Could you forgive this?

All photos used by permission of Unsplash

I have just been preparing a lesson on forgiveness for Year 5 pupils. It is easy to understand what it is, but probably one of the hardest things to actually do!

I was quite young when I first heard about Corrie Ten Boom, she was a lady from the Netherlands who lived with her family in Haarlem not far out of Amsterdam. I was fascinated by history and this story gripped me. For my fortieth birthday we went to the Netherlands and while there visited the jeweller’s shop where the events took place. The shop is a going concern and the house above is a museum telling a great story.

The Ten Boom family were Christians and when Hitler and his forces took control of the Netherlands, they were appalled by the persecution of the Jews. They had a rambling old house and bravely had a hiding place built where they could hide Jews when the Nazis came looking for them. They saved many Jews from being captured. Eventually in 1944 they were betrayed and caught and taken away. Corrie’s father Casper died ten days later in Scheveningen prison and Corrie, with her sister Betsie, was taken to the notorious Ravensbruck Concentration Camp where they were treated worse than cattle and went through beatings and indescribable hardship.

National Holocaust Day 2023

Photos from own collection

Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration camp.  More than 1,100,000 men, women, and children lost their lives here.  Multiple train tracks led in to this extermination camp, no Jew ever came out!

All over the nation, places of public entertainment are closed, and last night a state ceremony was held in the Warsaw Ghetto Square in Jerusalem to honor the Jewish people who perished at the hands of Nazi Germany.

The flag was lowered to half-staff, and prayers were recited.  Holocaust survivors lit the six torches that symbolize the Six Million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust under Hitler's Final Solution.

Despite the process of dehumanization and annihilation that the Nazis unleashed on the Jewish People, necessitating a struggle for survival in the worst of circumstances, many Jews continued to exercise creativity, pursue education and culture, recite prayer, and observe the holidays.

"Many of those who struggled to maintain and preserve the human spirit did not survive the horrors of the Holocaust, but their deeds and actions are a reminder to future generations of the stamina and nobility of the human spirit," the Yad VaShem website states.

The Nazis packed Jewish people like cattle into railroad cars as they shipped them to their final destination at labor and extermination camps.  Those camps were part of Hitler's "Final Solution" to kill all of the 
Jewish People.

The Nazis intended that no Jew would survive the Holocaust.

Multiple tracks led from all over Europe to concentration camps like Auschwitz.  Jewish people were crammed into cattle cars and shipped to these death camps.  Very few survived.

Many were gassed immediately upon arrival and their bodies burned in ovens.  

Those who were healthy enough to work when they arrived were literally worked to death.

Two-thirds of European Jewry, that was one-third of all world Jewry, died in the Holocaust.

This horrible, unfathomable number—six million murdered—does not count the many Jewish children who will never be born because of this genocide.

Whole families were destroyed.  Some Jewish people who came out of the Holocaust were the sole survivor of their family.  They were left completely alone.  Many communities were utterly erased.

Those who came to Israel from Europe were a remnant.

Some of those who were gassed and put in the ovens were the parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles of our Bibles for Israel Ministry staff.

May We Never Forget.

Paying tribute to the six million who perished in the Holocaust.  
Never Again!

Used by permission  

"The LORD will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins; He will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the LORD.   Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the sound of singing."  (Isaiah 51:3)

 

Remembering Sir Nicholas Winton

All photos courtesy of Unsplash 

Towards the end of 1938, a stock-broker, born to German-Jewish parents, travelled from England, which had become his home, to Prague, Czechoslovakia, knowing that upon arrival, he would find many people displaced from their homes. Some were living with relatives, others living rough or in camps with little food and trying their best to keep warm in the winter conditions. At the age of 29, he had so far lived a relatively comfortable life, but hearing about Jews who had lost their jobs and suffered other forms of persecution, he set out to see if there was anything he could do to help.

Whilst a number of organisations were working away, things were getting tougher. He was concerned with rescuing children, but amongst other challenges, was the problem of transporting unaccompanied children across Europe into Britain. Nicholas used his political connections to put certain things in order and his mother went to the ‘Home Office’ to make his rescue plan possible.