Two Roads to Remembrance

There are (at least) two ways to enter peronally into a community’s corporate memory, sot hat it can renew itself in you:

• Contemplative remembrance is clean and simple, driven by the mind, when the eyes focus on something in an unhurried way, in isolation from the ordinary business of life. Icons are windows into heaven, to be gazed through as well as on. To switch on to the icon, you switch out of the distractions.
  
  
• Resonant remembrance is messy. You put yourself through a routine with your wits around you, but floating on the surface, so that a stray thought or impression can resonate against something in you, and bring you up against something you thought you had forgotten all about, but can now be understood in a new light.

So, today, I visited an extraordinary place of Contemplative remembrance, Yad Vashem’s extraordinary museum — a place to spend weeks, not days. It stores in the most moving ways the remembrance of the Holocaust and its victims, giving names to the nameless, and guiding you through the story with a small number of token objects, which you have to focus on in an unhurried way to get the best out of the experience.

Compare and contrast the discipline of doing the Via Dolorosa. There is no reflective space, but only the bustling life of a middle eastern street, distracyions all round, tourists snapping away, horns blaring, people selling their wares. It could not be less conducive to contemplation. Yet if you throw yourself into the flow with your wits around you, what connects you to Jesus’ sufferings is not the place (wehich has largely changed), but the whole ambience. Do we suppose, for one moment, that the first Good Friday was different from any other business day in Jerusalem? The bustling crowds, the children running, the animals, the smell, the noise. Nobody cleared those out the way, then or now.

Here’s a process of Messy resonance, told me by a good and much respected friend yesterday. She found herself at a small on-street station on the Via, hemmed in on every side, with blaring commerce and life going by, noise, smell and bustle. And she thought of Jesus falling for the second time. And what floated to the surface was a memory of the pain of childbirth and hearing a dustcart in the street outside, and wondering how they could carry on regardless, as though nothing significant was happening. And perhaps such a thought entered Jesus’ mind — Is it nothing to you who pass by?

Actually no — and that unwitting rejection in itself becaomes an emotional footprint connecting us to Jesus even more surely than if the street looked the same. Indeed if it did look the same that could make this kind of remembrance harder, because it would be too easy to rubberneck it, or sentimntalise it, or turn it into a movie in the mind. The shaft of pure recognition is too piercing and poingnant for any of those things. And that, roughly is how this kind of pilgrimge works — not high class rubbernecking, but allowing oneself to be carried along in a stream of experience that allows for sympathetic resonance. You come back with a new view, not of the buildings, but yourself.

That’s the difference between being a Pilgrim and a Tourist. And it’s been a true privilege to travel for ten days with such an engaging, open, thoughtful company of fellow pilgrims.

Holocaust Memorial Day in MK

A great honour to say a few words with others at this year’s MK City Holocaust Memorial Day celebration at Christ the Cornerstone. We were opening an exhibition of art principally by two artists, Edna Eguchi Read and Alicia Melamed Adams.

Edna’s work explored the legacy of war, including Afghanistan, as someone of partly Japanese ancestry. She encodes the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not as anger, but an errily ash-covered general and domestic world of stuff. Ordinary things are reduced to a kind of useless sterility, where all that is left is form, bereft of function. She does something similar in this exhibition with passport-sized images of troops killed in Afghanistan, flattened as a collage onto a wall. Drat! I didn’t take a picture... you’ll just have to go and catch the exhibition if you can. I had seen the same thing on Sunday at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre — a collage of ordinary people’s photographs greets you as you enter the historical displays area.

During the evening Arran Hartley and Georgia Bateman, presented a moving a/v collage reflecting on their school visit to Auschwitz. It took a fresh, powerful view. They had been especially shocked and moved by the piles of stuff, shoes, hair, artifical limbs. Alicia’s work as an artist who survived the holocaust puts faces to the story. This is very important because we are about the last generation to have the privilege of talking with and learning from holocaust survivors. All our grandhildren will have are the faces in art, or the Holocaust may be reduced to a mere topic in history, not an exposure of our own tragic capacity for evil.

Alicia’s work is fundamentally a statement of hope in the face of the unspeakable. She pulls no punches. Consider this picture, The Parting, and commentary:

My parents and I and a few relatives who had survived worked for a German, Victor Kremin, who set us up in a small camp where we collected iron and rags. On 24th July 1943 we were surrounded by Gestapo and taken to the local prison. It was their custom to keep people for three days without food until they were weak and then to load them onto lorries and shoot them outside Drohobycz in Bronica Woods. When we were brought into the prison I saw Poldek Weiss who was 17. We had met twice before in a friend’s house. His father was a tailor for the Gestapo. His father made a suit for the head of the Gestapo and the son was released from prison. He begged his father to intervene on my behalf. I was 14 at the time. His father made another suit and I was let out on the third day as Poldek’s wife. My whole family were shot the next day. This picture is called The Parting. It shows me parting from my family in prison.

