Ray writes -

Through January we have been meeting regularly on monday evenings for a meal and practice together.  Tonight though, instead of a service, we chose to attend the candlelit memorial ceremony held at the Winter Garden as part of Holocaust Memorial Day.

I was conscious of just how busy we all are. Sundari with a deadline for the completion of her book manuscript;  Bhaktika not present because he was working late; Stuart about to begin a night shift at the hospital; Sally just starting a new job; Sue also in the early days of her new career as a housing officer; and me, with a head full of planning for people’s alcohol detoxifications! The line of our liturgy that reads “Wishing to practise a religious life in truly simple faith” has become almost a koan for us as we explore what it means to live a buddhist life very much amidst life in the world.

The memorial was moving. There were some readings given by students from the King Edward VII Secondary School, including Benjamin Zephaniah’s powerful poem - We Refugees

Khun Saing spoke of his experiences fleeing from Burma and the home he has found in the UK.

But it was the words of Dr Otto Jakubovic that will stay with me. He started by saying he had been asked to speak for five or six minutes about his experiences as a child in the concentration camps during WWII. An impossible task and he spoke for much longer. He spoke with great dignity and the image that remains is that of a 14 year old boy, arriving at a death camp after an unimaginable train journey in a cramped carriage, walking in a line that seemed to be being segregated into two streams. Puffing out his chest, saying he was 18 and a gardener rather than a just a school boy, he was thus  spared the wavering of a thumb that meant he avoided being immediately sent to  to the gas chambers and instead was led to the camp.  ”You had to have luck to survive” he said.

The event ended with the lighting of candles and affirmations about what people could do right now to address discrimination in our own city and how we can all be a part of being a welcoming, inclusive community.