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Secondary Assembly: Liberation
There’s very little we don’t know about these days about gathering information. If an event happens somewhere in the world, it can be on our screens in seconds. We are continually being updated on things that matter and things that don’t matter to us. Sometimes, however, an event happens which has a momentous effect on the whole world – such as ‘September 11th’ or the war with Iraq. One of these, which we are thinking about especially this week, is of course the Nazi-organised genocide against the Jews of Europe – the Holocaust.
As a society, we are careful to commemorate these events which happened all over Europe 60 years ago. This is because we believe that commemorating such events is important and can be a positive reminder, encouraging us to work together against prejudice. They are not just horrific stories to make us think how lucky we are, or to give us nightmares, although they may do both. It is important that we use the knowledge we have of these events, thanks to the courage of the eyewitnesses who survived and speak about it, to be watchful in our own society, and to condemn all racism and prejudice. This would be a true form of liberation.
You might think that people who had suffered so terribly would want revenge. But any desire to continue the violence left most survivors within days, even if the effects of what they experienced never will. It is remarkable how many survivors today are eager to share their stories (or parts of them), seeking not to gain celebrity status for themselves – quite the reverse – but in order to help the rest of us learn important lessons for our society.
One eyewitness survivor was called Hugo Gryn. Hugo was born in a small town in the Czech Republic in 1930. It was a prosperous market town and the Gryn family were active members of the Jewish community. With the arrival of the Nazis, Hugo and his family were imprisoned in a ghetto in the town and then transported to Auschwitz. Separated from the rest of his family, Hugo and his father survived the horrors of the camp as slave labourers. His father died on a ‘death march’ that the Nazis forced upon them as the war was ending. Hugo was 15.