Ultimately, though, what makes Alicia’s work so extraordinary is her capacity for hope and joy that was not entirely rubbed out. Her final painting was entitled Going up soon, but where? in which, Julia Weiner says:

the artist thinks about her own death. After the horrors of her childhood, death appears to offer little horror to Alicia, and this light-filled work with its radiant pink backround contrasts to the earlier works about death. There, she used dark colours and menacing shapes to evoke death by violence and at the hands of others. When death comes naturally it’s not to be feared.

If you could see him with my eyes...

Many of us were disturbed by the bizarre way the BNP tried to twist Christian imagery in their recent election campaign to leverage decent people into Fascist ideology. It comes as no surprise that exactly the same thing was done in Germany in the 1930’s. Susannah Heschel logs the process at the highest levels in her study The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Jesus the Jew was rebranded by Eisenach Institute theologians, bizarrely, as an icon of Aryan racial “purity,” reflecting the Nationalist, Racist fantasies of the age.

But what knocked me off my seat was a Christian Century review of the book by Holocaust Studies Centre director Henry Knight, contending that we still have unfinished business with the Holocaust, and giving profound food for thought in these memorable words:

Jesus is Christianity's burning bush. His presence beckons to his followers in each generation, calling them to stand before him fully present and attentive to the rule and realm of God brought near in each encounter with the neighbor.

Like the summoning bush of Moses, Jesus' searing presence calls forth without being consumed by the transcending nature of the call. He declares with that presence, "Here I am. Where are you?" He remains who he is, Jesus of Nazareth, even as he manifests to subsequent generations the fullness of the One who calls us out of ourselves into full and responsible engagement with every other...

The confessional task of letting Jesus be who and what he is remains a critical and a persisting concern. Jesus can never not be a Galilean Jew. But the temptation to leave him behind in pursuit of an ideologically configured Christ beckons to each generation that sets out to find him. The Aryan Jesus reminds us of what is at stake.

(h/t Paul Walton)

Yom haShoah: Living Memory

International Holocaust Memorial Day has in recent years been observed on January 27, the date troops entered the camps. In Israel, Yom haShoah is timed around the anniversary of the rising in the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943, but its closeness to Pesach can lead to some variation. I was immensely honoured and moved to be a guest at the Council of Christians and Jews celebration of Yom haShoah yesterday in Oxford. The Oxford Jewish Congregation is a vibrant and extrordinary outfit which encompasses a wide range of expressions of Jewish practice under one roof.

Proceedings began with the simple but compelling voice of Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, played on the cello by Lynton Appel — music reflecting traditional chant from the eve of the Day of Atonement. Another unforgettable part of the evening was an address by Ruth Shire, a refugee from Nazi Germany, evacuated with other children in 1937. Ruth put everything in historical perspective, briefly, then told her story — of living with a family near Oxford, of the internment of her father during the war, and of the life she had built in this country.

Ruth’s story reminded us that amidst evil, the kindness of strangers and the resilience of the human spirit make for an everlasting remembrance. Her simple words reminded us that we all have stories that can bless us or curse us, by informing the decisions we make and the attitudes we take. Worst of all is to travel in ignorance of one’s own story. This being a Jewish community, there was, of course, a prodigious family party afterwards.

The memorial included the recitation together of the Kaddish, two minutes silence and the lighting of candles around which we placed stones. In Bible times graves were marked by cairns. Placing stones on them was a way of making them more permanent. Stones do not fade like flowers, and bear witness that others have visited and not forgotten. It was immensely significant to leave stones for those millions who were denied the basic dignity of a grave — an expression of the respect they were denied by their persecutors.

It is important to focus on the historical aspect of this, all the more as time passes. However it added a very special additional dimension to be a guest within a resonant community, in which memory is not a museum piece, but living consciousness. The evening was not simply about feeling sad, but also about identifying with those who died and those who suffer injustice and genocide in the world today:

We remember those who died in the Holocaust,
when madness ruled and evil dwelt on earth. We remember those of whom we know, and those whose very names are lost.

We cherish the memory of those who died as martyrs, those who died resisting, and those who died in terror.

We mourn for all that died with them; their goodness and their wisdom, which could have done so much to enoble and enrich humanity. We mourn for the genius and the wit that died, the learning and the laughter that were lost.

We stand in gratitude for their simple, decent lives. Their spiritual resistance remains an enduring testimony to a community where light persisted in darkness. Each person was unique, and we remember them all in love and compassion.

