A Tribute to My Great Uncle George. 1920-2005.

This is a brief tribute to my Great-Uncle, George Knight, who died when I was 16. He was one of the male role-models of my childhood, and this is based on the address at his funeral, written up from memory shortly afterwards. I discovered it again recently and with help from my Dad tidied it up.  This is a testament to an extra-ordinary life, from the aftermath of the First World War to the dawn of smartphones, one of the remarkable generation who lived right through the heart of the 20th Century, and saw their world change more than we can imagine.

My Fathers Uncle, my Grandma Florence's brother, a good and cheerful man to everyone he met: George Knight was born on the 9th January 1920 in South London.  His father died when he was young, he had been scarred by injuries from the Great War and couldn’t work, couldn’t operate, and then, in the late 1920s, sadly passed away.  George was part of a large family who would struggle to look after him at home, and so through a scholarship he was sent away to a boarding school. The experience was hard like the discipline. He used to say, 'when a cane wore out I was sent to buy another one'. But it taught him respect for elders, hard work, obedience and discipline. It also gave him a deep trust in God, that would last him his whole life.

As a child, a small lost boy from a poor family, he developed three dreams: To get into Oxford University, to become an officer in the Royal Navy and to become a Vicar in the Church of England. At the age of 17, he gained entry into London University and then at 19, with the help of a scholarship, he was granted entry to Oxford. His first impossible dream fulfilled. He was there from 1939-1942 and while there became Chairman of the Oxford Conservative Association and Captain of his college's Boat team. This taught him the skills of operating as part of a team and swiftly giving orders to react to the situations that faced him. He did not ignore his studies either, gaining the best theology degree of his entire year.

After graduating from Oxford he joined the Royal Navy in 1942 as an Ordinary Seaman, the lowest rung on the ladder, and on his first day was put in charge of a work party of 40 men.  He was soon promoted to Able Seaman and then, after completing training at the Britannia Royal Naval College, commissioned as a sub-Lieutenant.  His second ambition achieved.  He was later promoted to full Lieutenant, and commanded one of the second wave of ships that landed troops on Sword Beach on D-Day. One of his favourite stories from the War was when he was sailing in the Adriatic in 1945 shortly before VE Day. He was in charge of the bridge on his ship and from nowhere several vessels came speeding into view towards him. They were German boats and they had white sheets hung on their towers. They were trying to surrender, and George suddenly had this vision of all these enemy ships personally surrendering to little old him and escorting them triumphantly back into harbour. Think of the glory! So, he called his Captain to the bridge as quick as possible and asked him whether he should escort the ships back to harbour. The Captain said no, let them go on their way, so they did, and George continued on to Yugoslavia, glory sadly missed.

After the war George resigned his commission and entered the seminary, from which he was ordained as an Anglican priest. His last great ambition, fulfilled. He returned to the Navy as the Chaplain for the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, at that time the 2nd most senior religious post in the Royal Navy. There one day in 1951 he met a pretty blonde Swedish tourist on holiday. 18 months later they were married, and it was the start of 54 years of happy marriage that only ended with his sad death on the 7th December 2005. He was happy in his job too, and was very lucky one day after a service at the College, which as chaplain he was leading, to end up dancing with a certain Princess Elizabeth, now the Queen. He said, 'Who was I, to be cavorting with princesses?'

He later also met the late Queen Mother at a reception, where as chaplain he was required to say Grace before the meal and, as was Naval custom, afterwards thank God for the good things he had provided. Later he was honoured to have a long private conversation with the Queen Mother, then still Queen Elizabeth. He was also honoured to be appointed chaplain on the Vanguard, Britain’s last ever battleship, when it carried King George VI and Princess Elizabeth on a state visit to South Africa in 1947.

George served in the Royal Navy for 30 years, and he was thoroughly involved with all sorts of Naval developments. On one occasion he was asked to join a Naval commission to improve the prestige of the Fleet Air Arm. After many hours of discussion and various proposals, George suggested that Fleet Air Arm officers be granted the right to wear bicorne, Nelsonian hats when coming aboard ships, as that would do the job of marking them out distinctly as well as anything else mentioned and for considerably less money.

