´óÏó´«Ã½

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Rabbi Julia Neuberger.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Good morning.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, when we remember all those who were murdered so brutally, Jews, Sinti, Gays, Communists, and many more. But I want to remember a group of British POWs held captive in Auschwitz III, Monowitz, where they saw terrible things. Take Arthur Dodd, for instance. Captured at Tobruk, he was transferred to Auschwitz III in 1943, which housed over 10,000 Jewish slave labourers, as well as POWs and forced labourers from all over occupied Europe.

There, he lived in absolute filth, with a constant accompanying smell of burning flesh from the nearby crematoria at Auschwitz II. For 14 months, he witnessed the mistreatment and killing of Jewish inmates by their SS guards. Some British POWs endangered themselves to get any scraps of food they could to the Jewish prisoners.

And many of them deliberately sabotaged the pipes they were forced to work on by placing stones or blank flanges in them. One suspicious German engineer ordered a pressure test on the pipes. The POWs knew no pipe would pass the test- they would be shot in 20 minutes. But just as the test was starting, the air raid siren went off; and they were ordered into the shelters.

Dodd remembered. "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…. 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 and, when the raid was over, we saw that the only bomb to hit the factory had blown out the wall where the pipes were. God was looking after us that day……"

As we remember those who were murdered, let us also remember those who helped and tried to help. There is good in the world alongside evil. Let us choose good.

Amen.

Show less