We salute those who had the courage to stand outside the mob, to save us, and to suffer with us. They too are God’s witnesses, and a source of hope when we are tempted to despair.

Because of the suffering, may such times never come again, and may their sacrifice not be in vain. In our daily fight against cruelty and prejudice, tyranny and persecution, their memory gives us strength.

In silence we remember those who sanctified God’s name.

Many thanks to Alison Ryde for the picture of candles and stones afterwards, and to the community of the Oxford Jewish Centre for their generosity and hard work.

Speak up, speak clear, say it now!

Bishop Nick Baines reminds me it’s the 25th anniversary of Pastor Martin Neimoller’s death — “they came for the communists, I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist...” It’s a chilling reminder that, given the choice, we speak up against racism and anti-Semitism too early, not too late.

On the subject of noticing, not being deceived by the veneer, and speaking up, I admire the poet and commentator Vanessa Hidary:

h/t John Hobbins: Text of monologue/poem here.

Fallen, frail: Holocaust Memorial Day

I was going to put up fascinating colour footage of Dachau shot by George Stevens in 1945, but could not bear to do it. This material is just too indecent to show, too painful to watch. “How can one human being do this to another human being?” was his question. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is one helpful contemporary take, in a year the focus is on children.

It matters that we remember, because the awful truth is that evil can take root anywhere, any time, given the facts Christians call Fall & Freewill. Political convictions, good intentions, progress, even religion or lack of it, all existed in Central Europe in 1941. They cannot innoculate against evil. Only truthful memory enables us to understand our own moral frailty and, perhaps, make better choices in future.

I can understand lack of belief in God. God does not compel faith, and honest doubt is worth more than feigned belief. I object, however, to lack of belief in evil, including the possibility of anyone being entangled by it, for that really is a pernicious, blinding thing.

Evil through the eyes of a child

Way back, the Go Between explored how adult games look through the eyes of a child, vivid, simple, utterly pragmatic. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is Auschwitz through innocent eyes — good script, brilliantly cast, beautfully made, well acted, almost impossible to watch.

This film does not ham things up, preach, sentimentalise, or demonise. The unvarnished tale is more disturbing. The horror is in the substance not the way it’s served up. Conventional war movies, even compassionate ones like Sergeant Ryan, are all well and good, but all the wrong things steal the show. They’re like sermons where the circumstantial illustration smothers the point. This one is painfully right on the button.


The “Bloody Fool” school of history has answers to everything, but understands nothing. It’s too ready to believe that people in the past were just utterly different, that‘s all. Big labels like “Evil” do not answer the basic question that matters — “how do people do such things?”

Filling in faces of the holocaust is a painful necessity, or it simply becomes incomprehensible or, worse still, the stuff of prurient curiosity or myth. We have to try to understand what there is in us what blinds us to what we don’t want to know, our own capacity for “Don’t ask, don’t tell”.

The audience we were part of in Wycombe was slightly stunned. So we bloody well should be. I suspect this film will not pack the cinemas this autumn, but people who can bear to watch it, may understand a little bit more, and, in the end, be glad they did.

Why? Wherefore?

There is something in us all that isn’t quite civilised — a gap between what we are and the basic requirements of humanity. Before 1945 it was possible, convenient even, to pretend that it didn’t matter, or that progress and education and secular wisdom would render this gap obsolete. In 1945 there were many who thought nothing so bad could ever happen again, as long as the memory was kept alive. Since 1945 the gap, a radical expression of what theologians call the Fall, has opened wide again, all over the world. Where does this leave us? How aware of the roots of it within ourselves?

Shoah is the first of a sequence of seven memorial poems called Menorah by Don Barnard written in 2005.

Shoah

In the beginning was the Word and the word was Jew.
And the word said Other, the word said Them. Not Me, not You.

Then the ploughing of the minds and the sowing of the lies
and the lies said Rapists and the lies said Thieves
and the lies said Evil in disguise.
And the Word was Demonise.

Then the growing of the Weeds. And the Weeds were Greed.
And the Weeds were Spite and the Weeds were Schadenfreude
and folk passed by on the other side.
And the Word was Bleed.

Then the writing of the Laws.
And the Laws said Jews
are not as other men.
No loving of your neighbour.
No Jews as citizens.
And the Word was Cleanse.

Then the packing into trucks and the tracks led east.
People carried like beasts and harried like beasts
and herded like beasts into pens.
And the Word was Untermensch.

Then the Words became a sentence and it sent them to their death
by burdening the strong, who earned another breath
before they died,
and murdering the rest, who simply died.
And the Word was Genocide.