He retired from the Navy in 1975 and became a parish priest, at which time he was also awarded an OBE for his services in the College. His life was unfortunately mired by a tragedy as well during this time, as his only son, Christopher, died of Cancer at a young age. In 1990 after over 40 years as a Church of England priest he resigned in protest over the decision that year to ordain women as priests, and after that in his old age joined the Philadelphia Church of God, a small, distinct Protestant church to which his wife already belonged. He continued his life happily though, always cheery, always active, and luckily healthy right up until he was struck down by a stroke three weeks before his death.  Indeed on the very morning on which his stroke occurred he was out in the garden planting tubers. He was a good man.

Red Poppy Wearing - The last and only article you'll ever need

Dear Media of Britain.

Out of the goodness of my heart I have written the only article you will ever need about wearing poppies leading up to Remembrance Sunday.


No, you don't have to wear one.

No, don't harass or insult people for not wearing one.

No, wearing a red poppy does not glorify war.

No, red poppies do not glorify the War on Terror, or the invasion of Iraq specifically either.

Yes, you can wear a white poppy instead (or as well), just don't imply you're therefore better than everyone else.


Furthermore, you can wear a poppy any time from the beginning of the appeal on 23rd October until after Armistice Day on 11th November. England, Wales and NI have the same red poppy and Scotland has a similar but subtly different red poppy, both are fine. And, you can wear it on the left side, right side, either way up or however, as long as, in the words of the Royal British Legion, you "wear it with pride".

There we go. Complete and Done. Now go and get a poppy, it's an excellent cause.

And, Media of Britain, if at any point you're unsure, just re-read the tweet below.

The Refugee Crisis and the Holocaust - How not to learn the lessons of History.

I am a big fan of learning the lessons of History. Without understanding the past our understanding of the present will always risk being superficial. 

However, amid the chaos and confusion that has been exploding across Europe due to the refugee crisis some people have not got the idea quite right.  The problem comes when people pick out entirely superficial resemblances to historic tragedies when much larger problems are raging around. 

Hundreds of thousands of migrants are struggling across the continent, and there is massive confusion among official bodies in about what they were meant to do with the tide of people.

The BBC reports in one Czech town migrants "had numbers written on their skin with felt-tip pen". The police thought the "priority in dealing with the 200 migrants at Breclav railway station [...] was identifying them and trying to keep family members together. This was a difficult task when many had no documents and did not speak English; hence the numbers in felt-tip pen on their arms."

But many news outlets were outraged because somebody felt this vaguely visually resembled something that was done during the Holocaust: the tattooing of prisoners at Auschwitz, the largest Concentration/Death camp. This is one of the most trivial historical comparisons I've ever seen. The Czech authorities were faced with a situation that was crowded, noisy, confused, dealing with large numbers of people with no ID papers and with whom they probably didn't share a language: whether Czech, English or Syrian Arabic, and so they resorted to felt tip pen. And no, they didn't "stamp" it, they wrote it. The difference is quite clear.

Of all the things that are a problem with the refugee crisis, the EU response (and even the Czech response) this is really not one of them. Even on a surface level the resemblance is not that close. Auschwitz prisoners were tattooed on the arm or chest and some of these tattoos are still visible on survivors 70 years later. The refugees had a number written on their hand in felt tip, which they could rub or wash off in a few minutes. It's hard to know where to start with the other important differences between the planned mass murder of millions of people and a temporary measure to organise a small group of migrants in a Czech train station. It feels like no-one should need to say that but apparently we do. Seemingly news outlets would rather officials cared less about what they were doing to help people, and care more about whether their actions bore a totally superficial resemblance to tiny parts of a vast historic crime.

This summer was very hot in Poland, reaching 100F (or 38C) and so the Auschwitz memorial museum set up mist sprays to cool visitors cueing for long periods in direct sunshine. Apparently though, this caused complaints that they resembled the gas chambers used to kill hundreds of thousands of people there. Actually, I say complaints, but every article I've seen on this repeats exactly the same complaint from one tourist. Again, though, that same article has then been copied and pasted into many online news outlets until it popped up on my computer.

It's hard to know where to even start. Firstly, the museum had an entirely legitimate health and safety reason for putting the mist showers up. Secondly, again, the resemblance is entirely superficial and frankly vague. I can do no better than quote the Auschwitz museum trust's own words from their Facebook page, in which they sound frankly bemused by the whole thing.

