THE DEAN WRITES …..MARCH 2008
The Dean gave the address at the 2008 Northern Ireland Regional Holocaust Commemoration in the Great Hall of Parliament Buildings, Stormont.
One of the major challenges of the honour of being invited to speak this evening is to condense and comment on the constructive remembrance of the greatest crime in the history of humanity against the people of a particular faith.
The passage of time does not diminish the enormity and the barbarity of the Holocaust. And I contend that any individual attempting to fully appreciate this almost unbelievable period of immense suffering and death – must be prepared to recognise that it will be a life time pilgrimage.
I fully realise that there were several groups of people affected by the Holocaust but this evening my comments are based on my personal pilgrimage with this assault in particular on the Jewish faith and people.
At my grandmothers’ knees – and she died when I was only seven years of age - I learned of the faith heroes of the Jewish scriptures – those God inspired writings we Christians refer to as the Old Testament.
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David and Gideon were nurtured in my imagination and they to me, were much more believable than the fiction of Dan Dare. They were people of quality.
Despite living near Antrim, from childhood I was in Belfast every Saturday, and almost weekly walked past the Synagogue at Fleetwood Street.
THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY
But it was a couple of history tutors – at Inst and Queen’s - who really enabled me to appreciate the causes of the Second World War. They forced me to confront the raison d’etre of Nazism, its evil impact on the German people and its unquantifiable impact upon the Jewish people. The telling account published in 1954 in “The Scourge of the Swastika” by Lord Russell of Liverpool who had been a lawyer at the Nuremberg trials left no one in any doubt about the Nazis’ endeavour to achieve the wholesale corruption of every facet of German life. One could not avoid concluding that every power in the country was involved in the Holocaust.
I speak as a friend of Germany, a country I first visited as a geography student at Queen’s in 1963. Our family has holidayed in Germany more than in any other country - from the Baltic to Bavaria. And I was there on nearly 20 occasions as a chaplain with the Army Reserve.
Like many others, I have found there a wonderful people who are culturally and academically talented to the utmost. In every profession you find people of the utmost qualities. All of which was betrayed by the allure of Nazism, its scape-goating of its Jewish minority community, its demonisation of this faith community, its false gospel of racial superiority, and its subversion of every bona fide ethical standard. Its advocacy of a utopia tomorrow based upon the extermination of your neighbour today. And not content to work him or her to death or to starve him or her to death, you abuse their bodies and their souls with the foulest of experiments in genetics and claim it is the advancement of science.
My pilgrimage continued and a significant milestone was the two occasions when I served as a relief chaplain to the community at Hohne garrison. It is on the road running north from Celle to Hamburg. It is a road which runs through typical North German plain landscape: moorland, cultivated fields and stands of pine trees. Close to the garrison’s perimeter on the west side of the road is a small interpretative centre which gives access to a massive clearing in the trees.
BERGEN - BELSEN
There you walk between areas of raised land bound by rough stone walls broken only by a larger stone on which there is an engraving which declares how many thousands people are buried in that particular area. And these walls and raised earth areas extend not far short of a mile. These people were not gassed. They were worked to death and for a great part of their final agony they were on starvation diets.
It is true that no birds sing there. The only consolation I brought from several visits to this place was from the monument in the centre marking the visit to that place of the President of Israel, Chaim Hertzog, son of a beloved and respected former rabbi in Belfast, Dublin and Chief Rabbi of Israel.
The sight of the shoes, the glasses, glass cases and other personal belongings of the victims in the large glass towers in the visitors’ centre was disturbing enough. But the experience which caused me not a few sleepless nights was reading the copy of the account kept in the officers’ mess written by the Senior British Medical Officer present at the liberation of this camp – because what today is called Hohne Garrison – was formerly the guard camp for Bergen-Belsen.
Between 1943 and 1945, an estimated 50,000 people died there, up to 35,000 of them dying of typhus in the first few months of 1945. The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British 11th Armoured Division.
THE WORST DAY OF RICHARD DIMBLEBY'S LIFE
Sixty thousand prisoners were found inside, most of them seriously ill, and another 13,000 corpses lay around the camp unburied. The scenes that greeted British troops were famously described by the BBC's war correspondent, Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them, “Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which ... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.”
