Pew Sheet – 23rd January 2022

The Rector writes ‘Next Thursday 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day.

Every year I try to bring to mind all those who have died because of Genocide. We have to make sure not to forget in order to make sure it can never happen again.

In a book I am reading, I came across a lovely positive sentence ‘Look at the Sun, then your shadow will fall behind you’. What surprised me was that the girl who recorded this proverb in her 1941 diary was Edith Velmans, a young Jewish girl in hiding in Holland. She did survive the war, but only because she had been taken in and hidden by a courageous Christian family. Her father, mother, brother & grandmother all died. We can never allow ourselves to forget what happened to six million Jewish people along with unnumbered Gypsies, Gay people and Political opponents, in those Nazi Death Camps. We also need to keep in mind the Cambodian, Rwandan and Darfur Genocides and indeed what happened to the Armenian people back in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire, although not officially classified as a genocide (for various political reasons) it seemed to give the young German officers observing new ideas which they would put into such devastating effect in the 1940s. Holocaust Memorial Day 2022 will be commemorated on Sunday 30th January at the Mansion House in Dublin. Go to the website https://hetireland.org if you’d like to take part remotely.’