[This reflection was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 27/Jan/2019]
Last Sunday the remains of five Jewish adults and one child murdered in the Holocaust at Auschwitz were buried. They had been found in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, and were laid to rest in a Jewish cemetery outside London. In his eulogy, the UK Chief Rabbi said that they were “stripped of their dignity both in life and in death. And we will now have an opportunity to accord them appropriate dignity with a funeral.”
I remember visiting a vast underground base for Second World War Nazi V2 missiles in France. These bases were built by Jewish slave labour, and in the process more of them died during their labour than Britons were killed by all the V2 rockets launched against our country. Today, half of the base is an amazing exhibition of rockets and satellites as a history of space research, but because of the many Jews who died there the remainder is filled with possessions and pictures in memory of the Holocaust victims.
This was very moving and prepared me for a visit to the awe inspiring site of the Yad Vashem memorial and museum in Jerusalem, built in memory of the more than six million Jews who died in the Nazi Holocaust. As I was thinking about all this, I told the Israeli guide, a real grandfather figure, that my dad’s mother had been Jewish. He immediately said that my dad was therefore 100% Jewish. When I asked about me, he told me that I was Jewish too (he didn’t say 100%) and that I could apply to emigrate to Israel! I was looking at more of the memories and possessions of the murdered Jewish families when I realized something that shocked me. If the Nazis had invaded and defeated our country in the Second World War, then my father, my uncles and aunts, my many cousins and myself would all have died in the extermination camps because we would have been considered to be Jewish. Since that time the Holocaust has been much more personal to me.
In recent days there has been a rise in anti-Semitism around the world and in this country. In a few years from now, there will be no one left to remember personally the genocide of the Jews, and a recent survey in America showed that most millenials have never heard of Auschwitz. Even some Christians forget that Jesus was humanly speaking a Jew, and so were His disciples and the first Christians. It is important that we remember the Holocaust as a guard against future genocide, not only of the Jews but of other ethnic groups too.
The Bible foretells a time when the Jews in Israel will be almost overrun by their many enemies and at that time they will be rescued by their Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, our Saviour, when He comes again. Then Jesus will fulfil all the promises to the Jews in the Bible from Abraham onwards, and as Paul says in Romans 11:26-27, “And so all Israel will be saved. As the Scriptures say, ‘The one who rescues will come from Jerusalem, and he will turn Israel away from ungodliness. And this is my covenant with them, that I will take away their sins’”.
From then on the Jews will live in peace and never face another Holocaust.
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Contributed by Michael Goble; © the Author
