In memory

Seventy years ago in Paris, starting at 4am on July 16th 1942 and continuing on into the next day, over 13,000 Jews were rounded up by French police, carrying out orders from the occupying Nazi regime. Many were taken to the old Vel d'Hiv ("Winter Velodrome") close to the Eiffel Tower or else to an internment camp on the outskirts of the city, before being moved to other camps and ultimately to the death camps in Eastern Europe. I've talked about this before - "La Rafle" (oops - just noticed a typo in last year's entry!) and while I didn't know the full story when I visited Paris, the many little memorials across Le Marais district had a profound effect on me, even before I visited the Shoah memorial.
The day I was inspired to start blipping by my friend Sea Urchin.
Anyway, noting the anniversary yesterday I decided today I would try and find an Edinburgh link to the Shoah for today's blip. I wasn't sure what I would discover. At the very least some link to Edinburgh's own Jewish community. There is an old Jewish cemetery the other side of the Meadows, for example.
But my searches found a more direct link. A memorial to a Scottish missionary, Jane Haining, who died in Auschwitz. In the 1930s she was matron of the girls' home at the Scottish Mission School in Budapest, Hungary where she looked after 50 of the school's 400, mostly Jewish pupils. Despite being ordered to return home she stayed on to look after her charges and was arrested in April 1944 and detained by the Gestapo. She was ultimately sent to Auschwitz in May 1944, where she died "in hospital" on 17 July 1944, of "cachexia following intestinal catarrh", although it is thought that she may have died in the gas chambers. She is one of ten Scots who are thought to have died in the Nazi extermination camps. She was only forty-seven when she died. Younger than me.
This is the Vigil Cairn on Calton Hill, in central Edinburgh, erected in 1998 to commemorate the vigil for a Scottish Parliament that was held at the bottom of the hill, across the road from the Scottish Office building. I remember passing the little hut several times, a little awed by the dedication of the team of campaigners that kept it manned in all weathers. In all it lasted over five years, from the 10th April 1992 (the night of a fourth consecutive Tory UK General Election victory) to the 12th September 1997 when Scotland had just voted YES, YES to the establishment of a Scottish Parliament (with tax-varying powers, the second YES). I remember being at the official count in the EICC as the numbers came in from across the country.
The cairn includes a stone from the top of Ben Nevis, a stone from Robert the Bruce's castle at Lochmaben, a stone from Robert Burns' house in Mauchline that he shared with Jean Armour, a stone from Auschwitz and a paving slab from Paris, 'used for defending democracy donated to the people of Scotland by supporters in Paris to commemorate the auld alliance'. An even stronger link to "La Rafle" than I had first thought!