Seven Churches in South Oxfordshire

From the Rector: Tuesday 28th January 2025

The Black Map

Dear friends,

I was on the phone at the weekend to a former colleague, who lives in Yorkshire. She is in her eighties, and was telling me about her favourite uncle, who was a solicitor, and who during the war drove ambulances for the British Army. “I only found out after he had died that he’d been one of the first into Bergen-Belsen,” she said. I said “Did you know that tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day?” I asked. “Did your uncle talk about what he saw there?” “No, never,” she replied. “I can only imagine why not.”

Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the advancing British troops on 15th April 1945. It was the first such camp to be entered by the British, and the scenes there were those that properly first brought home to the British public the truly monstrous nature of the regime that we had been fighting. By that stage in the war the death camps in the East had been largely emptied out ahead of the (faster) Soviet advance into Germany, and from late 1944 many thousands of prisoners were force-marched west to other camps, one of which was Bergen-Belsen. The arrival of many thousands of sick and starving brought complete collapse to the already strained resources of the camp. The British medical teams (who were the first into the camp) found fifty five thousand  inmates, many of whom were critically ill, starving or dying of thirst. Conditions were so unbelievably appalling that usual British reserve was put aside, and camera crews were called in. It was possibly felt that mere words would not be enough to describe the horror.

An army chaplain, Revd T J Stretch, gave a testimony on camera, in front of one of the mass burial pits that were required. This article, from the US Holocaust Memorial museum gives a good appreciation of the massive state apparatus behind the Nazi regime’s dealings with “undesirables”. (See the map on the title link) Bergen-Belsen was not primarily a “death” camp, even though over fifty thousand souls perished there, among them Anne Frank. It began as a POW camp, but was expanded in 1943 to become an enormous complex of camps, holding prisoners of the regime; Jews, gypsies, criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, and anyone the regime labelled “asocial”. It is too easy when remembering the atrocities of the Nazis to simply focus upon the vile brutality of the SS. Behind the piles of corpses we must also remember the complicity of those who drove the freight trains, those who compiled lists, those who wrote the propaganda of dehumanisation, those who betrayed friends, those who profited from confiscated business or property, and those who looked the other way and said nothing. Those who study the Holocaust have, as well as the categories of “victim/witness” and “perpetrator”, a third kind of individual; the “bystander”. How would you be, in such a situation, when the risk of speaking out meant that you too, might also perish?

Worship Services for Sunday 2nd February: Candlemas

9.30am Family Service at St John’s, Stoke Row with Canon Kevin Davies

11am Morning Prayer at St Peter and Paul, Checkendon with Mr  Brian Turner

Midweek zoom service: Wednesday Evensong at 5.00pm  410 935 129

We all are very aware that costs for just about everything have increased of late. Your local church too is feeling the pinch – heating, insurance, repairs, clergy – all fixed outgoing commitments. You can support Checkendon church or  Stoke Row churches via dedicated and secure online card donation pages. Just click on the link. It is very secure. There is an option to set your donation to be monthly rather than one off. There is also an option to Gift Aid your donation. Please do this if you can as your church can then reclaim the income tax you have paid on your donation. Thank you!

A little light

It is the time of year when the mornings still are too dark for comfort. Reminders of death and the evil that men do add to the winter’s weight. However this coming Sunday is the last of the Epiphany season, and we remember the presentation of the young Christ in the Temple at Jerusalem, with all the promise of the glory that awaited the messiah of Israel. The day is also known as “Candlemas”, when the lights for the coming days would be given and blessed. As we move into February and the days lighten in their wonderful and inexorable way, so too the Christian year turns towards the Son; after Candlemas the Sundays become those “before Lent”, the colour green.

In the garden, daffodils and a few foolhardy tulips are pushing up in beds and turf. I’ve left a fucshia and a tall sedum unpruned to give the birds on the feeders a little extra sanctuary. The tits on their way to the nuts love to explore in the gooseberries, working their way up and down the branches, looking for grubs of some kind. I thank them for their pest control services. The (squirrel planted) oak by the back fence is a naked and skinny in comparison to the Nordman fir adjacent, which is robed in glorious and rich green. This latter was a rooted Christmas tree which we enjoyed indoors for perhaps fives years before it outgrew us. It is now about twenty feet high, outstripping the oak by a couple, which has its own, different, season of glory. The birds are thankful for them both, as am I in this time when all is bare, waiting, holding out for the light to return. Here’s the collect (prayer) for the coming Sunday which picks up this theme by inviting the light of Christ to dwell in our hearts and lives. May the peace of the Lord be with you, and those you care for.

Revd Kevin.

Lord Jesus Christ,
light of the nations and glory of Israel:
make your home among us,
and present us pure and holy
to your heavenly Father,
your God, and our God. Amen.

 

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