Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz 2024

by Barbara Wegmüller The security checks have intensified over the last few years. The numbers and names of all the international passports were given weeks ago to register the group of retreat participants. The entire entrance area was recently rebuilt. In the first year, the museum recorded 170,000 visitors. Currently, there are more than […]
Pilgrimage, Place, and Commemoration in Personal and Collective Healing

Join us for an insightful session in our Peacemaker Circle format, featuring Ellen Korman Maines. Ellen shares her experiences and reflections on the significance of pilgrimage in personal and collective healing. Through her narrative, Ellen delves into topics such as bearing witness, the power of place, and familial and ancestral connections. This episode also explores […]
“Never again – for everyone!”

An interview with Zen Peacemaker Roshi, Barbara Salaam Wegmüller Roshi (Bern) and Cornelius von Collande Roshi (Würzburg), about the upcoming Auschwitz Retreat in November 2024 against the backdrop of the current war in the Middle East. The interview was held in May 2024, therefore only the war in Gaza and not in Lebanon is addressed […]
Remember This (trailer)

After surviving the devastation of the Blitzkrieg, Karski swears allegiance to the Polish Underground and risks his life to carry the first eyewitness reports of war-torn Poland to the Western world, and ultimately, the Oval Office. Escaping a Gestapo prison, bearing witness to the despair of the Warsaw ghetto and confronted by the inhumanity of […]
Auschwitz Retreat Q&A Session

Since Bernie Glassman, Jishu Holmes, Eve Marko, and Andrezej Krajewski began the annual Bearing Witness Retreat at the old site of the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oświęcim, Poland in 1996, the Zen Peacemakers have been returning for over twenty-five years to continue to bear witness to oneness in diversity, in the place that became a […]
Pearls of Ash & Awe – Readings from AschePerlen

Pearls of Ash & Awe—AschePerlen is a book that documents 20 Years of Bearing Witness in Auschwitz with Bernie Glassman & Zen Peacemakers. During this event, several of the authors will read their – or other – testimonies from the book. After reading, we will take time to share in a mindful way. You will […]
GERMAN PRIEST AT THE THRESHOLD OF AUSCHWITZ

This is the story of a boy who was born in post-war Germany, when the Holocaust was not talked about in schools and families. Going as a young pacifist to volunteer in Israel preceded by a visit to Auschwitz, he did not know what shock awaited him. Years later, already as a priest, he returned […]
Healing the Scars of History

Healing the Scars of History BY LINDSAY KYTE| FEBRUARY 9, 2023 Retreats are being held at Auschwitz, a former plantation, and a site where Indigenous people were massacred. Lindsay Kyte reports on how retreatants are finding freedom from their ancestral pain. Approximately a million people died at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It was the […]
Poem from Ukraine
Bitburg – September 2022 Grandma Ida sent letters and money to her family in Poland ― or was it Ukraine? Until the letters came back stamped, Undelivered. The addressees had been delivered, and the entire town disappeared. In Bitburg, last fall, her grandson paid a visit to the well festooned section of cemetery […]
Native American Lakhota Bearing Witness At Auschwitz

Lakhota elders Manny & Renee Ironhawk joined Zen Peacemakers International’s Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat in the Autumn of 2022. During this presentation, Manny & Renee will share their experiences of bearing witness to these concentration camps.