Auschwitz… Four Thoughts and a Response

Yesterday was the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We reflected on four repeated themes

Remember: The story… elderly survivors reminded us of the horror, the suffering, the gas chambers, the systematic murder of six million Jews, together with disabled people, L.G.B.T. folks, political prisoners, Roma…

Re-member – again-memory… It’s not a single commemoration service; it’s deliberate, repeated, again-memory.

The Prime Minister talked about making, ‘Holocaust education a truly national endeavour.’ Soon there will be no more survivors; we must still remember, regularly, systematically…

Compassion: How we remember… When we hear the stories of loss, suffering or courage we feel them. Yesterday we saw King Charles’ emotional response as he laid a wreath…     

Com-passion – with suffering. I put myself in Auschwitz. It’s me enduring physical suffering, the mental despair, feeling injustice, everything taken out of my control.

And in a small way we develop empathy, we appreciate our common humanity, we cannot remain indifferent.

Atonement: Remembering, feeling compassion, leads to healing, restorative action.

At-one-ment – at one creation. It’s about reconciliation, bringing people, divided by differences, together – making them ‘at one’.

Eighty years later there is still prejudice and division… through religion, disability, sexuality, ethnicity and politics… King Charles encouraged us ‘…to cherish our freedom, to challenge prejudice and never to be a bystander in the face of violence and hate.’ He advocated atonement and reconciliation.

Resolve: When faced with human tragedy we often hear, ‘This must never happen again.’ It’s said by the great and the good; it’s said by suffering ordinary folk.

Re-solve – solve again. We’ve tried before to find a solution; we must try again. We cannot accept that atrocities are inevitable, that differences are unreconcilable, that human wickedness will always triumph. Resolve speaks of determination, of not giving up.

My response… ‘Lord make me an instrument of your peace’ is a prayer of personal resolve. I cannot leave it to others… personal remembering, personal compassion, personal atonement with ‘the other’, must lead to my personal resolve, with God’s help, to change myself and my world…