"And one more thing. It is really hard for us to comment on some suggested historical references since the mist sprinkles do not look like showers and the fake showers installed by Germans inside some of the gas chambers were not used to deliver gas into them."

That means that some of the gas chambers were disguised as shower blocks to avoid panic and resistance among the victims and to encourage them to strip before being murdered. The shower-heads in the blocks were never used though. Anyway, how anyone could confuse an old fashioned concrete building with fake shower-heads inside with an outdoor mist sprinkler is beyond me. Also, I can't help but feel the complaint is bizarre because surely you're meant to feel uncomfortable when visiting Auschwitz? You're meant to be reminded of the gas chambers? It is unclear whether the person thought the idea of people not being too hot was insulting to victims, or was too light-hearted or what.

"Officials in the German town of Schwerte have made plans to place some 20 refugees in barracks which were once part of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. The 'pragmatic solution' to provide shelter has sparked criticism, German media reported."

The wave of refugees entering Germany this summer has strained local resources and available accommodation. So one town has decided to use vacant buildings that were once barracks for guards of a sub-camp of Buchenwald, one of the Nazi concentration camps. This genuine attempt to help in a time of major demand and limited resources is apparently not good enough for some people.

"the decision has sparked criticism among the country's activist groups, with many calling the plan "questionable" and "insensitive."

It's not clear who it is insensitive to: not the migrants who will have somewhere decent to stay, not the victims of the camp who almost certainly couldn't care less even if they knew. And as for 'questionable', that has to be the weakest criticism known to man, to be reached for by politicians and activists when they have nothing to actually say. I would hope that almost everything is 'questionable', except perhaps the fact the sky is  blue (and even then one may ask, why).

The activists do not seem to be making any alternative suggestion of where the refugees should be housed.  And I shudder to think what they would have said when for years after 1945 many of the camps were used to house the millions of refugees and displaced persons who flooded Europe at that time, in some places for years afterwards. In times of great need you do what you can with limited resources to help people.

And finally my last Holocaust related example of people missing a major issue and clinging on to the completely superficial and irrelevant. Migrants and asylum seekers are commonly kept in camps for periods of time while they are being processed, especially when large numbers appear at once. And particularly in this current crisis large numbers have been travelling by train across Europe.

Which will be sad news for anyone who has ever taken the train to Butlins, or Centre Parcs, or a festival of any kind.

Now, it shouldn't need to be said, but to avoid confusion, I'm not saying that the European response to the refugee crisis has been perfect. But I am saying of all the things wrong with it this isn't one.  It's like people's minds are just trying to cling onto something, anything, so they latch onto the surface level visual resemblance to something terrible that once happened.

Maybe I'm over-reacting to a few daft news articles and twitter comments. But I saw all these examples within literally a couple of days, and I wasn't going looking for them. For a brief period it seemed like we were entirely losing our critical faculties. Hopefully it was just a one-off fluke of social media. But most people spend understandably little time in their day thinking about complex global problems. This kind of total trivia just chews up that valuable time and distracts people from actually considering what is really important about these crises, and makes them think these are the kind of issues that they should be concentrating on.

The whole model of 24 hour online news media is partly to blame. We have actually reached a point where there is too much 'commentary' . There are so many news sites that have to be constantly filled with a stream of 'articles' that it just encourages sites to put up any old rubbish with a title that might get a few clicks. It's staggeringly lazy. Each of these 'stories' could be found pretty much word for word identical on many, dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds even of different online news 'platforms', presumably just copied and pasted from Reuters or Associated Press or whoever actually originally wrote the piece. There's no creativity or intelligence or effort involved whatsoever, and once you become aware it's incredible how much of even respectable newspapers and media channel's content is just lazily copied and pasted in this way without any thought of the quality of the 'story'. Even when it's not just copied and pasted from somewhere else the need to constantly update with new content leads to attempts to generate stories left, right and centre where frankly none exist.

More generally, some in our society seem to think you show what a good person you are by finding things that nobody else has thought to be outraged by and getting really angry and pissed off about them.  And the more obscure the thing is you've found to get outraged about the better. That just shows you care more than the other people who haven't noticed that offence or 'insensitivity' enough to be screaming into their computer screens. Any idea that taking a pompous position of personal moral superiority is itself bad, or that people might make innocent mistakes that deserve some benefit of the doubt, or might just be doing the best they can in difficult circumstances, seems to be get lost. 

