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Shabbat Ki Tavo, 5th September, 2009 – Rabbi Alex Wright

Seventy Years since the outbreak of the Second World War

It has been a strange week. Summer is certainly drawing to a close – what we have had of it. There is a chill in the air in the early morning, the leaves have slowly taken on pale shades of red and gold, the apples in our garden have ripened quickly in these last weeks, and at night when the wind stirs through the trees, they drop heavily on to the dew-laden grass, and before we have time to collect them and stew them, they are bugged and wormed and quickly rot. The early September wedding I officiated at for two of our members on Thursday was due to take place in the grounds of a beautiful historic building in East Sussex. But the heavens opened, the wind was gusty and at the last moment, to the couple's great disappointment, the chuppah was moved inside.

And with these seasonal changes this week, we marked the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. With the memories of those days of uncertainty and held breath, there were those who were remembering particularly their final farewells to parents and family as they made their way to England on the last Kindertransport out of Germany and Czechoslovakia. On Tuesday of this week, a train set off from Prague Station to make the 800 mile journey to Liverpool Street Station. Its passengers were former evacuees, refugees who had left Czechoslovakia between March and August 1939. Meeting the passengers yesterday for a moving reunion was one hundred year old Sir Nicholas Winton. Many of you, I'm sure will be familiar with this name. Winton was a twenty-nine year old stockbroker with Jewish roots who, in December 1938 was packing for a ski-ing holiday when he was telephoned by a friend who urged him to come to Prague where he witnessed the work done by the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. In the following months, Winton focused his attention on refugee children from the Sudentenland and on resident Czech Jewish children. He returned to London with hundreds of pictures and details about children whose parents hoped to save them from the German advances. Impatient with the slow reaction from the Home Office, Winton invented the ‘Children's Section’ of the British Committee and while continuing his day job, spent his evenings writing to the press and every organisation he could think of for help. He asked for money to bring the children to England – £50 guarantee – probably the equivalent about £2,000 or more today and searched for foster parents to take in these children. Through his agency, he persuaded the Home Office to let the children come to England.

Between March and September 1939, eight transports with 669 children arrived in England from Czechoslovakia. The final one, with 250 children on board was due to leave Prague on September 1st, but was stopped by the Nazis. Every single child was taken east and murdered.

With the outbreak of war, Nicholas Winton joined the Air Force. The story of the rescued children was kept secret for fifty years and it wasn't until 1988 that some of the rescued children discovered who had secured their freedom.

Kim Masters' grandparents lived in a small village in Czechoslovakia. Their three daughters were sixteen, fourteen and ten when they took the decision to take the girls to Bratislava and put them on a train destined for England. The sisters recalled the moment when they were about to leave. Their parents were distraught. The older two girls, Josi and Alice, kept urging their parents to take their youngest sister off the train. “We kept saying, ‘Take Elli off the train,’ recalled Kim's mother, Alice. ‘We said, ‘Keep her! Keep her!’” And their mother so full of conflict and uncertainty almost succumbed, taking the tiny girl off the train – before finally putting her back on – the last time their parents would ever see their daughters.

The number seventy is significant for several reasons. Seven and multiples of seven are significant in Judaism – the Sabbath, the Sabbatical Year, the Jubilee Year are special, designated times. The Psalmist writes: ‘the length of our days is seventy years – or eighty, if we have strength’. Seventy for the biblical authors was a lifetime, today it is seven tenths of a lifetime for those like Nicholas Winton who live to be a hundred. That is why this anniversary of the outbreak of the War is perhaps more poignant and more special. Will those who remember their evacuation from Europe, or those who remember the outbreak of the war and their own wartime lives be around for the 75th or 80th anniversaries? Who will remain our wartime examples of heroism, courage and decency? These are difficult and sobering questions.

My generation can only begin to imagine what it must have been like to live through the years of the Second World War – through a time of false hope and false security to begin with, then years of uncertainty, loss, privation, evacuation, separation, economic difficulty, hunger and dislocation. Our generation is spoilt in some ways and find it difficult to conceive and even accept what it must have been like to be separated from husbands, fathers, brothers and sons for whole swathes of time, or how it was for children to be evacuated to places miles away from their own parents and homes, sometimes at a very young age. There was great kindness and generosity of strangers, but there was also insensitivity and indeed unkindness and sometimes what would be considered today inappropriateness that left their scars and deprived children of their innocence and trust in adults.

It would be easy to blame those adults who failed to understand the needs of children or teenagers. Was it deliberate unkindness or insensitivity, or an unwitting omission and ignorance? We have travelled a long way in our understanding of children's needs and dependency in the last sixty years, even though there are certainly times when we doubt our progression as a society, lamenting the brutality and violence that we hear about through our media.

I hope that the names of those men and women who acted decently, with courage and determination during the years of the Second World War, will continue to provide examples for all of us. For it is through those examples that we learn that human existence cannot endure without morality, justice and goodness. These are the critical elements of good religion in its broadest sense. Judaism as a faith and a way of life cannot exist unless ethics and morality are primary, unless its teachings lead towards the human tasks of doing righteousness, showing compassion and pursuing peace, as it is written in our Haftarah: V'samti fekudatech shalom, v'nog'sayich tzedakah… v'amech kulam tzaddikim – ‘For I will make Peace your government, and Righteousness your rulers and your people, all of them shall be righteous for ever.’ Amen.

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