Articles - From the Vicar

February 2000

On a recent visit to the library my eye was caught by a book of photographs with the arresting title Children of a Vanished World. It proved to be one of the most moving books I have encountered for some time. The book's black and white photographs are part of an extensive archive of work belonging to a German Jewish photographer who, in the mid 1930's, had travelled widely in the Jewish towns and villages of central and eastern Europe. In a haunting series of images the children of these communities, usually desperately poor, are portrayed at play and at school, talking and resting, running errands and making mischief. Accompanying the photographs are poems and songs in Yiddish, the mother tongue of millions of European Jews for hundreds of years yet now almost extinct. For overshadowing the normality of these images, frozen in time, is the Holocaust yet to come, Hitler's 'final solution': a few years after the photographs were taken most of the children in them were dead, victims of the Nazi death camps. Their songs and poems exist now only on the lifeless pages of books, mute testament to a vigorous cultural life that had far deeper roots in Europe than the Third Reich.

Jewish survivors of the death camps have spoken of 'the silence of God'. I, too, rage against that silence and against the complicity of countless so-called Christians who allowed the Holocaust to happen without protest. How can we believe in a loving God after Auschwitz? What right do we have to preach such a God to our neighbour? Perhaps only a survivor of that horror, the Jewish writer Pierre Sauvage, has the moral right to frame the beginnings of an answer: "If hope is allowed to seem an unrealistic response to the world, if we do not work towards developing confidence in our spiritual resources, we will be responsible for producing in due time a world devoid of humanity - literally".