I imagine the format of many online media, whether short blogs, twitter, facebook, tumblr or whatever, adds to this: difficult to present a nuanced view that understands both sides, easy to scream outrage and bile. Neither do I think this helps get more good done. Often it just makes the world an angrier, shoutier place and distracts people from doing any good, rather than attempting to appear good. As well as quite possibly making us all more miserable and stressed, apart from that small number who seem to actively enjoy having someone to yell at.

I understand the irony of criticising people for criticising people over trivial issues instead of focussing on what's important when this itself is not exactly vastly important. And I am sorry for that, we are all trapped in the same hell. In fact, I don't want to criticise any individuals in particular because there's no point. I just want to encourage greater consideration about what really are the serious issues, common sense, and the occasional benefit of the doubt. That would make the world a less angry place while actually seeing more genuine understanding of complicated historical issues, and more good done in the long-term. 

When there is genuine, serious injustice and suffering, people need to raise a voice, even an angry voice. But we would be better able to hear that voice if it wasn't drowned out by a constant, screeching tidal wave of trivialities.

Update

There appears to have been another outbreak of this nonsense in Britain itself. This time linked to help for asylum seekers. While, as always, there are genuine questions to be asked to improve our treatment of those in need, people squawking about Nazis are not helping. This article covers my point admirably:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/12120009/Red-doors-and-wristbands-Another-day-another-comparison-to-Nazi-Germany.html

Remembering Victims of Genocide

Updated 10th September 2015: Please see the end of the article

This article presents some of my own thoughts about remembering victims of genocide and other acts of evil. This is not meant to  criticise anyone else, merely to present some thoughts that I have found helpful. It was inspired by my own study of the 2nd World War, by the recurrent prod of the annual Holocaust remembrance day, and, directly, by a visit I made last summer to the Nuremberg Trial museum in Nuremberg.  (Warning: some of the photos are quite graphic; The term democide refers to any organised mass murder, including genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, etc)

The first question I want to try to answer is 'Why it is important to take steps to actively remember victims of atrocities and violence?' After all these people were nor individually related to us as friends or family. Why do I think it's important we take active steps to remember them?

I think we do have a duty to remember. I think gross injustice affects us as a society, as a whole, and the more the bigger the injustice. These terrible acts were perpetuated not by single individuals but by and against societies as a whole, with all the complexity that brings; and I think the only level at which we can properly respond is as a society, as a whole itself. Just as grief and mourning is almost essential on an individual personal level to move on from loss, so acts of social remembrance and exploration are the only proper response to mass loss of human life.

And this is the  only response we have left. Justice requires that we act to stop evil, and when we can not stop it to at least recognise it as evil. We didn't stop it, or we couldn't stop it, so all we can do to acknowledge something terrible and wrong happened to people and to remember, to bring them to mind, and make ourselves aware. I believe we also have a duty to remember, to honour their names, because, on a very real level, we live through other people. A real and large part of our existence, when we are alive, and continuing when we are dead, is through other people thinking of us, caring for us, remembering our lives and appreciating what we have done. Thinking of people brings them to life again, in the only way we can, insufficient as it is.

I think genocide, or any other act of mass murder or violence, is not only an attempt to kill people in the sense of ending their individual life. It is an attempt to erase them from the world, to take away everything they have been as well as what they are or will be; To make the world as though they never existed, only to be ever thought of, rarely, and if at all, as an extinct, forgotten shadowy mass. To actively remember those who suffered is to directly frustrate and undo the work of those who hated them so much in life. It honours their lives that were, in the same way we show respect to be people who are alive: by committing to them our time, interest and concentration.

Then of course there's the obvious reason, so oft repeated as to become cliche: to prevent such a thing ever happening again.  But because this is an, often failed, cliche does not make it any less true. Also because acts of violence never occur alone, but as the symptom of a complex process of mental and spiritual poisoning that stretches back long before,and can continue long after, the violence has been stopped and the bodies buried. This poisoning can and will continue unless consciously fought, and because it is buried deeply in men's psyche it requires a sustained effort to root out and prevent its return.

