Posted August 25, 2025

My ears and eyes full of the hate and hatefulness in the public square these days, I’ve been thinking about Carolyn Manosevitz.

Carolyn was a diminutive woman—maybe 5’3” if she stood on a box—with piercing eyes and big earrings whom I first met when she stood in front of me and 19 other wanna-be pastors to begin a seminary class called “Spirituality and the Holocaust.” She demanded to know from us what it meant to answer a call to ministry after Auschwitz. “You speak with certainty of a sovereign God whom your own Scriptures describe as love. How do you make sense of God is love in the face of the systematic extermination of 10 million human beings?”

She wasn’t being rhetorical or melodramatic. Born in Poland in the 1930s, she escaped to Canada with her father, mother, and siblings. The rest of her very large extended family chose to remain behind, and perished. For Carolyn, after Auschwitz, how we make sense of all we think we know about God was the fundamental question not just of her life, but of human existence. “Don’t be so glib in speaking of a sovereign, loving God,” she said. “God is sovereign, is loving. Yet unspeakable things still happen.”

I’m not certain what Carolyn, who passed away several years ago, would make of today’s rhetoric comparing events in this country with those in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. I am certain, however, she’d be focusing her energy on healing rather than dividing, understanding rather than demonizing. Carolyn knew better than most that in healing there is hope, and you cannot heal while at the same time injuring others.

Which explains why Carolyn taught and spoke and listened all over the world, any and everywhere, to allpeople. “I cannot heal alone,” she would say, “and neither can you. We must have one another.”

But healing and hope can be difficult.

“I’ll be the first to admit it,” Carolyn said. “It’s the ultimate hypocrisy, but it cannot be helped. It was Germans who killed my family and exterminated my people. I cannot, will not set foot in their country or talk with them. I cannot, will not forgive them.”

A year after I’d graduated from seminary, Carolyn was again scheduled to teach “Spirituality and the Holocaust” and the week students were to pre-register, a young man showed up in her office. “Ms. Mansovetz,” he said, “I want to enroll in your course on Spirituality and the Holocaust.” He spoke with an accent. Carolyn looked at him. He was blonde. He had blue eyes. “Who are you?” she asked. “Where are you from?”

“My name is Heinrich Schulz,” he said. “I am a theological student from Germany.”

“Looking at him,” Carolyn later told me, “my blood froze. He could’ve been a poster boy for the SS. He could’ve been the officer who ordered the murder of my family. Everything within me said I must tell him, no, I am sorry, but because you are who you are, you cannot take my course. But how would that have been any different than a Jew being told he cannot do something because he’s a Jew?”

Carolyn swallowed hard. Yes, she told Heinrich, you may register.

He did, and over the course of the semester, Carolyn came to know him, to know of his grandparents and great uncles and aunts and cousins who’d been members of the Nazi party and served in the Wehrmacht. And one who had, indeed, been an SS officer. And she discovered that as much as she, Carolyn, carried wounds from what people like Heinrich’s family had done, so, too did Heinrich—toxic, crushing wounds of guilt and shame.

“Why did you enroll in this class?” Carolyn asked Heinrich one day.

“It is as you said,” Heinrich answered. “We need one another to heal.”

Several years later, Carolyn received a phone call. It was Heinrich. “Carolyn,” he said, “you once asked me why I enrolled in your class and I told you what you told all of us, that we need one another to heal. Carolyn, it is time for you to heal.”

A few months later, with Heinrich, Carolyn went to Germany. She met Heinrich’s family. She met many Germans, each with their own wounds. Carolyn taught and spoke and listened. And they did the same. And the healing—for all of them—began.

The resurrected Christ, squatting over a charcoal fire on the shore of the Sea of Galilee tells Peter three times that if he, Peter, truly loves him he will feed his sheep, which is to say, Peter will love God’s people. Jesus doesn’t say love only certain people or love only under certain circumstances and within certain limits. Jesus simply says, love my people, and given that Jesus died for all people, that means Jesus’ people are all people.

Which is a reminder to each of us amidst the hate and hatefulness that we are to see everyone as Jesus did: as children of God for whom Jesus died. Which is a reminder of our responsibility to care for one another. First, because caring for one another is what Jesus commands and, second, because our own well-being depends on theirs. We do need one another because therein is the source of much of our healing, and much of our hope,