Shoah

You may remember that I visited Jerusalem about 16 months ago and spent two weeks studying at Yad Vashem, the World Centre for Holocaust Research. It is a place that serves two primary purposes - the first to give the 'memory and a name [yad vashem | ד ושם‎‎י ]' to the many millions of now nameless Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, the second to educate the world about the causes. 

If you want to read a few of my thoughts from that visit, please visit an old blog of mine here. 

I read, watched and listened to many hours of testimony, primary source evidence and the scars left by that tragedy. A few things stuck:

1. The Holocaust ['Shoah' (Ha Shoah, catastrophe |  השואה) in Jewish circles] was unique among genocides because it was a whole-race destruction based on idealism and not on aggrandizement of land or property. Jews dies simply because they were Jews, not because the Nazis coveted the land or wealth of that population.

2. The ideology behind the Shoah has its roots in (among other places) Christianity and the first Christian tragedy of the death of Christ. Martin Luther joined many of the Early Fathers in an anti-semitism that was later nurtured in the heart of an Austrian artist and eventual Chancellor of Germany. Indeed, his book Mein Kampf cites Luther a number of times, regarding him in the light of a national hero. (I ought to note here and now, that the Jehovah Witnesses died in their thousands because they wouldn't support the Nazi ideology)

3. Three groups of people played their part - the victim, the perpetrator and the by-stander. The first two are perhaps obvious, with the third including you and me in this day when people still die in genocides. 

Of the accounts that I heard all those months ago, of all the faces of children I looked at as they played mere days before their screaming agonising frightening execution in the dark, of all the piles of personal paraphernalia that now characterises that event, of all the hours of evidence given by relatively banal civil servants defending their acts of genocide as 'orders', one encounter stuck. That was of a women who sat before us in the room where we were gathered.

She was a women in her seventies, a retired nurse. She was well dressed, well presented, the happy mother of children (one of her sons was our tutor). She had lived a broadly good life, except for one thing: she didn't know her name. She knew the name that her adoptive parents gave her, a women into whose arms she was thrown (yes, thrown) while her birth-mother queued for her death. She landed in the arms of a stranger who took her in (to their own mortal risk and against vast odds of landing in supportive arms) and raised her as their own. The lady didn't know who her real family were, who she really was. In many ways she still felt anonymous, rootless, the un-murdered victim.

Rarely do we see these people with our own eyes. We read of them in our history lessons or in books that we dare to glance through. This Shoah was real and the victims real. They are still among us today as we carry on with our business. Though they are the 'lucky' ones. They didn't have to dig their own grave before being shot into it. They didn't have to experience that moment when lights dimmed and poison filled the air. They didn't have to regard the taunting eye of a gun chamber or a line of uniformed boys pointing rifles.

This happened in our lifetime. This happened in the age of television and telephone. This happened because bystanders (on all sides) stood by and watched madmen construct vile ideologies.

Which means that it could, just could, happen again (if we let it). 

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, may Yahweh bless, preserve and watch over all those who died because of their heritage, and over us who can never fully comprehend their Passion.

The Judgement of Genocides

It is only a few months ago when I sat in a room with Professor Yehuda Bauer and twenty other British clergy as he addressed European scholars by weblink. The topic of his talk was genocide, a subject he is well qualified to discuss. He is the Director of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and probably the single most significant authority on the subject of the Shoah (Holocaust / Heb: 'calamity' ). A tiny frail old man was helped into the tiny room where we were all crammed, but a man far younger than his considerable years emerged as he talked on the subject of genocide. 

He talked of the distinctiveness of the Shoah compared with, as it were, generic genocide, though this is not a matter for this post. What is a matter for this post is that he was quite clear how genocide-immune we seem to have become in Western civilization. Instinct would surely cause any right minded soul to react abruptly and angrily to such a damning claim, but we must not forget that even in my 38 years on this planet we call home Pol Pot ordered the murder of 1.7 million souls in Cambodia, Menghistu his 1.6 million in Ethiopia, Kambanda's near million in Rwanda, Saddam's count in Kurdistan and Iraq, Mullah Omar's in Afghanistan, the million murders orchestrated by Gowon in Biafra, Brezhnev's efforts also in Afghanistan - and those at the hands of the man featured here, Ratko Mladic. I sit here as a man of, hopefully, compassion and love, a crusader against injustice and inhuman crimes - yet I had to look all these genocides up to be able to write them here. Yes, I am only too aware of the Shoah, but that is more to do with it being a topic in my former history classes.