So that is why I think remembrance is so important.  The next question is how?

The thing about acts of democide is that the numbers and the scale make it impossible to relate to. 6,000,000 Jewish people killed in Europe between 1939-1945. Several million non-Jewish victims of the same Nazi campaign of mass murder. 700,000 people shot in a single year during the Stalinist great terror in the Soviet Union. 500,000 people murdered in a few months in a tiny country of Rwanda with primitive machetes and knives and sticks. Neither do the pictures help for me:

Partly it's the black and white of these pictures.  But mostly when I see images of what people have became there is a feeling of numbness.  The mind recognises it is seeing something horrific, but cannot reach across to feel the loss of each individual, because so many malformed corpses just look like planks of wood. My brain cannot wrap itself round this like it should. Just like when presented with the numbers the response is blank shock, a certain unbelieving horror even when faced with the grim reality. But mostly a lack of feeling; somehow these bodies just don't really seem real and these numbers don't seem human.

It is so far beyond anything we have experienced or can understand. Bits of the evil can even seem almost comical at times, with villains and schemes that just seem cartoonish.

This silent movie villain of a man was Wolfram Sievers. And he was responsible for what is known as the 'Jewish Skeleton Collection', which sounds like a bad name for a rock band, but was in fact an effort during the Holocaust to scientifically document the supposed racial inferiority of Jewish people. The idea was to kill a number of people in controlled conditions and preserve their corpses so they could be displayed after the war, like "diplodocus skeletons" in a museum: a testament to the supposed physical inferiority of the Jewish race. They were worried that all the Jews would be exterminated, and so there would be no 'specimens' left. As such 86 people were selected for their perceived exaggerated racial characteristics, murdered with gas, and their bodies preserved.

 
At first the photo just looks like another horrible waxwork. But then the details start to creep through. This man was Menachem Taffel.  He was a dairy merchant in Berlin, he sold milk. He had a wife called Clare who was a year older than him and a daughter called Esther who was 15 and volunteered at a local nursing home after school.  He was born July 21st 1900 in the Russian Empire, in 1938 he and his family moved in with his wife's parents and on August 17th 1943 he was murdered  in a gas chamber in some god-forsaken Hell in what is now Eastern France. The night before he ate his last meal on earth: it was potato peelings. His wife and daughter were already dead, having been murdered on arrival at Auschwitz on 13th March 1943.

And already for me the emotions have changed. I hear the name and read the scant details of an ordinary life and my brain moves from blank horror to connect with the reality that these were individual, innocent persons, with their own ordinary lives, virtues and foibles, whose lives were taken away, their hopes and dreams snatched from them.  All at some madman's whim.

This is Elisabeth Klein nee Thalheim. She was born in 1901 in Vienna, daughter of Saul and Karoline Thalheim. She married Koloman Klein on 6th January 1924 and moved to Belgium in 1938 with her mother, father, and husband to avoid the Nazi persecution. She was arrested, and later murdered in 1943, like Menachem Taffel, in Natzweiler, in a refrigerator room used as a crude gas chamber. Her husband had been arrested earlier in 1940 in Brussels and was murdered in 1942 in Auschwitz. She almost certainly never knew.

She was another one of the victims of this particular small, noxious, macabre episode in such a large period of evil. When confronted with this image, with a name, and with these ordinary facts about ordinary people again my immediate emotional response is different. Instead of numb, almost unbelieving shock, my gut is heaving, my pulse starts to race, I feel both like I am going to throw up and suddenly unbelievably angry, and like I want to do something right now to make this evil not have happened.

Please excuse the introspection. My point is that when we learn about people who suffered great evil as individual, living human beings with their own small and detailed lives, rather than as victims, or corpses, or numbers, the psychological response is totally different and much more powerful. When I just see piles of corpses it is easy just to feel shock. When I know who these people were, the inconsequential details about them and the ordinariness of their lives, it makes real empathy easier, because it sounds like the ordinary people who are part of my life, and not just like 'victims'.  Then suddenly I feel burning, rising anger.  And that is a very different response. This is the response of being confronted with an act of evil and injustice to a human being in front of me. Not the incomprehensible shock of something I know I reject but I cannot begin to really understand.

