The groves of trees, the flowers, the neatly winding cobblestone paths at Bergen-Belsen belie the horrors that took place at the site half a century ago.
It looks like a “wonderful park,” says Berkeley resident Johanna Ceapach Choinn, who just returned from the former German concentration camp.
“You stand there and you rub your head like, `How could it be?'” she says. “Could this be a place that was so full of horror?”
Even in the face of such cognitive dissonance, the 37-year-old Ceapach Choinn, who is studying to be a rabbi through the Jewish Renewal movement, recently experienced the concentration camp in a way that made it difficult to ignore its profound significance.
She participated in a five-day memorial retreat at the camp aimed at heightening awareness and memory of what happened there. Organized by Lisa Malin, an Austrian Sufi, the retreat entailed a fast to heighten spiritual awareness, daily Buddhist chants and intensive interfaith prayers for peace.
Though they slept at a Catholic center in the town of Bergen, the nearly 15 retreat participants — who hailed from such countries as Japan, Germany and the Czech Republic — spent entire days at the former concentration camp.
At daily prayer gatherings there, Ceapach Choinn, the only American and only Jew at the retreat, imparted Judaism to her fellow retreat participants, teaching them Jewish precepts and leading them in such songs as “Lo Yissa Goy” and “Hine Ma Tov.”
“Every day I would offer some kind of teaching, something to do with healing or with loss or with the dualistic nature of God, something that was pertinent with `How do we get through reckoning with the Shoah?'” says Ceapach Choinn, a member of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco.
“How do we work through it without forever staying in a place of rage or victimhood?”
One woman attending the retreat helped Ceapach Choinn consider that question. Ceija Stoika, a Gypsy Holocaust survivor who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen, joined members of the retreat, praying with them and sharing her own World War II stories.
At one point, Stoika guided them to a tree, explaining that in the waning days of the war, when prisoners were no longer given food or water, she licked resin from the tree bark to stay alive.
“She is such an amazing life-lover,” Ceapach Choinn says of Stoika.
“She has worked very, very hard to get through the experience and come to the other side. While she never, ever would say [what happened] is for the best, she recognizes that we have to pray for everyone’s soul.
“A person who would be so ill as to perpetrate the horrors of the Holocaust…their souls need to be prayed for. These people were not well.”
Last year, Ceapach Choinn — a recent graduate of the Jewish Spiritual Leadership program offered by the Chochmat HaLev educational center in Berkeley — participated in the 1995 Interfaith Pilgrimage for Life and Peace, an eight-month trek from Auschwitz in Poland to Hiroshima in Japan, commemorating the end of World War II.
That event was organized by monks from the Japanese Buddhist monastic order Nipponzan Myohoji, which has organized peace pilgrimages and interfaith dialogues around the world.
During that event, Malin, the Austrian Sufi, conceived of a five-year project of visiting various international sites of suffering, including the concentration camps Ravensbruck, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.
Malin envisioned the journey, Ceapach Choinn explains, as “an act of `We don’t forget what happened here,'” a chance to offer prayers for those who perished in the sites and hopes that such devastation will not occur again.