“Hope without memory is like memory without hope” is the striking phrase by Sir Elie Wiesel brought forward by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for the 2010 commemoration under the theme: ‘the Legacy of Hope’. Elie Wiesel was awarded an honorary knighthood in 2006 as a public sign of the importance of the living memory that survivors of the Holocaust are for present day humanity. Our 2010 commemoration of the Holocaust has at its heart the survivors of the Shoah, the unique human beings who are the primary source for our continued attention, our understanding and our need to continue to work at the lessons in a world that seems not yet to have learned them.
As those who directly connect us and our children with that archetypal genocide pass from this life, we are confronted with the challenge of keeping alive the reality of what happened and of its defining significance. There may still be some 5000 Jewish and other survivors of the camps and of the years of Nazi occupied Europe. But tragically there are also many hundreds of thousands of people in this and other countries who are survivors of the many other genocidal events of the 20th and 21st centuries, including those atrocities that have taken place, like the Holocaust, on European soil.
This is a fine statement, as far as it goes. At least Cantaur mentions in passing that there have been other terrible examples of religiously-based genocide and ethnic cleansing in the 20th and 21st centuries. But I wish he was just as vocal and emphatic in keeping alive the memory of our slaughtered Christian brothers and sisters. Where is his statement of solidarity with our Armenian fellow Christians, over 1.5 million of which were ruthlessly killed by the Muslim Ottoman Turks in WWI? And most of all, where is his plea for remembering our fellow Anglicans who’ve been, and still are being, brutally killed and hounded by the notoriously genocidal National Islamic Front regime in Sudan??
I’m all for remembering the Shoah. But it’s easy nowadays to denounce the Nazi’s for that utterly wicked and unspeakable crime against humanity. It’s harder, and even more important, for a Christian leader to denounce those utterly abominable Muslim governments that are attempting the same sort of annihilation of fellow Christians in our own day.
David Handy+