That is an 18 year old Russian girl. But the face is so distorted by suffering and deprivation that it is barely recognisable as human, and so again when I look at that face I can't seem to manage the same reaction as when I look at that picture of Elisabeth Klein. But I start thinking of how pretty she must have looked before being imprisoned, when the face was not drawn by starvation. I think that she must had all the same thoughts teenagers had: the worries about making friends, doing well at school, attracting boys, what to wear, squabbles with parents and siblings, all the the same things we all had and seemed so important at the time. She had all that before she was torn away from that normal life by a horror no-one could have predicted or imagined. Only then can my mind really recoil in the horror and anger that I think is the proper response to this being done to someone.

If we remember people only as they became and what was done to them we risk presenting them only as victims, which is what they were turned into; not human beings with lives and accomplishments, which is what they were. When we only remember that way I think we fail to properly consider them as human beings, and even, in a totally unintentional sense, view them in a manner similar to that their murderers viewed them: as statistics, as objects, rather than as individuals. Individual humans who are valuable not only because they are human but also because of all the things they achieved and did and were. Whether that meant they were doctors, bakers, pretty, Old, young, top of their class, lazy, businessmen, mothers, funny, kind, friends, postmen, shy, athletic, tall, sad, musical; and all the other list of features and qualities that make up actual human beings.

There are, I think, two parts to this. The first is that presenting these individuals as the people they were with the lives they had, rather than just as the victims they were turned into, is a more effective and whole way of enabling people to make the emotional connection to what happened to them (as I have described myself going through above). Not just in a detached sense, but in visceral, emotional sense. The kind of emotion that can reach across differences of decades and continents and sparse knowledge, and that drives and motivates us to not just recognise something as wrong but to act against it.

The second part relates to what I said at the start that in a real way we all live partially through how and whether other people think, act and feel about us. And because one of the purposes of democide was to erase people from existence in the widest sense, as much as biologically kill them. To remember people as they were, rather than as what they were turned into, feeds into both of these points. By remembering the people they were before evil overtook them we undo, in a horribly small and horribly insufficient, but still real sense, and the only one we have, what their murderers tried to do to them. Remembering them as who they were is an act of defiance.

This girl really illustrates what I mean.  Anne Frank's diary is world-famous, though she never meant it to be.  And I have always thought it was one of the most important and powerful historical accounts we possess.  This is not only despite but because it does not make any direct description of the historical events that surround it, rather it is the intensely personal account of a teenage girl with literally nowhere to go, with all its moments of boredom and pettiness and personal selfishness. And as such it makes Anne the most unavoidably human, and hence unbearably poignant, victim of the Holocaust. Anne's book contains nothing of her tragic fate; It obviously ends without warning the day before her family were captured. And in fact we know almost nothing about her time after arrest, and how she died, certainly nothing to the richness of the account of her life. And so despite what was done to her she will always remain the pretty, gawky, adolescent girl she was first, who is recognisable across the world.

Finally, I think that it is important to both look at the large numbers, to understand the scale of evil, but also to focus on single individuals, to understand the depth of the evil. But this does not mean that any one person can or should be taken to represent all victims. Each individual's loss belonged solely to that individual, and was valuable because of that. This quote by Miep Gies, one the people who hid Anne Frank's family, explains that:

"Anne's life and death were her own individual fate, an individual fate that happened six million times over. Anne cannot, and should not, stand for the many individuals whom the Nazis robbed of their lives ... But her fate helps us grasp the immense loss the world suffered because of the Holocaust."

What individuals stories can do is give us a window that reveals at least a tiny part of the totality of loss properly. What I believe is needed, in exploration and remembrance, is a holistic approach that takes in all these elements: the total, the individual, the before and the after of people's lives, rather than gets distracted into any one of these features. And this is becoming ever more important in our current time, as we reach the point where the last living survivors and eyewitnesses of the Nazi terror are dying and the events slipping out of living memory and into history. So it becomes so much more important to think in a structured way now about how we can keep the understanding of what happened alive in our society, and communicate it to each new generation.  Especially as in my young life-time the number of genocides and democides around the world tragically continues to increase: Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria.

