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| Gena Turgel |
Imagine, today up your road march soldiers who are from your own country, they have been to school with your children, they speak exactly the same language. They have already made you and your Jewish people live in a ghetto, all of you together, leaving your comfortable middle class life, your pictures, your kitchen, your table, your garden and herded you together. Today though they order your out of the ghetto and herd you and your children to the station. This time there are no seats in the carriages, these are cattle trucks but for people. You are still together though, you hope that you are going to another ghetto but that you will still be together.
We know now that these Jewish families didn't stay together, they were split up, divided, stripped, gassed, hung and tortured. Some survived, their stories survived but it is too easy to read them as if they were history, as if they happened when people weren't as civilised as we are. We have seen the films, we have felt sorry and maybe lucky that it didn't happen to our family but we seldom hear that story and know that it happened. In the newspaper today, Gena Turgel, the only one of 9 children to survive says: "My story is of one survivor but maybe that was why I was spared so my testimony bears witness to the murder of six million others. They were real people: mothers, fathers, children, doctors, teachers. They used to laugh like we laugh and cry like we cry, but now they scream in silence.
I read this and cry; I seldom cry, too old perhaps but this story isn't just a story, it happened and it was a terrible thing. Let us not allow terrible things to happen, even the smallest terrible thing distorts our humanity and we are responsible because we are human. She lights a candle on Holocaust Day, we lit one when we meditated this morning and we will again and we will join in the remembrance.
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