Secondary Assembly: Reflections 2

Secondary Assembly: Reflections 2

We only have to switch on the TV news or open a newspaper to be aware that human beings are capable of the most appalling cruelty. In individual cases, this is awful enough, but there have been many times when whole tribes, nations or races of people have been targeted by others and persecuted to destruction. This week we are commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day, when we remember the time when most of Europe was gripped by Nazism.

The Nazis sought to wipe out any who were different from their fellow citizens in some way. They rounded up and killed Roma people, they imprisoned because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses or because of their sexual orientation, and murdered people with various disabilities in cold blood. Those whom they hated the most were the Jews of Europe. Jewish people were hunted down and sent to camps where millions and millions perished in the most appalling circumstances.

After this, the world said, “never again must we let this happen”. But it has happened again in places such as Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia, and Holocaust Memorial Day also provides an opportunity to learn from these events, too.

How can we learn from something so terrible? Surely the events are so unusual that they have nothing to teach us about our own lives? But all these genocides were begun when people were willing to believe that others were in some way inferior to them, that their very presence was a threat to the well-being of the rest of society and, even, that they were not really human. The Nazis used the word ‘Untermenschen’ – subhuman – for Jews and Roma. The Hutu leadership in Rwanda referred to the Tutsis as “cockroaches”. When a Jew entered the camps, a number was tattooed on the right arm. This was a further attempt to take away a person’s humanity; you were known by a number, not your name.

• Secondary Assembly - Reflections 2 (PDF document)