Each of these further tragedies is a testament to fact we have not, as a world, learnt the lessons of the Holocaust; but each act of evil itself must be considered holistically, as its own unique event. Each one hence also raises its own unique questions about the proper means of remembrance and awareness, though I believe the points I have outlined here also apply. In general though, I am a historian, and so I guess biased, but I really believe that only by knowing the past and understanding the past. Only by keeping faith with those who died before us can we hope to understand our present situation, where it has come from, and where it might go, and lead our world into a better future.


Update: 10th September 2015

In this article I use examples taken from the appalling story of the 'Jewish Skeleton Collection'. This was one small story within the tragedy of the Holocaust that particularly touched me, including the image of Menachem Taffel, who for decades was the only identified victim due to the photo above.

Amazingly, in July 2015 some of the dismembered body parts of Mr Taffel and one other victim were discovered in Strasbourg Medical institute, 70 years after it was believed all the victims were decently buried. Last weekend these remains were given a Jewish funeral at the Strasbourg-Cronenbourg Jewish cemetery, hopefully bringing a final end to this awful tale. The full story can be read in the following article: 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3225272/Remains-Polish-Jew-wife-children-gassed-Auschwitz-dismembered-pickled-test-tube-sadistic-Nazi-doctor-finally-laid-rest-72-years-later.html 

We will Remember them . . . . .

We Will Remember Them.

Since the War to End all Wars there has been:

The Russian Civil War, the Soviet-Polish War, the Turkish-Greek War, the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, the Italian-Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese-Japanese War, the 2nd World War, the Arab and Zionist Rebellions, the Guerrilla War resisting the Soviets, the Greek Civil War, the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, the Kashmiri Conflict, the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, the Invasion of Tibet, the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, the Guatamalan civil War, Angolan War, the Rhodesian War, the Namibian War, the 6 day War, the Cambodian Civil War, The Northern Irish Troubles, the Naxalite Insurgency, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Yom Kippur War, the Ethiopian Civil War, the Lebanese Civil War, the East Timor War, the Chad Civil War, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the Chechnyan Conflict, the Salvadoran Civil War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Falklands War, the Ugandan Bush War, the Sri Lankan Civil War, the first Intifada, the Afghani Civil War, the Gulf War, the Yugoslavian Wars, the Somali Civil War, the Nepalese Civil War, the War in the Congo, the Kosovo War, the Liberian Civil War, the 2nd Intifada, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Ivorian Civil War, the Sudanese Civil War, the Lebanon War, the Mexican Drug War, the Somali Civil War, the Gaza War, the Libyan War, the Syrian Civil War, the war on ISIL.

We Will Remember Them.

In the World today conflict continues in Nigeria, Colombia, India, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, Yemen, Mexico, Congo, Sudan, Burma, and Syria.

We Will Remember Them.

And that is only the instances of major armed conflict.  It does not begin to list all the one-sided 'wars' across the world fought by states and governments against un-armed civilians, often with more force, more equipment, more ferocity (and the loss of more lives) than conventional wars. Because of greed, because of race, because of politics or religion or language or power or fear, or for no reason at all.  A few of the names are well-known to us: Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields, Rwandan Genocide, Holodomor, Sarajevo. Many more are not.

And we remember all those wars fought by governments or terrorists or criminals or a single bully who uses force to crush scattered people, or a few people, or just one person alone, with bombs or secret police, or torture, or camps, or prisons, or bullets or threats or fists.

We remember each individual who gave his or her life for freedom or dignity or to save another whether soldiers or civilians. Raoul Wallenberg, Witold Pilecki, Józef Adamowicz, Janusz Korczak & countless, countless others, whether known to the World, or known to one or a few grateful or heartbroken souls, or known only to God. Even if we cannot, we rest in the faith that God remembers them.

We remember them. Those who gave their lives to defend our peace & freedom  and those who gave their lives to defend our Brothers and Sisters in countries around the world.

"For no greater love has a man than this, that he should lay down his life for his brother" John 15:13.

And we remember those who had their lives taken, despite the best efforts of so many to defend them.  We remember each individual, and the millions of individuals known only as a place and a people. Though we cannot save them now, we can honour their lives and their sacrifice as we can through simply remembering them. And by giving our all to build a better world, in our own hearts, in our homes, in our own countries, and across the world, so no more names and places are added to the list that must never be forgotten.

We will remember them.

Amen.