A QUESTION OF FAITH

With Rev Anthony Thacker of Burbage Congregational Church 19 July was the centenary of the Peace Day, but September sees the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, so expect a World War II focus, this Remembrance Day. Our family memories switch (in my case), from a grandfather in the trenches, to a father and uncles serving here in the RAF, or else in Canada, Sierra Leone, or fighting malaria as well as the Japanese in the jungles of India. Readers’ families will have their own stories. And with World War II itself, we have the war which could not be prevented by a piece of paper, and which only ended with nuclear weapons destroying cities. Above all, it was a time which redefined inhumanity. But what about humanity? I have recently just watched again an opera by Mieczysław Weinberg, The Passenger. The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich – Weinberg’s close friend – described “this opera as a hymn to humanity ... to those ... subjected to the most terrible evil in the world”. It tells the story of Lisa and Marta. Starting in German and English, on board an English ship, Lisa is with her husband, the new German ambassador to a Latin American country. But she sees a passenger, who triggers a terrible memory, a hidden, awful secret. Lisa was an SS guard in Auschwitz, and the passenger – could it be Marta, a Polish prisoner in Auschwitz? Then the opera takes us into Auschwitz, with Polish and other voices. This was personal: Weinberg, a Polish Jew, evacuated deep into the Soviet Union in 1939, lost most of his family in the Holocaust. But what is it to be human amidst the greatest inhumanity? Could Lisa pretend she was humane by giving occasional favours – while administering this corner of the Holocaust? What Weinberg does brilliantly is enable us to see and hear the prisoners, Polish, Jewish, Russian, Czech, French, in their humanity, though the system had turned them into numbers. Their struggle for faith, Jewish or Christian, in this bleakest place, and their prayers, in face of impossible evil. The people: Marta, Tadeusz, Ivette, Katja, Hannah, the lives in the death camp. I have visited Auschwitz and Dachau, places you can only walk around in silence. The world has a duty never to forget the evils of the Holocaust, never to forget where race-hatred and antisemitism leads. But also to remember the people. War always destroys real people. It is costly to build the institutions of peace – to cede sovereignty to the United Nations, and so on. But war is far more costly. It is not enough to imitate the angels over Bethlehem, and just talk of ‘peace on earth to those on whom his favour rests’. We need to be God’s co-workers, active for peace and reconciliation: “Blessed are the peace-makers.”