World Cup Churches 12. Poland

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Poland is rare among European nations in having increasing numbers of churches.  The land of Poland has an unfortunate story of being a very suitable place to wage war, and as everyone knows, war is a historical preoccupation of Europeans.  Even as I write this blog, Poland is only over the border from Europe's latest war in Ukraine.

Perhaps it is heartening that such a troubled area has increasing numbers of Christian (mostly Catholic) sites.  Here is on such church, in a former Nazi SS Headquarters building:

This Church at Birkenau is, however, very controversial.   It is just down the road, as it were, from the infamous Birkenau Camp - also known as Auschwitz 2. Whilst, looked at from the perspective of Christian - Catholic - tunnel vision it is surely heartening to see a place of such dishonour being redeemed for Christian worship, this is most certainly not how it is perceived by the Jewish community.  And as such it brilliantly illustrates the problem of Church History.

There were, of course Catholic Christians (and other Christians) who died in Nazi Concentration Camps.  But the broad sweep of the Catholic response to Nazism was ambiguity - at best.  Pope Pius's attitude has been the subject of volumes of claim and counter-claim but that his official position was largely neutral is the best that can be said for him.

Hence the problem with this church.  Had it met in the building when the Nazis were there - and challenged them - it might have its rightful place.  But for the Jews it simply reminds them that they were ignored then and ignored now.

Churches need to be good news first and buildings second.

World Cup Blogs 12: Germany

One of the great values of international sport is that it brings people together, albeit in a competitive way.  However, when Argentina recently cancelled a game they had scheduled in Israel we were reminded that sport is not really above politics but is merely allowed brief glimpses of an unrealistic utopia.

Germany are winners when it comes to the World Cup.  But the country faces battles and has worked very hard to redress its 20th century story, a story which put paid to many sporting events.  There was no World Cup tournament in 1942 or 1946.

One, I think, very moving and impressive feature of Germany are Stolpersteine.


In the pavements of several German cities, towns and villages you may find them - in English literally stumbling blocks.   Stolpersteine are embedded stones with a small plaque on top. On the plaque is the name of someone who lived in a building nearby and who was taken away by the Nazis in or before World War II, never to return. Gunter Demnig, an artist from Cologne, made it something of a life's work to place these wherever research shows people were deported.

I photographed those below in an anonymous inner city street in Frankfurt am Main. Seven people whose 'crime' was to be Jewish.

Such is the irrational injustice of anti-Semitism that if I had stood in that street in the war as a Briton - the declared enemy - though I may well have been killed as a spy, I might have talked my way into a prisoner of war camp. 

But had I been a Jew, and that was my home city, perhaps the very street I grew up on, I would more certainly have been killed and my family with me.  We must never let the warm waves of sporting internationalism fool us into thinking that injustice can be eradicated by donning football shirts and kicking a ball.  It might help.  But justice costs more than that.

Free News!

There are very many things that you see in London that you are unlikely to see in many, or any, other places in the UK.  

This seems to be such a thing, outside one of our nearby underground stations.  A Jewish Newspaper stand.

The big word FREE also made me think.  The message of Jesus the Messiah is surely the most wonderful free news ever to be disseminated to the world from the Jewish people, and we pray that many of them, as well as others, in London and beyond may learn to embrace it by faith.

Jerusalem's Windmill

There is a green hill far away outside a city wall.  And on it there stands the windmill.  This is not at all what we expect.  It is one thing to find a windmill in the Netherlands or Kent, quite another to find one outside the walls of Old Jerusalem.

This windmill was both a success and a failure.  

It was a success in that it was built as part of a project to get Jews to move out of their enclave in the old city onto the more spacious land outside.  This seems a simple enough idea now, but in the insecurities of of the nineteenth century with about 20,000 Jews in this enclave of the great Ottoman Empire, moving outside the walls was a daunting idea.  With the help of the windmill a colony was successfully formed outside the cramped squalor of the Old City.

Moses Montefiore, a British Jewish banker provided the funds, but its familiarity to an English eye is down to the fact it was designed in Kent.  And that is why it has survived (more later).

It wasn't a success as a windmill once it encouraged the Jews out of the enclave.  The photo contains a clue for there is a Jerusalem summer sky.  Of course it might be blowing a gale with a blue Middle Eastern sky - that's not unheard of, but rare.  The Kentish windmill lacked the Kentish wind.

But as history turns out (and nothing in Jerusalem is ever simple) its Kentishness saved it.  After the Second World War the Jews were organising themselves to form a homeland State and their enemy was the British.  The British determined to destroy the windmill which was functioning as a gun turret.  But the men sent to destroy it found that it had been designed in Kent - their home county.  So they simply blew the top off it to make it unusable but preserved.

And on another hill near the city the Maker of All showed greater mercy to those he had made.

Holocaust

I was struck by the crafted words of a journalist reporting on today's commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz:  Those who survived Auschwitz lived through one of the 20th Century's worst acts of hatred and inhumanity.

 

In a world where hype so often hides the truth here is the truth: one of one century's worst.

 

In fact the importance of marking today in our thoughts is not because it was unthinkably bad but because the inhumanity of the Nazis toward the Jews and others is repeatable.  The industrial, secret and targeted scale of it sets it apart, but only in degree.  I witnessed the fears that surround this still in one of my earlier blogs.

Protection for Frankfurt's Synagogue - today

We call it inhumanity because we do not want to think of it as human.  But it is absolutely human.  What other created species sets about its own in such a way?  Certainly none with any moderately developed intelligence.

I like the optimism in the word inhumanity.  I like it but I'm not sure I entirely believe it.  Humanity's best hope lies, I think, in the Man from Heaven.

Anne Frank

There are few more haunting places in Western Europe than Anne Frank's House in Amsterdam.
 

That is not to say that there are not worse places.  Massacres have littered the history of Europe; massacres on battlefields, in gas chambers, on hillsides and God knows where else.  Europe, whilst being a very nice continent to live as supplied by God through Mother Nature has also been turned into killing fields very many times and the sites are there to visit (together with a Tourist Office of course).

 

Anne Frank's house touristic too.  Annexes have turned it into a veritable museum and although there is a reality about it in some ways there is also a sense (with the Restaurant and Bookshop at the end)  that this could have been recreated from scratch in, say, Las Vegas.

 

Except for me it couldn't.

 

When we visited it on our vacation it was not the House itself that haunted me - though it is despairingly poignant.  It was just one (black and white of course) picture combined with our experience of visiting.
 

Duly warned, we had turned up early - a very strong recommendation given that there was an eye-poppingly long line waiting by the time we exited.  We lined up for no more than ten minutes and next to the canal and the Great Western Church we watched the cyclists scuttle by, the barges and boats glide past under a summer's sky.

The haunting black and white picture in the House was of exactly the same kind of Amsterdam canalside scene.  Only this time there were Nazi security forces and a line of Jewish families being rounded up for deportation.  The same canals, churches, sunshine, and another line of people out on the street.  These apparently glorious delights buried beneath human hatred.

That a setting that delighted me was a terror to Anne Frank: that I was pleased to linger in a place that she was for years terrified to step into; this showed me that the human heart is far more important than architecture, church buildings, summer weather and lining up.