ability to be the spiritual warrior;

Saturn the pysical bones of the Earth and our bodies; the disciplinarian and 'teter' of our metal; the limitations of the physical; endurance, perseverance, and stability,

Jupiter the king of the gods; beneficence, good fortune and expansion; the publication of ideals; the higher mind, wisdom and enthusiasm; generosity, optimism and increase on all levels.

"The fact that a total lunar eclipse is part of the Grand Sextile pattern adds to its significance immensely.
In at least one viewpoint, an eclipse carries the implication
of the beginning of some important undertaking
O R
the bringing to fruition of an issue that had its conception at an earlier time.

This eclipse could just so mark one of those milestone events on a global level."

There were clouds all over, no Star of David of our six companions,

with each planet's specific energy playing with each other in harmony and con-cordance.
nor the lunar eclipse, which held such great promise for my Noah's Shore.

And when I traced my way back all through the cold dark and the blinding cars,
and my stomach aches became excruciating,
I was forced not to dream about bringing Noah's Shore to fruition,
but to feel and sense a nano part of the physical conditions in BirkenAU.

Solidarity with the harmed on the night of harmonic concordance.

 

The next day, when I had already given up on "visiting" BirkenAU for a last time,
and in it block 28, as Yanina had urged me to do,
it was during lunch with three monks,
that I learnt about the annual Via Dolorosa procession of the Polish Catholics.
"You can come with us in the car. It will take two hours. It will be very cold."

I wondered, why the Retreat did not include the day of this mass gathering on the Selection Place.
Because it was too Catholic, too Polish?
But it was WALKing and it was SOUNDing and it was in a crowd of maybe 1500-2000 people,
very much reminiscent of the by then still warmly dressed crowds that awaited their destiny
of being soon transmuted into corpses or reduced to sheer numbers.

Mobile loud-speakers were dispersed among the crowds,
and a priest walking amidst its sang a litany dedicated to Mother Maria.
Every time the procession halted at one of the Fourteen Stations of the Cross,
the litany stopped and everyone kneeled down on their knees for a second or two.
Then a man or a woman would say something, maybe about the historic events at that station.

Suddenly I found myself next to Pater Manfred.
Two Germans, one Catholic and one Protestant who had become Jewish,
walking and sounding on the Via Dolorosa in Polish BirkenAU.

Mother Maria, the Godmother, the virgin, the Immaculata,
which means, that not only was the conception of Jesus "unpolluted",
but the conception of Mary was immaculata too.

Towards six o'clock Pater Stanislav and I met by chance in the kitchen.
So we had supper together - for 2 hours.

It was during my intense listening to the not-fluent, but fervent stories of Father Stanislav Stoi,
that my perspective of the Immaculata changed 180 degrees.


He told me:
The Irish monk Dunk Scott (12th century) came to a conference in Paris
with 200 proofs for the immaculate conception of Mary.
Long before it became an official dogma in the late 19. century,
it was a very strong conviction among all Polish believers.
"What does it really mean?" I asked, "Why is this so important?"

It means, that Maria is a true mediator!
"A mediator to Jesus?"
And there he said it:
"No! A direct mediator to God!
She is equal to Jesus!"

I finally "got it".
Never mind the belief, that "mediation" to God is needed here.
What is immensely relevant in this metaphor of the Immaculata,
is, that in an entirely male religion of "Father-Son-HolySpirit"
WOMAN has been re-enthroned.
NOt only the Son is believed to be equal to God,
but the Mother has become equal to God too.

If this was the metaphysical purpose of Maximilian Kolbe's "Militia" for the Immaculata,
then blessed be he.

For who is the Mother?
She is God's desire, God's feelings, God's emotions, God's Will,
the magnetic field, without which there would be no electricity,
or with another analogy: the canvas without which there would be no painting.
All the "puzzle pieces" of "Healing-K.i.s.s." intend to understand and apply this message of God's info.
And there I had come to AUschwitz-BirkenAU in person, not only virtually as during all the 45 years before,
to experience this message:
The feelings are meant to guide me in choosing what is in my own interest.
[October 7, 2009: the teaching of "Abraham" talks about "your Emotional Guidance System"]
To be able to feel my feelings
- especially as long as they are crass and unevolved, sick and horrid because of all the denial,
I must learn to vibrate them with my Body,
to breathe, to sound, to move them.

As I've tried to convey:
AUschwitz-BirkenAU is but the apocalyptic outcome of the split between "God" and the "Immaculata",
spirit-mind and body-will.
And since this has not yet been understood, leave alone applied,
the AUschwitz-BirkenAU Holocaust may seem small in comparison which what we are about to create on this planet.
"Mini-Nukes" , are now being produced by the United States,
which just confirmed a "Security"-budget of more than 400 billions Dollars.
"Small atom-bomb"s with "only" a third of the power of destruction of those that were poured over Hiroshima and Nagasake.
And "against" what?
Against "Terror".

