Lest we forget

Holocaust Memorial Day



The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth’s malice—a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out. The underground chambers were named “disinfection cellars,” the aboveground chambers “bathhouses,”  

Thomas Keneally ~ "Schindler's Ark"

I remember visiting Auschwitz in October 2006. 

I still recall the sense of growing horror at the scale and sheer inhumanity of the thing.  I defy anyone who has visited Auschwitz, or any of the other concentration camps, not to feel the same.   

When I visited it seemed beyond all belief that humanity could do such things.  Yet in the 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, if there is a moral universe, Humanity has still to earn its place in it: we have had the Khmer Rouge's genocide in Cambodia, the Bosnian genocide in Srebrenica, the genocide during the Rwandan Civil War and the recent Burmese genocide against the Rohingya, the list goes on.

So tonight we light a candle and hope that in so doing things may yet improve in the world.