*** DEBUG START ***
*** DEBUG END ***

Holocaust Memorial Day marked with stories, reflection, and prayer

28 January 2025

Archbishop of York leads commemoration at Lambeth Palace

COUNCIL OF CHRISTIANS AND JEWS

Daniela Abraham

Daniela Abraham

THE “untypical” story of a Jewish child who survived the Holocaust after being cared for by a Dutch woman from a Catholic family was told during a commemoration for Holocaust Memorial Day, at Lambeth Palace, on Monday.

Dr Martin Stern, who survived camps at both Westerbork, in the Netherlands, and Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, was born in 1938, in the Netherlands, and arrested in 1944 at a small school in Amsterdam. At the time, he was being looked after by a Dutch couple who pretended he was their own son.

Dr Stern’s father had been hidden by a Dutch family who were “devoutly religious Protestants” running a tiny farm where they had hidden, at any one time, 70 people. They were raided three times; the farmer and his son and Dr Stern’s father were all sent to concentration camps where they died.

Dr Stern and his sister (who was arrested at the age of one) were cared for at Theresienstadt, in women’s dormitories, by a woman prisoner from a Roman Catholic background who had married a Jewish man. When a train was loaded with children, destined for Auschwitz, this woman decided to go with them. But their names were never called, perhaps because they had never been in the children’s dormitory. “She had, in that and other ways, saved our lives.”

His story was “necessarily untypical for a Jew caught up in the Holocaust”, he said. But it was “by telling stories that we hope to make schoolkids want to know more”.

The commemoration, organised by the Council of Christians and Jews, marked 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. A survivor of the camp, Jean Améry, was quoted by the potter and author Edmund de Waal: “I do not have clarity today, and I hope I never will. Clarification would amount to disposal, settlement of the case which can then be placed in the files of history. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is settled. No memory has become mere memory.”

COUNCIL OF CHRISTIANS AND JEWSThe Archbishop of York

Mr de Waal is the son of the Very Revd Victor de Waal, a former Dean of Canterbury, who arrived in England from Vienna in 1939. His father had never told him what had happened, and it had taken him decades to trace the story, which he told in a memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes (Books, 29 June 2011). His father’s grandmother had taken her own life, not believing that they would escape. His aunt, uncle, and cousins, had all died in concentration camps.

Six candles, representing the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, were lit in a vessel created by Mr de Waal, who explained that, in both his stories and pottery, he sought to show “where damage has occurred”.

Testimony was also provided by Daniela Abraham, a second-generation survivor of the Roma genocide and founder of the Sinti Roma Holocaust Memorial Trust. She was raised by her great-grandparents until she was 16. Her great-grandmother was raped by Nazis when they arrived at her home town in Slovakia. Her eight siblings had all died. Her great-grandfather had managed to escape on foot from deportation in a boxcar.

Roma were the “most discriminated against group in Europe”, she said, referring to the genocide of Roma during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, in which about 30,000 were killed and half a million displaced, and the forced sterilisation of Roma women that had continued “well into the 21st century”. It was difficult to determine the number of Roma killed during the Holocaust, but recent work suggested that it could be in the region of 1.5 million people.

COUNCIL OF CHRISTIANS AND JEWSDr Martin Stern

During the service, scripture and prayer was chanted, sung, and read in both Hebrew and English.

The Senior Rabbi of the New North London Masorti Synagogue, Jonathan Wittenberg, told the gathering: “In a post-truth, post-fact, and post-empiricist world, where it is felt ‘my narrative is as good as yours,’ the door is open to how the story gets told, and therefore it is most important that we testify to the truth: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek. These places were; these things happened.” The gathering was present to “bear witness with gratitude and admiration to those who survived and those who had the courage to help them”.

Liberation, however, was a “dangerous and limited word,” he said. “It suggests that one is now free from what happened. The world and life don’t know closure. . . I want to honour those who struggle with the past, whose life has been difficult and lonely and torment”.

After welcoming guests to the Great Hall, the Archbishop of York, said: “I know that it is, and has been, the distortions of Christian theology over hundreds of years that often appeared to legitimise the persecution of discrimination of Jewish people, promoting and fostering terrible negative stereotypes, and this, too, we must learn from, and especially today when there is such an increase in anti-Semitism and race hate.”

He pledged to work “ever more closely together, rejecting the misuse of Christian doctrine and remembering that Jesus himself, a Jew, steeped in and learning from the Jewish tradition, taught all those who followed him to love their neighbour as themselves”.

The closing words were provided by the CEO of Liberal Judaism, Rabbi Charley Baginsky, who drew on a reading of Psalm 23 with its images of still waters and green pastures, “not images of escape or avoidance; they are images of deep restoration, of renewal”. The audience gathered was remembering “the resilience and hope that emerged from the darkest of times”.

Browse Church and Charity jobs on the Church Times jobsite

Forthcoming Events

Women Mystics: Female Theologians through Christian History

13 January - 19 May 2025

An online evening lecture series, run jointly by Sarum College and The Church Times

tickets available

 

Festival of Faith and Literature

28 February - 2 March 2025

tickets available

 

Visit our Events page for upcoming and past events 

Welcome to the Church Times

 

To explore the Church Times website fully, please sign in or subscribe.

Non-subscribers can read four articles for free each month. (You will need to register.)