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A Holocaust Memorial Day Like No Other

Guest blog by Nathan Eddy, Interim Director of the Council of Christians and Jews, taken from the 22 January CCJ Newsletter

cb0debf7-3ae7-4bc4-ac0c-6e67444d282fHolocaust Memorial Day, observed across the country on January 27th, will be unique. A year ago, I remember queueing in the rain to get into Methodist Central Hall in Westminster for the national ceremony and seeing friends and colleagues there. This year we gather in front of laptops, tablets and phones to remember, to hear stories of survival and loss, and to be together. And HMD is different this year for another reason; last year, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, was the last major anniversary at which survivors will likely be present. We now enter a new era of commemoration, with new ways of remembering, educating and gathering together.

During lockdown I was helped by reading the poetry of a Holocaust survivor, Dan Pagis, whom I first encountered on a CCJ Yad Vashem seminar. Born in 1930 near the Bukovina area of present-day Romania, Pagis lost most of his family in the Shoah, was interned in a concentration camp, and emigrated to Israel as a teenager. There he learned Hebrew for the first time and, remarkably, became one of the prominent Israeli poets of his generation and a world expert in Medieval Jewish literature. Life went on after the horrific events he experienced as a young person, but haunting and ambiguous images fill his poetry. ‘I was a shadow’ — a tzel, in his Hebrew original — he writes in his poem ‘Testimony’. Yet perhaps the very act of sharing his testimony is his poetry’s power — at least, it is for me.

The theme this year chosen by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is ‘Be the light in the darkness’. For survivors of the Shoah and other genocides, as was the case for Pagis, the shadows are present even in the light of liberation and a conflict’s ending, and this testimony of survivors can challenge those of us who want an easy ‘happily ever after’. As may be the case in the current pandemic, trauma changes lives forever. Yet there is a curious power, a healing power, in hearing testimony and reflecting on lives like Pagis’. The testimony of survivors can be a light in the darkness for us all, giving us courage to be a light in our communities today. That light will be shining brightly on Wednesday, encouraging and empowering us all.

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