remembrance

This week marked United Nations Holocaust Memorial Day.  In the university chapel, we held an act of remembrance.  This is my reflection.

Sixty-six years ago this week, Soviet troops advancing westwards in their rout of the Nazi army came upon a camp in occupied Poland.  Or rather, a connected series of camps.  As they entered, they found scenes of unimaginable horror and evidence of untold brutality and unprecedented mass murder.  This was Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place in which well over a million people met their deaths. 

Allied troops advancing east from the successes of the Normandy landings found similar atrocities in camps in Western Germany, atrocities so severe that General Dwight Eisenhower forced all his senior commanders to witness at first hand what had happened there, and what Americans had played their part in bringing to an end.

The Holocaust, almost seventy years on, still poses unanswerable questions and confronts us with indescribable suffering and despair.  No-one has ever expressed it better than Elie Wiesel: “it turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed”.  The Nazis sought to eradicate from the face of Europe those whose mere presence, whose very existence represented to them a diabolical act of resistance to their vile intentions and hateful, ill-conceived, racial ideologies.  The majority of those who died, resisting them actively or simply by being alive, were Jews, of whom around six million perished.  We shall never know for sure the exact numbers.  Others were persecuted and sytematically murdered too: the Roma, Sinti and Lalleri peoples, political enemies, the physically disabled and those with mental illnesses, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, the Slavic nations to the East and others.  We seek to remember them all today, perhaps as many as seventeen million in total. 

We come here today simply to remember, to honor, to refuse Hitler the posthumous victory of allowing his evil to go uncondemned and his victims unmourned.  We do not come to seek to impose upon these terrible events any glib platitudes, any false theological veneer, nor any empty sentimental excess.  We come, just for a moment to try and comprehend the scale of what happened, the lives it claimed, the the scar it leaves on the face of human existence and the awful questions left for all of us, religious or not.

In the darkness, though, we light a candle, as an almost futile gesture.  Because, somehow, we do yet have some vestige of hope.  That, in itself, is a miracle.  We pledge ourselves to remember the dead, honor the living and work for a world in which such a thing can never, ever happen again.

Just before Christmas, I went to have lunch with my friend Magda, a survivor of these events, whom many of you were able to meet last year.  In the morning, we visited the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, to where with Student Activities we’re organizing a visit this semester.  She took me into a cattle car in the museum, one of the very cattle cars in which Jews were transported to their deaths, exactly like the one which took Magda and her family from northern Hungary to Auschwitz.  Standing the darkness, neither of us had any words to say.  I couldn’t even imagine what it brought to mind for her. 

Back home, sat round her kitchen table for lunch, she told me stories of her family, her most recent trip to Hungary, her plans for the holiday and her busy schedule for 2011, over goulash, dumplings and noodle pudding.  And it struck me that her very life was the only answer to all this evil, a life that Hitler wanted to deny her, and a life which resolutely refused to submit or capitulate.  If I find hope anywhere today, it is there.  The light in our world can seem very frail indeed at times, amid so much darkness, but it stubbornly refuses to go out.  May our lives, and the life of this university, be seedbeds for such hope, and places where the world may be mended through compassion, humility and courage. 

So long as we live, they too shall live,

                for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.

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