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Good morning. 71 years ago today, the concentration camp of Auschwitz was liberated by a Soviet Red Army battalion led by Major Anatoly Shapiro, a Ukrainian Jew.  By that time, some 1.1 million people had been murdered there, at least a million of them Jews, but also Poles, Communists, gays, Roma, Sinti and others. I want to remember one small group today, the British POWs held captive in Auschwitz III, Monowitz, a sub-camp, where they suffered themselves, but saw far worse.

Arthur Dodd was one of them from 1943, along with forced labourers from around Europe and some Jews. For the next fourteen months, he smelled burning flesh from the crematoria at Auschwitz II. He witnessed the killing of Jewish inmates by SS guards. And he, and other British POWs, endangered themselves greatly by passing any scraps of food they could to Jewish prisoners. Meanwhile, the POWs were sabotaging the construction pipes they were forced to work on by placing stones in them.
One suspicious Nazi engineer ordered a pressure test on the pipes. The POWs knew it would fail- and they would be shot. But the air raid siren went off. Dodd recorded:
"We knew…. they had found out what we had done. They had us lined up against a wall to shoot us as soon as the pipes failed the test. I had just said a prayer when the air-raid siren went and everyone…. dived into the air raid shelters. We heard a bomb fall ….. the only bomb to hit the factory had blown out the wall where the pipes were. God was looking after us that day……"

So let us remember those who greatly dared, and helped, and recognise that the human spirit is capable of great horrors, which we remember today, but also of great courage, and humanity. Amen.