Songs for Suffering - Psalm 44

In Chapter Three of his book “Songs for Suffering : Praying the Psalms in Times of Trouble”, Simon Stocks uses examples from his own experience to illustrate that in any healthy relationship there must exist the ability to voice complaints and concerns. To do so is a way of fully engaging in the relationship.

Whilst it might seem uncomfortable to some, the Psalms show us that this is also the case in our relationship with God; that it is possible (perhaps even healthy?) to complain to God about God, in prayer.


Psalm 44 is a prayer of a people whose trust in God has led them to ruin. It begins by recalling the blessings God has bestowed in the past, but from verse nine becomes a litany of complaint against God for the horrors that have befallen them. In the twentieth century the psalm became associated with the holocaust. It was chosen as the title for a short novel by the Serbian writer Danilo Kiš written in 1960 and recently translated into English.

The story focusses on Marija and her escape from a concentration camp. Like many of the psalms, the narrative moves backwards and forwards through time, initially without explanation. We learn later that these memories are surfacing as Marija is giving birth to her son, Jan, whose father Jakob is a Jewish doctor who has been made to work with Dr Nietzsche, performing horrific experiments (the character is based on the Nazi Dr Mengele)


Because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. (Ps 44.22)

The novel puts the matter-of-fact descriptions of violence and brutality in the psalms, which can often be hard to relate to, into a contemporary setting. In doing so both Marija’s story and that of the psalmist can be seen in a new light.

Marija describes, in vivid detail, a flashback in which she recalls witnessing the rape and murder of other Jews; their clothing and jewellery being removed, bodies being broken and forced through a hole in the ice covering the Danube. The detailed description informed by Kiš’s own memories of a massacre he witnessed in Novi Sad in 1942 when aged seven.


All day long my disgrace is before me, and shame has covered my face (Ps 44.15)

The vivid descriptions also focus on Marija’s present condition and her struggle to survive in the concentration camp. Early in the story we learn of the value attached to rags. The sheets of Polja, a woman dying in the next bed, are highly prized. We discover that the rags are needed to make sanitary pads. With their heads shaved and bodies emaciated and mutilated by medical experiments, this struggle to find, keep, wash and dry and rags in order to try to stay clean becomes associated with a struggle to retain their femininity - the one piece of their identity that their captors cannot erase.


You have made us the taunt of our neighbours, the derision and scorn of those around us. (Ps 44.13)

In one of Marija’s flashbacks she recalls an uncharacteristically lucid outburst by her father, when he explains why she (then aged fourteen) and her mother were forbidden from riding in a tram home, as anti-semitism becomes the norm. This is the last time she hears her father speak - he is taken (and presumed killed, like Kiš’s own father) shortly after. His words, like those of the psalmist, seem, sadly, timeless;

“It is not the hatred of Negroes of Irish or of Jews that is at issue here…. it is simply human intolerance that is searching for a pretext in skin colour or in customs or in anything else that is different from what is generally found in a given setting….

“..nothing is easier than inventing a reason for hatred and thus also a justification for a crime: one needs merely to ascribe to a .. weaker ethnic or religious or national group one of the common human vices..such as greed, stinginess, stupidity or proclivity to drink.”


For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. (Psalm 44.25)

Making her escape in the dead of night with the help of fellow inmate Zana, Marija describes jumping in to the pit at the entrance to the escape tunnel and tasting the flavour of the earth. She experiences survivor guilt and describes the pit as a “crossroads of time” where past present and future collide; an idea and a setting we find in many of the psalms.

The nature of Marija’s fear changes now - to what she describes as “active fear” as for a short time she has one hand on the lever controlling the events of her life, as she tries to escape, without Jan crying out, through the tunnel to the camp fence


If we had forgotten the name of our God, or spread out our hands to a strange god, would not God discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart. (Psalm 44.20-21)

On the night of their planned escape from the camp, Marija’s thoughts turn to her faith. In a flashback she recalls her father explaining that there is no difference between the God that different people pray to; “my God is simply the incarnation of justice and philanthropy and kindness and of hope” he explains.

Conscious that she cannot describe “her” God, Marija uses her fathers description and asks Zana if she also believes in a God who is “equal parts hope kindness mercy love.”

“And hate” Zana adds; pointing out that we cannot make God in our own image without God also being in the image of Dr Nietzsche and those who are complicit in the genocide. The two women agree that if God is in the image of Marija’s newborn Jan, then they will both pray to him.

Like Marija, Zana and like all of us, the psalmist is also limited in the way they can conceptualise and talk about God. Psalm 44 suggests that the reason for the difficulties the people are experiencing is because God is asleep or hiding his face. As Simon Stocks reminds us in ‘Songs for Suffering’, the psalmists are not offering a true picture of who God is, but an expression of their truth, based on their understanding at a particular point in time; just as Marija, her father and Zana put forward different expressions of the same truth.


This was the first novel I have read that is set in a concentration camp. Whilst, apart from its title, the book has no direct references to Psalm 44, reading the story helped to bring the words of the psalmist closer to home.

At the end of the novel, Marija takes her son (now aged six) and her husband on a tour of the camp on the anniversary of its liberation. She explains that whilst she doesn’t want Jan to be disturbed or upset by their visit, she wants the suffering of those who lived and died in the camp to be “in him” - like a living memorial.

Perhaps, if we fully inhabit the text of the psalms, these “Songs for Suffering” can have the same effect on us?


Links

Songs for Suffering - Psalm 26
Songs for Suffering – Psalm 6
Songs for Suffering – Praying the Psalms in Times of Trouble by Simon Stocks
Psalm 44 (novel) by Danilo Kiš