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THERE ARE PEOPLE IN MY CHURCH COMMUNITY who recall the returning from experience at Belsen of Daphne Waite, one of their own. One such person kindly wrote to me, in time for yesterday’s remembering:
Daphne Waite in later life until her retirement was a head teacher, but during WWII was one of the Allied Military Administration Staff, who followed close behind the advancing front line to start the immense task of re-building, in all senses of the term. Daphne was one of the administrators who entered Belsen Concentration Camp a few hours after British soldiers had liberated it, and so was among the first to see the horrors it contained and to start to do what they could for those imprisoned there.
The same writer went on to tell of his own experience of visiting Auschwitz:
I found walking round Auschwitz, and visiting the sites associated with the Warsaw Ghetto and Uprising, an experience that permanently changes one’s outlook and perspective. Some may have known, or met, a Holocaust survivor. Some may remember listening to members of St Michael’s, now dead, who had more direct experience.
I have recently been awestruck (and I mean awe struck) in the presence, by the kind hospitality of our local synagogue, of a “survivor” who lost more than thirty of her own close family members. How thankful I am for Archbishop Rowan’s reflections, published yesterday. How humbled by a videoed conversation between the Archbishop, the Chief Rabbi and Rabbi Tony Bayfield who visited the camps, together, thank God, in 2008. Here’s a paragraph from the Archbishop’s pages. The whole is infinitely worth the reading:
We must attend to the signs at home and abroad of those attitudes in ourselves and in others which were the harbingers of the Holocaust. These include the dehumanising rhetoric which seeks to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ and then to project all that is negative on to the other, on to “them”. We need to be vigilant about every expression of ungenerous feeling towards people in need and all who may for a time be dependent on the wider community – the refugees and asylum seekers. We need to be alert to the signs of a casual attitude to the value of human lives, whether by acts of terrorism or more subtly, in relation to disability, or the beginning or end of life.