Dimbleby who had accompanied the troops since the D-day landings said, “This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”
Another eyewitness, Peter Coombs, a British soldier, in a letter of May 4, 1945 to his wife after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, wrote, "The fact is that all these were once clean-living and sane and certainly not the type to do harm to the Nazis. They are Jews and are dying now at the rate of three hundred a day. They must die and nothing can save them - their end is inescapable, they are too far gone now to be brought back to life. I saw their corpses lying near their hovels, for they crawl or totter out into the sunlight to die. I watched them make their last feeble journeys, and even as I watched they died."
Across the road close to the garrison’s main gate you can still see the railway siding from which these unfortunate people were marched – many to their fateful destiny. It is almost beyond imagination to see them walking down that country road. But the ghastly evidence is they did.
I don’t think I would have the courage and capability of coping with a visit to Auchwitz.
The only consolation I can take from this period of immense suffering is that there were some quite remarkable individuals who at great risk and cost, recognised the idolatry and the false values of the Nazis and who recognised the Holocaust for what it was; genocide, mass murder, the utmost offence against God.
THE WITNESSES TO TRUTH AND THE CHALLENGE
So in our remembrance there must be acknowledgement of people like Count Claus Von Stauffenberg, the army officer who gave his life trying to defeat Hitler, Churchmen like Martin Niemoller and Karl Barth who challenged the silence of the churches, and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who returned to Germany to witness against what was happening, and who was executed on Hitler’s specific command in Flossenberg in April 1845. Men like Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat, accredited at Yad Vashem for saving 15,000 lives, but whose own life was probably taken by the Russian state. And then add to their names the name of every single allied fatality who paid the price of putting Nazism out of business at that time.
The challenge is to get parents to raise children without prejudices.
The challenge is to teach history responsibly, to tell the story accurately, and to point out the dangers in stereotyping.
The challenge is to enable young people to visit these scenes of betrayal of God and neighbour.
The challenge is to confront the sad fact that despite the cost of the Holocaust – humankind does not learn and the battle of good against evil is a challenge for every society in every time and every generation.
Since the Holocaust and the forty million lives taken in the war and the events surrounding it:
- Russia has had its gulags.
- China has had its “Great Leap Forward” costing 14 – 20 million lives and in addition tens of thousands killed during the so-called “Cultural Revolution”
- Cambodia has had its killing fields when the regime of Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979 took 1 million lives through execution, starvation and disease.
- Rwanda has had its genocides.
- Saddam Hussein has attempted to exterminate the Marsh Arabs, other Shias and the Kurds in Iraq.
- And in Darfur and the Sudan – what do you think is going on?
And don’t tell me this community here didn’t teeter at the edge of its own form of ethnic cleansing; don’t tell me that legitimate traditions were not subverted. I would certainly beg to differ.
THE ONLY ANSWER IS SPIRITUAL
The only answer is spiritual:
- Seeing the creator in the face of every other human being.
- Engaging in dialogue in which the most important element is listening not talking.
- Proclaiming and implementing the fact that justice is indivisible. It is justice for all or it is justice for none.
- Being willing to be enriched in our journey together.
- Being committed to an ongoing ethical struggle against evil.
I can bear testament to the reality that in dialogue with my Jewish friends I have gained better insights into my own faith and my own shortcomings in faith – but I also have been enabled through that dialogue to realise more fully what I share with Christians of other traditions.
All of us who accept the premise of the opening words of the Hebrew Scriptures – In the beginning God. All of us who accept that statement of faith have a challenge as the People of God. Christian and Jew alike – we need to stand for the values of the Decalogue which those words introduce in our faiths:
- Thou shalt do no murder
- Thou shalt not bear false witness
These values were the first victims of the Holocaust. We need nights like this and events like this tonight, when we stand on Common Ground and remember those whose names are recorded in the hearts and minds of their families as well as in Yad Vashem. And from that remembrance return with renewed determination that they will not be forgotten, and that we shall resist those who wish to create new sufferings. We will remember them.
