Holocaust Memorial Service

Some years ago, when I was doing something entirely different to what I do today, I went to interview a man at Rugeley.  This man worked on the coal face at Lea Hall Colliery, and as we got talking I said to him that from his accent he obviously didn’t come from Rugeley, and he began to tell me a story about his early life.

He was seven years old when the Germans came to his village in the Ukraine in 1941, and they rounded up all the villagers and marched them into the village square towards an officer who was standing there.  As the people approached the officer he signalled right or left with his hands.  Women, young children and old men went one way, young men and boys went another.

His mother, sisters and grandparents went one way he went another and never saw them again.  His father like many of the men had escaped from the village before the Germans arrived, to fight for the Russians he believed. He never saw his father again either.

This man was taken with the other boys and men to a work camp where he was used as slave labour by the Germans, and one by one the boys and the men were killed for not working hard enough.  Realising that he would probably be killed he escaped and made it to the Russian side, where he was promptly put into a work camp and used as slave labour.

In 1945 now aged eleven, he managed to escape and made his way west until he eventually got to the Americans who were moving east across Germany. The Americans took him in and looked after him and eventually he found his way to England and after school he began work in the coal fields in the North East, coming to Rugeley when they opened Lea Hall. He married a Geordie and had a family, and if he didn’t tell you about his war time experiences, and he rarely spoke about it, you would never know what had happened to him. He was like anyone else you walk past in the street. The remarkable thing for me was he told me all this in such a matter of fact way, but clearly it had scarred his life forever, how could it not have done?

When the Germans invaded the Ukraine to drive through to conquer Russia, some Ukrainians welcomed them because of the way the Russians had treated them, they thought the Germans would give them independence, and some Ukrainians agreed to collaborate with the Germans, rounding up Ukrainian Jews, and sending them off to camps.  But it quickly became clear the Germans had their own plans for the Ukraine, it was to become like other European Countries, “Lebensraum”, living space for “Aryan” colonisation, with the elimination of the local indigenous population, Slavs, and Jews.

Slavs, like the Jews were classed as “Untermenschen”, sub human, and so could be eliminated. Slavic people perished under Nazi Occupation, Czechs, Kashubs, Poles, Slovaks, Serbs, Silesians, Belarussians, Russians and Ukrainians. Ukraine lost more people than any other European Country, estimates vary but between 7.5 and 13 million were killed or sent to slave labour camps in Russia or Germany out of a pre war population of 41 million. 90% of the Ukrainian Jewish population was eliminated. Amongst the millions who died during the war, there were at least 6 million Jews, 500,000 Gypsies, 250,000 disabled adults and children, 2000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 200,000 Freemasons, millions of Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, and religious and political opponents of the Nazi’s.

It’s easy to think all these years after the war that the Nazi’s acted without the knowledge of ordinary German people, indeed it has been said many times they didn’t know what was happening, but that cannot be true. In 1935 laws were passed banning Jews marrying non-Jews, and declaring that Jews were no longer citizens. In 1938 Jews were required to have a large J imposed on their passports to identify them. In 1939 Jews were forced to wear a yellow star to identify them to everyone. Between 1933-39 360,000 people were subjected to legally enforced sterilisation. All the concentration camps required a vast support network from local towns and populations to enable them to carry out their industrial sized annihilation of people.  Ordinary German people must have seen and known what was going on, but accepted it., and in some ways that is worse.  Edmund Burke reminded us, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. Not all did of course, many Germans stood against Hitler after he came to power in 1933 and paid the price with their lives.

A good example of this resistance was the German Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had been a fierce critic of Hitler, was on a lecture tour of America when war broke out, he was begged by friends to stay in safety in America, but he knew he had to stand against Hitler and so returned. Arrested and imprisoned in 1943 for his anti-Nazi stance he was hanged on April 9^th 1945.

After the atrocities were uncovered the world was aghast with condemnation and Nazi leaders were punished, some executed for crimes against humanity.  The world believed it could never happen again. Then in 1975 the fate of Cambodia shocked the world when the Khmer Rouge seized power and began to systematically destroy the country.  “To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss” was their slogan.  Nearly 2 million men, women and children were murdered in the Cambodian genocide that lasted until 1979.

Again the world was shocked and apparently powerless to stop the killing and torture of Muslim men, women and children in Serbia between 1992 and 1995. At least 8000 were murdered. The mass graves are still being discovered.  How many perpetrators have been caught and punished?

In 100 days in 1994 nearly 1 million Tutsi and some moderate Hutus were murdered in Rwanda by machetes and clubs. Why? Because they were from different tribes and were accused of shooting down the President’s plane. The killers were all people who the victims knew.

In Darfur since 2003, the civil war has led to the deaths of between 200,000 and 400,000 civilians, at least 2.5 million have been displaced and living in makeshift refugee camps.  And the atrocities there continue unabated.

Have we learned nothing from what happened in the Second World War? Well, I suggest what we have learned is that we humans have the capacity for evil, a fact that all the great religions realise and preach against. We humans also live in fear and suspicion of people who seem different from ourselves.  Different colour, different religion, different language, different way of life, different sexual preferences.  So black people, people from other countries, gypsies, Gay and Lesbian couples become easy targets for homophobic groups, and that homophobia feeds when people are feeling the effects of recession, unemployment, reduction in social housing, cut backs in benefits.  All the things the world is struggling with following the recession.

We see this evil in the First Book of the Bible, The Book of Genesis , Cain murdered his brother Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve. And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground”.  The millions of people murdered by the Nazi’s, by the Khmer Rouge, in Serbia, Rwanda, Darfur are crying out to us from the ground. And yet last year France and Italy began to deport the Roma Gypsies from their country amid horrific scenes which should have shamed any civilised person and the world stood by and did nothing.  “These are dark-skinned people not Europeans like you and me”, not a message from the Third Reich, but from the Vice Mayor of Milan, Riccardo De Corato.  There was even a call from a Hungarian MEP to set up “public protection camps” to put all the Roma in. Hitler did that and killed half a million of them.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.

We have seen in recent years the growth of right wing white supremacy groups and the BNP, to the extent that these organisations that incite violence against people who are different, have gained Local Authority Council seats, and Nick Griffin was elected an MEP. Who votes these people in, not a small group of extremists but ordinary men and women.  We should hang our heads in shame.

All the great religions tell us we are all God’s children, and we must love our neighbours as ourselves.  History tells us we must stand with our neighbours against the evil that humans inflict on others, otherwise there is no future for humanity and we will descend into a new dark age.

Holocaust Memorial Day is not just about remembering the horrors of the Holocaust and the genocides since, it is a wake up call to every sensible person to stand against oppression, for people of every religion, colour, creed, political view and orientation to stand shoulder to shoulder to ensure that genocide can never happen again:

And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brothers blood is crying out to me from the ground”.

A reading from the Quran: “We believe in God and that which is revealed unto us and that which was revealed unto Abraham and Ishmael, and Isaac and Jacob and his sons, and that which was given to Moses, and Jesus and the Prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between them, and unto Him we have surrendered”.

Let us remember we are all children of Abraham.  Amen.