Wendy Cohen
Friends escorted me to Poland and the Ukraine, the “old country,” according to my grandparents, the countries where they were born. After releasing so much of my personal history, I was going back to find it. I was eager to explore my background, but I felt slightly uneasy scratching in the dirt of my past. Why was the LORD bringing me back to my ancestral homeland, after taking me through such an intense surgery of my ancestors’ influence?
I began to realize that the Polish people had hosted us for over 1,000 years. We had lived in Poland, as a semi-autonomous society within their country, with our own rules and regulations, and our own culture, for over 1,000 years. Sometimes the Poles had treated us badly, sometimes they had treated us well, and sometimes they had simply tolerated us. When Nazi Germany conquered Poland, and began enslaving its people, the Nazis were extremely harsh to the Poles. Was our historical presence in Poland part of the reason?
I had never thought about any of this before, but now I wondered, how many Polish people, after ten centuries, contained Jewish blood? How many Jewish people had left “the fold” to marry and become Christian? How much had the two cultures influenced each other? What had both sides gained? What had both sides suffered? I began to understand why Jewish people had traditionally been scared of Christianity. How many people had the Jews lost to Christianity? How many Jewish people had been “saved” but had lost their cultural inheritance? How many Polish people contained some Jewish blood but did not know it?
No wonder the Nazis hated the Poles. The Polish people were mostly Christian and Jewish, the two people groups with whom God desired to dwell intimately for eternity, an intimacy Satan lost forever. Six million Jews, including three million Polish Jews, died in the concentration camps, as did another three million non-Jewish Poles. We were fellow prisoners, fellow victims, fellow survivors, fellow refugees, and fellow revolutionaries. I felt like I had very, very much in common with the Polish people. We even look alike.
I was eating, everyday, from my grandmother’s “cooking,” tasting foods I had not consumed since childhood. Gawking and munching my way through the remains of the shtetls, the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, and imagining life within them. I would often cry. What kind of spiritual soul food was God feeding me? I was smelling the ancient sweat of my ancestors’ shoes, dancing a dance that was far from new, whose steps I’d previously chosen to lose. But now I was remembering them, and dancing my/His dance, brand new.
What happens when God takes you back to your past, and shows you how much it has defined you? When He shows you how much you are a product of its creation, and how much He yearns for you to give Him back its spiritual/emotional/mental/physical properties? When He shows you that if you want to wear His new shoes you must first embrace your old shoes? If you are me, you shake and tremble, fly high and go low, learn to be still, pray and ponder, write words and play music, read the Word and wait. Wait. Wait. God’s up to something. What? WAIT!
In Birkenau, which is the death camp associated with Auschwitz, I was sifting through the ashes with my hands one day. There, a friend handed me the ash-covered, brittle, inner sole of a woman’s shoe. Did it belong to a Concentration Camp victim or survivor? It is one thing to read Ezekiel 36 and 37, it is another to put your hands into the dust of the chimneys and hold the shoe of somebody whose bones may have been burned to a crisp.
With my hands in the dust, I began to speak to the LORD.
“LORD, I’m going to split again from all the pain here, and I don’t want to split. What do I do to stay whole?”
“My Dear Child, you forgive. You forgive absolutely. You forgive everyone for everything. You forgive victimizers and victims. Hold nothing back. In My Name, forgive.”
Immediately, His Spirit poured through me, and I went wandering around, up and down every row of the camp, forgiving everyone for everything. I felt God’s blessing pour out from me over the death camp, over the Jewish people, over the nations. Comforting. Releasing. Healing. Nations. People groups. Individuals. Unlimited compassion and understanding. Reconciliation. It brought joy to my heart, a song to my lips. I did not want to leave the death camp. I felt like I was in heaven, resting in the joy of His peace, knowing His blessings. He was there.
John 20:23 says, “If you forgive the sins of any, they have been forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.” God gave me the power, the right, to forgive nations, because nations had hurt my people, and they, through their pain, had hurt me. As I forgave, the habitation of God’s peace became mine. My mental chaos, the ups and downs, decreased more. God released me from huge quantities of wounds, personal, historical, and corporate, all at once. Released from prison. Parts healed. Bam.
Then I heard the LORD say,
“Now I want you to write a book about your childhood, about the Holocaust, and about forgiveness; about what you have learned.”
………………………
FREEDOM 
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