This coming Sunday sees us hosting our annual Holocaust Memorial Day service.
This year's theme is 'Untold Stories'. Here's the preamble from HMD :
"It’s easy to talk about the numbers murdered and persecuted during the Holocaust and subsequent genocides. It’s less easy to appreciate what these figures mean. The millions murdered under the Nazi regime of hatred aren’t a statistic. They were individuals. Somebody’s friend. A mother. A father. A child. A colleague. A neighbour.
There are millions of stories we will never know. But we can still honour the memory of those affected by genocide by playing a part in these Untold Stories. We can listen and learn from them, we can tell others the stories we hear. Some stories are not easy to hear. They can speak of danger, pain and suffering. We must not shy away from these stories – it is vital to recognise the consequences of exclusion and persecution in order for us to learn the lessons of the past.
We all have the power to play a part in the lives and words that are remembered, it is our role to ensure that the Untold Stories from the past do not get lost. On HMD 2011, we are asking everyone to tell these stories that enable us to learn from history, from the real stories of those who are no longer with us in order to create a safer, better future.
And something to watch.
HMD 2011 Untold Stories from Holocaust Memorial Day Trust on Vimeo.
Not too late to include HMD in your Sunday service, and if you think it is, start planning for next year.
Pax
3 comments:
HMD should be widened to include victims of the megaholocaust - the abortion industry. 32m in 2010 alone - rather more than managed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot put together. Or is HMD just a convenient way to keep peoples' minds on a holocuast that happened 60 years' ago, in a different land, and firmly off the one happening right now, right here, which we could (unlike the past one) do something about?
No and no. The two things are not mutually exclusive, but neither do they need to be conflated.
The problem with the idea of extending HMD into one which includes abortion (AKA 'the Silent Holocaust' ) is to extend past the 'Shoah' (the correct term for the Nazi holocaust) and the genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia.
There is a need for a separate 'silent generation' day to mark the many lives taken by abortion bit this is not generally genocide but social, economic and gender engineering.
HTH
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