The embedding within
my heart and memory of the SHOAH, the holocaust, was as a small child when
newspapers and magazines produced photographs of the starved, wide eyed with terror
survivors and of the ovens, the piles of bodies and newsreels when I was
somewhat older, my heart pierced by the images of children rolling up their
sleeves to show the tattooed numbers, which, bluntly ‘thinged’ them, reduced
them and their elders from human persons to disposal units of slave labour and
worse: disposal sub-humans.
The arrival in the
city, sometimes on what in those days were called ‘tramp steamers’, meaning
they were at the bottom of the shipping pile, sometimes in Third Class on less
than luxurious liners, between the end of the war and as late as 1951, of so
called ‘displaced persons’ from Europe was a steady flow of the traumatized,
the survivors, the widowed, the orphaned, the frightened.
There being virtually
no impediments for even young boys to wander around the docks we would, if one
of those vessels of human sorrow was unloading the broken seeking hope, seeking
life without terror, go and watch and be overwhelmed because both the reality
of what caused these men, women, children to be arriving and the obvious hatred
which was the core cause, our little brains could not fully comprehend.
Later in life, before
becoming a priest and after, I was humbled to learn in conversation with
survivors, not just Jewish Brothers and Sisters but a priest from Poland who
had himself been stenciled and put in a camp, what evil truly is, what evil
does and how otherwise apparently sane human beings, with power, factually
ersatz power but bloody destructive nonetheless, can do to their brothers and
sisters.
Elie Wiesel [tattooed
as A-7713] who survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald writes: “Never shall I
forget that night, that first night in camp, which has turned my life into one
long night….Never shall I forget that smoke…..{from his book NIGHT}
St. Maxmillian Kolbe
did not survive, offering his own life in exchange for that of a young husband
and father, who did survive.
Love is stronger than
hate and is the victory, rooted for believers in God who is Love, for those who
do not know Him rooted in simple faith in the foundational reality we are all
human beings, each a person.
But, but, have we
learned anything since the SHOAH and its six million slaughtered, since the
horrors of WWII with its fifty million dead and additional tens of millions wounded,
widowed, orphaned, displaced?
We live when the new
normal is the violent hatred of Islamists spreading terror and death among
fellow Muslims and throughout the world, when a nation ostensibly faithful to
its Buddhist tradition, a religion which like Islam claims to be a religion of
peace, slaughters the Rohingya and casts them out of their homeland; the new
normal of not knowing when some hateful nut will plunge the world into nuclear
war; the new normal when otherwise normal people elect governments which
slaughter the unborn, allow the sick and elderly to be euthanized.
Today, with solemn
ceremonies we make a show of remembering and honouring the victims of the
SHOAH.
Yet our memory is
selectively simplistic.
To remember means to
learn from the remembering.
To honour the victims
means never to ourselves be victimizers.
Each needs to look
deep into our heart, especially those corners in shadow where lurks evil
spirits of harsh judgement, rejection, hatred, a hunger for vengeance.
We need to ask Christ to
purify our hearts that we exercise only the power of love, that we stop
electing politicians who are anti-life, for their hands are overflowing with
the blood of our brothers and sisters, blood which splashes on us each time we
cast a ballot unless we choose life and vote accordingly.
73 years since.
Are we finally willing
to learn?
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