Holocaust Sunday; Remembering Marian

Sometime in the 1970s the BBC showed a 2 part documentary about the Holocaust. It focussed on the family of a physician in Berlin in the late 1930s. He was a popular Doctor and the family were well liked in the community. Then came Hitler and gradually patients stopped coming-they were afraid- and one day the younger daughter didn't come home. A happy young women who had learning difficulties had been abducted to be killed.
The parents decided to send their elder daughter to England for safety; their own lives ended in a concentration camp.
Not long after that documentary was shown, I was about to chair a plenary session at a nursing research conference. The speaker as it happened was a BBC producer and I was very nervous, so I wasn't happy when Marian insisted on talking to me. She could have chosen a better time I thought. She was very distressed and angry; she too had been sent from Berlin to safety in England in 1938 and never saw or heard of her parents again. The story told in the Holocaust programme was her story- and I was trying to get away to start the session and introduce the waiting speaker and so I cut her short. I did not get another chance to listen. Some years later she died of cancer.
I wish I had not been so anxious; I might have arranged for a later time when we could all have listened to her story; perhaps it would have eased her bitter anger.
So many brilliant people came to us from Germany and Austria at that time and were channeled into service professions like nursing. I think of friends like Dr Hockey, Dr Shrock and Professor Annie Altschul; Annie took an Honours Degree in Mathematics the year she retired from the Chair of Nursing in Edinburgh University. She might have been a Maths Professor in Vienna; instead she was nursing scholar who did mathematics in her spare time! They are all gone now and we celebrate them, but could more have been done to help those who came here in such traumatic circumstances even though it was wartime?

Remembrance Day

I am not sure why after all these years but I was in tears again through the service even though I stayed home today and just listened on the radio. I am overcome even before we get to the Last Post and the silence. Then it was all the Royals and political leaders and service chiefs laying their wreathes and that long list of what was once the Empire now the Commonwealth who were fighting with us from the start. They started with Canada, Australia, NZ, S Africa, India, Pakistan Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Malaysia and so on in the order they were independent- including Lesotho and Botswana, most of the West Indies and little islands, Figi, Tonga, Papua New Guinea it really was a world war and yes I know America came in too.

And then there was the description of the war graves in France and Belgium, the millions who died and the horrors of the Trenches; and the new memorial to those who died since 1950 including recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 2 minute silence has been brought back in recent years at the suggestion of the British Legion (started in 1921 to help the families and war-wounded who also started the red poppies to support the work) more

The young seem to be taking more interest these days too. I heard an 18year-old speaking of his Great-Great-Great grandfather and his son who joined up together in 1914 and died together at Passiondale -

So why am I so moved? My Dad was in the RAF and I learned to appreciate the little Spitfire from him (and go occasionally to see one in the Air Museum at East Fortune). Some of my older friends were there too. Alan was flying with the RAF in 1944-45; Joan was a Nurse in Burma when the Japs came and C was in a Japanese camp in China as a child and cannot speak of it. Something of their experience reaches me.

And there are those who are able to forgive and those who seek peace and reconciliation and as we remember and determine it should never happen again we are aware as never before of the vastness of the suffering, cruelty and dying that goes on and on- and the love and compassion and hope-

Once in my student days when I was trying to keep warm in bed in my bed-sitter ( I really did!) and depressed about VietNam and student revolts and Marcuse writing something like ‘Revolution is no good because you can’t change mens’ hearts’ I thought miserably that God can; and suddenly my head seemed to resound with the Hallujah chorus THE LORD GOD OMNIPOTENT REIGNETH’ and I had to laugh at the way He reminded me that He is and always will be King-