The set for "Schindler's List" had been chosen. The actors were in place, the sets prepared and only two things were lacking - the film's director, Steven Spielberg, and the film's most important prop, snow.
So important to the movie's theme was the presence of snow that the film's executive producer, Gerald Molen, had made plans to haul tons of it from Poland's mountains in army trucks to the film's sets hundreds of miles away if it didn't arrive before Spielberg did.When Spielberg finally arrived in the middle of a driving blizzard, Molen said he knew the filming experience would be unlike any other he had been associated with.
"It seems that from the moment (Spielberg) decided to work on `Schindler's List,' I knew that something special would be happening," Molen said at the closing luncheon of the Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches at Brigham Young University this week. "It was obvious to me that we were being divinely guided."
As far as scholastic conferences go, this one was as original as they come. It's not every day that Christians and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, university professors and Holocaust survivors are brought together for any purpose. Perhaps even more bizarre is that despite ideological and scholarly disagreements, most of those involved recognized God's hand in the events prior to, during and after the most horrific event in world history.
"A belief in a God is what makes understanding, repentance and reconciliation possible," said Lorenz Wilkins, a pastor of a Lutheran/Calvinistic church in Berlin Germany. "It is what makes a conference like this possible."
Throughout the conference's three-day run, which ended Wednesday, testimonies of concentration camp survivors bore witness to the hundreds of complex problems that are associated with the Holocaust. Scholars from universities throughout the world presented papers aimed at helping to pick apart the aftermath. Panel discussions tackled tough issues ranging from teaching students about the events, to individual moral responses to the Holocaust and mourning.
Often the discussions would elicit tears from some, arguments from others, and pondering from most. But it was an understanding of God's role in the Holocaust that most often seemed to contribute to the insight gained.
"It is too easy to blame God, when the effort should be to try and awaken humanity," said John Pawlikowski, from the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, during the discussion Monday on the impact of Elie Wiesel on Christianity. "As we near the end of the 20th century, finally let the instruments be created of peace."
Sharon Gutman, from the Hebrew Union College, and chairman of the panel on "The Practice of Dialogue," said the Holocaust was so monstrous and so grotesque that some truths about mankind must be faced.
"We must acknowledge some awful things about ourselves and recognize that those unlike ourselves are our relatives. There is much work still to be done."
Pawlikowki said in the midst of human devastation, "we find God" comforting, healing. "The question is not how can you believe in God but how can you believe in man?"
During the same discussion, Alan Berger from Syracuse University theorized that if Jesus Christ had been living during the time of the Holocaust, he would have been taken to the gas chambers as a Jew.
"In rediscovering the notion of a compelling God, atheism is not the answer. After protesting God's non-intervention during history's Dark Night, we cannot let God go," concluded Pawlikowski.