The very knowledge of these calamities, these grotesque mass-murders, is crushing. That they happen unchecked (or so it seems at times) in apparently enlightened, 'information overload' times adds to a growing sense of despondency that I could very quickly acquire at this realisation. Yet today's news gives me a little hope in global justice. It comes hot on the heels of a similar event fairly recently when 'the littlest of the little fishes', John Demjanjuk, was finally reeled in for his part in the  murder of 28,060 Jews in Sobibór during the Shoah. A frail old man, maybe, but a murderer who faced justice. And so we hear about the arrest of Ratko Mladic a 'mere' fifteen years after the Srebrenica massacre of Muslim men and boys in the former Yugoslavia. Another frail old man of failing health has finally been dragged in. In and of itself, this is good, but it is altogether more important for another reason. It is a sure sign that genocide always faces justice in the end. Often it takes many decades, and often its perpetrators have died gentle and private deaths in comfy homes surrounded by loved ones. But judgement always seems to come. 

I am left to ponder why events that, to me, represent the worst of humanity's criminal capability, only become clearly visible in considerable retrospect. Why does it appear to take decades for civilised compassionate and educated societies to find the ability to formally judge these catastrophes. Perhaps the murder of millions of people we do not know is too big or distant to fully comprehend - unlike the murder of individuals in our own country where we can sense national outrage. There is a clear difference between how we react and yet that seems quite wrong. Perhaps such behaviour mitigates (though never full excuses) the apparent blindness so many of the 'bystanders' during the genocides that were unfolding in their midsts over ages.  

Holocaust Memorial Day 2011

Do not look away, they couldn't. 

It was my honour to visit the Yad Vashem Memorial only weeks ago, and the material in this film is present there and ten fold. 

If you are interested to look, I composed a separate little Blog when I was there - not many posts, and perhaps wildly incomplete. If you are interested to look, follow this link.

Please pray for the living and departed who knew these dark days. Please pray that our children will never see their like. 

I have looked at a lot of films prepared for this day, and this was, in my own opinion, the most evocative. I thank its creator, alaine4488

Mojo

I have good news and I have bad news - or bad news and bad news depending on your point of view:

The Curate is back, but I can't find my Mojo!

I have just returned from a fortnight in Jerusalem studying at the International School for Holocaust Studies, and since my return have shivered and frankly, lied a lot. I left Tel Aviv on a day when its temperature peaked at 41 degrees, and now languish in my corner of middle-England that is petrified under the oppressive temperatures scaling the dizzy heights of -1! 

Yeah, baby, yeah! I said I had lied a lot and I know you have scanned down to this point to find out how. Well, my lovely friends and family, upon my return, have asked: 'Did you have a good time?'. I say 'yes, thanks, it was a wonderful experience - a real opportunity'. I lied. The real answer is 'the experience was life-changing and valuable, but my heart was ripped out and sacrificed on the altar of ideological genocides; I have seen things that will give me nightmares for the years (and already have); but otherwise great, thanks'!

I am not complaining, for as a man I am unaccustomed to such a thing as that - but I returned to this blog from the other one I have been doing wondering how on earth I could be The Vernacular Curate again. Suddenly [for me, even if not for you] this stuff seems grotesquely trite and facile (and quite unlike the levitous Lesley's Journo-Blog) - hey ho!

With all this in mind, a dear friend (a reader - and good morning to you, for you will know who you are, Brother) stopped me yesterday and thanked me for this eyewash - a kindness for which I am deeply grateful. 

So, kids - I am back, but I seem to be devoid of me Mojo, Man. I deign to write this in the shadow of so much death and evil as this for me is living, and living is what I have to do. Life is the gift I am granted and if someone somewhere smiles or is glad to have visited this site, I have done some good in a world where we need every little bit of it we can.