27/01/2020

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Baroness Julia Neuberger, Rabbi of West London Synagogue

Good morning.

It’s Holocaust Memorial Day today, so I thought I’d talk about my mother. She was a refugee from Nazi Germany, who came to England as a domestic servant in 1937. With the help of the wonderful family she was working for, she rescued her younger brother too, and, just before the war, her parents as well. Most of her other relatives were murdered. She made a great life for herself in Britain, married my father, and the rest is history. Except it isn’t.

On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, 25 years ago, she broke down in tears and couldn’t stop crying. My father, very sick by this point, was flummoxed. So was her GP. It was one of her friends, a fellow refugee, who came to the rescue. “Liesel,” she said, “You’ve deliberately put it all out of your mind, trying to get on with life. You’ve suppressed it, but all these years on, your memory is bringing it all back. You’re not alone. It’s happening to all of us.”

She was right. Many refugees, who’d arrived as young people, suddenly found themselves- fifty years on- thinking of all the people they had lost- family and friends - and found their minds full of mental pictures of them. My mother began to sort out her vast box of unlabelled photographs of people I could not have known. And she began to talk about them. So those people I’d never heard of began to live again in her words, as she rejoiced in their successes, remembered when they had been hopelessly impractical, or celebrated how they had treated her as a child.

Whilst we are remembered, something of us never dies. May we learn to remember with love, O God, and cherish those memories, so that something is left of those who were murdered so cruelly.