Holocaust Memorial Day

This week’s Cathedral Services focussed on Holocaust Memorial Day, which this year commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the Senior service Mr Medhurst spoke on our widening perspective of the Holocaust in popular consciousness and asked the question “Where was God in Auschwitz?”, while the Preparatory School Service detailed the moving story of Hana Brady, an eleven year Czech Jew, one of a quarter of a million children murdered at the hands of the Nazis. The focus was retained in the Lower Sixth “Banned Book” elective, which this week explored Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” detailing the lives of his parents, both of whom were Holocaust survivors.

To conclude matters, the first of the term’s Zetountes lectures examined “Art and the Holocaust”. The talk explored the motives of contemporary artists whose work variously offered an escape from reality and spiritual resistance, at the same time recognising that “when people are dead and their testimony is mute, art remains”. Consideration was given to Jewish victims such as Felix Nussbaum, gassed in Auschwitz, war-artists who depicted the liberation of camps like Bergen-Belsen and Majdanek, survivors like Samuel Bak and contemporary painters, including Anselm Kiefer, whose monumental works address German collective guilt.