Terror as Anti-Terror are results of the accumulated denials of each one of us.
"HARMonic Concordance", i.e. the redemption of HARMeze, will only manifest,
if more and more of us truly accept the Mother of God, the Immaculata,
or without metaphor :
if I feel my feelings,
move my feelings,
accept my feelings,
and thus let them evolve.

It has been for 25 years, that I've been training myself in this.
"But it all the world around me goes into a different direction, it is hard not to regress",
my daughter once said.
And it is even more difficult not to regress,
since "my own people", those closest to me,
all embrace the "spiritual" way of meditation and silence
and away from vibrating feelings with BODY.

Yesterday [2003_11_25] I hitchhiked to the Dead Sea for my last preliminary research of "Noah's Shore.
After a rare 45 minutes of not being picked up somewhere on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho,
a driver opened the door and said, not really friendly: "Till Qumran".
Since I felt uneasy sitting next to him, I ventured a conversation:
"May I ask, for what purpuse you are going to Qumran"
"I use a break in my studies to climb up to a cave to meditate for some hours."

This sounds promising, doesn't it?

I ventured further and shared, that I was going to the Dead Sea for a peace-project.
He blurted with contempt: "Everyone will live by his own belief", a quote from the Bible.
When I wanted to understand, how to interpret this,
I received a shower of preachings:
"I don't believe in this kind of peace.
Let everyone care for the peace of his own soul, and the rest will follow."
"In this we agree, but why does this contradict taking care of peace in the world?
After all you are dependent on the world,
the car in which you drive - maybe a million people were involved in inventing, producing, selling it."
I don't remember the answer, but everything I said, met with: "Everyone according to his own way."

It reminded my painfully of the sentence said to me during the Retreat,
and repeated to me through one ghastly e-mail from one of the participants:
"Everyone according to his own need."

I pleaded with "my" driver:
"But if someone puts a bomb in your car,
would you also say : "everyone according to his own way?"

"I worked in "the Security" for a long time", he said coldly,
"Putting a bomb is the terrorist's way.
May way is - to kill the terrorist."
"And that's all you can do in YOUR way?"
"That's MY way."

With this sentence said, he let me off at the foothills of Qumran.
"I am very, very sad!" I said, already outside the car.
He shrugged and went up to his cave to meditate....

To meditate away his feelings.
But thank you for having picked me up!

 

 

 

 

 

"

 

Then, on my last night,
for two hours alone in Marian's "Labyrinth" with Pater Staniswav Stoi,
we pondered over an idyllic scene, placed above one of Marian's gruesome paintings.
The idyll showed Marian, the prisoner,
mowing grass with a skythe
and the digging of a pond.
"It was German propaganda", said the priest - with anger, grief and disgust.
And though he came to live in the monastery only a month earlier, he knew:
"There were small natural ponds dispersed around here in Harmeze.
The villagers of Harmeze were expelled and a subcamp of Auschwitz was erected
The first prisoners like Marian were brought to Harmeze to dig out fish-ponds.

Whenever the priest mentioned Harmeze, it sounded like the Hebrew khaermêsh.
I shuddered.
Khaermêsh means "skythe", in German "Sense".
And the connotation was the "Sensenmann", the man with the skythe,
the personalization of DEATH in the old legends.
Harmeze - harm and Harm and DEATH...

"But who would do the fishing here and who would eat the fish,
definitely not the prisoners."
"That's the whole point: there was no real interest in the prisoners' work-force.
There was no need for most of the things, the slaves were forced to produce.
It was just for the sake of torture.
If they had been interested in getting any real work done effectively,
they would have given the slaves water, food and sleep."

I couldn't help remembering a famous Guru in India,
who demanded from his followers (some 20 years ago),
to shovel a huge hill from one side to the other...

I had never thought of this possibility.
After all there is "Schindler's List", for instance, which proves,
that people could be saved, if work vital for the German Reich could be done by them.

But Marian's mowing with a skythe and digging fish ponds proved the priest's point.
And this aspect of torture made it all the more vivid to me,
that the Endloesung, the ideological concept of extermination, was not the main thing.
If yes, gassing all newcomers immediately would have been the efficient way to accomplish it.
There was room for 2000 people, a whole train, in one gas-chamber.
True, the burning of the corpses was more cumbersome
and to accomplish it, some slaves needed to be kept alive for the Sonderkommando.
And some others for exploiting all the belongings of the murdered, including their hair and gold teeth etc

They could have gassed the people in their clothes and with their hair intact.
No economic interest demanded to strip them naked and shear them like sheep.
There again was only one interest:
the kick of humilating and torturing living co-humans.
The kick was desired as compensation for the rich skala of feelings,
which are LIFE and which had been first ignored and denied like in ordinary people,
and if a rest was left, then this rest was systematically erased, blotted out.