I had better begin with a clarification, since my last thread on a similar subject seemed to provoke confused responses. When I say "God died in Auschwitz", I do not mean it in a literal sense that there was a personal creator deity and that the acts of the Final Solution killed him. Rather, I mean it in a symbolic sense that the theistic notion itself--that of a personal deity who is involved with the affairs of humans--died, and that one can only continue to believe in this sense by ignoring this experience.
It should be of little wonder that the primary targets of the Final Solution--the Ashkenazi Jews--are among the most atheistic and least religious communities in the world. But one might say, "Yes, the Holocaust was horrible, but religious believers have endured terrible tragedies in the past, and continued to thrive. One might even say that the history of religion is built upon human tragedies." Where I think this kind of rejoinder fails though is in dealing with the Final Solution in terms of tragedy. This, I think, it is wrong in the fundamental sense.
Tragedy presumes a certain dignity to the victim, a dignity that was entirely absent in the Final Solution. The whole process, from the selection to the cattle cars to the final naked walk was meant precisely to remove that dignity. The chief judge in the BBC drama God on Trial put it best: "When you came here, they took away your property, they took away your name, cut your hair, took away your childre, wives, mothers, even the fillings in your teeth: everything that made you a man they took." To frame a suffering as a tragedy requires the minimal dignity of personhood, that though the victim is suffering unfairly, say being executed publicly as a political prisoner, the chance to face that suffering with defiance or courage. "My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country" is perhaps the prototypical example of the dignified last act of the tragedy. Or perhaps more universal across culture, the process of making peace with God, the giving of last rites, or the final prayers of the condemned, etc.
To imagine such a confrontation in Auschwitz is to basically make fun of the victim. It presupposes a certain level of dignity that simply wasn't there. When the brutality is total, and the person is reduced to a level of existence even lower than a herd of cattle, such prayers, whether for personal salvation or for a miracle, descend to the level of total farce.
When you take a situation like Auschwitz, where the dehumanization, of both the executioner and the victim, is total, the only genuine human acts that are left are tantamount to suicide. Perhaps the starkest example of this that I can think of is from Primo Levi's autobiographical work If This is a Man. While imprisoned in Auschwitz, Levi was befriended by an Italian bricklayer Lorrenzo Perrone. Lorrenzo was a conscripted laborer transferred from Italy as part of camp expansion plan. He had no reason to fraternize with an inmate at a death camp. Yet Perrone, at great personal risk to himself, smuggled food from his meager rations to Levi, as well as warmer garments to wear under his uniform, saving Levi's life.
Perrone could have been killed at any moment for any of what he was doing. And the hunger he endured to save his friend may well have cost him his life in the end, as he died of Tuberculosis in 1952, likely contracted during this period of malnutrition. As Levi himself put it, "But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and unblemished, and he was outside this world of denial. Thanks to Lorenzo I happened not to forget I myself was a man."
It may seem simplistic to ask, "Where was God in all of this?" Nevertheless, it is a question that anyone who believes in a personal deity, who concerns himself with moral affairs, has to answer. There simply were no miracles at Auschwitz, and by the time the camps were liberated by the Allies and the Nazi regime overthrown, 78 percent of Jewish population of Europe had been annihilated, along with sizable portions of the Eastern Slavic population (10% and 11% of the Polish and Soviet populations respectively, for example). Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan for the depopulation and German colonization of the Soviet Union and Poland, called for similar levels of annihilation as the Jews. In the face of this uncompromising brutality, anyone who believes in a God that is in anyway concerned with the affairs of mortals (especially one that grants miracles, as many modern evangelicals believe) is going to be left with an uncomfortable answer to Eddie Izzard's question "Why didn't God just flick Hitler's head off?"
