Reflections on Yom Hashoah
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4/28/2014
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Last week I accompanied
the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, during his trip to Israel, on a very
moving visit to Yad Vashem. But perhaps more moving still was a chance
encounter before his lecture at Hebrew University, when a university employee
approached him and said: "I'd like to show you a page from my
grandmother's memoirs. My grandmother was hidden in Belgium during the Second
World War, in the same village in which your grandparents took refuge, and she
mentions them in her book."
Seeing the family name of a leading British politician in memoirs of a hidden
childhood brought home to me not only the importance of the courage shown by
those righteous gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews but also the
enormity of the loss of the Shoah. I was left to reflect on how many potential
leaders - not just in politics but in science, art and every field of endeavour
- were lost to the Jewish people and the world because of the tragedy of the
Shoah.
Only by remembering can we give that loss any semblance of meaning. Today as we
stand on the brink of that moment when the Holocaust will cease to be memory
and will become history, remembrance and Holocaust education take on new and
even greater importance. We welcome the launch of the Commission on the
Holocaust by the Prime Minister, David Cameron, as an important statement of
Britain's commitment to face up to that challenge. But at this crucial moment
every one of us is called to listen and learn from those who survived the nightmare.
For, as Elie Wiesel has written, "whoever listens to a witness becomes a
witness."
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