OUR Year 7-13 students and staff came together in Ely Cathedral this morning (January 24th) for what was an incredibly moving Holocaust Memorial Service.
We welcomed Holocaust survivor, Eva Clarke BEM, into school for the service. Eva was born in Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria on 29th April 1945. She and her mother are the only survivors of their family, 15 members of whom were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau: three of Eva’s grandparents, her father, uncles, aunts and her 7-year-old cousin, Peter.
Eva read the poem, ‘First they came…’ which is the poetic form of a prose post-war confession first made in German in 1946 by the German Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller.
Revd Dr Ros Lane, Chaplain at King’s Ely, said: “The theme of our worship was ‘Stand Together’. Today marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Sir Nicholas Winton, who rescued 669 children from Nazi Occupied Europe, reminds us ‘Don’t be content in your life just to do no wrong, be prepared every day to try and do some good’.
“2020 also marks the 25th anniversary of the Genocide in Bosnia. In this act of worship, we came together as a school community to overcome racism, discrimination, religious intolerance and ignorance in our world today. We stood together with other groups around the globe and remembered that we are never alone in overcoming these human ways of thinking and behaving.
“In our reflection, we listened to Spikes play the first movement from a Jewish life by Ernest Bloch, written in 1924, and dedicated to the cellist called Kindler. This music captured the complex, ardent, Jewish soul and created us with an opportunity to pray.”