Lest we Forget
Earlier this month on Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Dat we commemorated all those who were killed or wounded in war.
This week a plaque was unveiled to remember those people who made a special effort, sometimes at considerable personal risk themselves, to save Jewish people from the Holocaust.
The official British government record in terms of effective action to protect people from being murdered by the Nazis was mixed. There were undoubtedly some enlightened official decisions which allowed many thousands of people who would otherwise have been killed by Hitler's regime to escape to this country, to America, or to what is now Israel. However historians who examine the record as a whole will always ask whether there was more that the Western powers could have done.
That question will not be asked of Captain Foley, the British Intelligence head of station at the Berlin Embassy, who saved a very large number of people - probably thousands though nobody knows the exact number - from death in Nazi extermination camps. He was one of a number of individual British officials who saw what was coming, and granted visas for Britain to every Jewish refugee they possibly could, sometimes literally securing their release from concentration camps to leave the country. In many cases Captain Foley and his wife personally hid Jewish refugees in their own house.
Men and women like Captain Foley and his wife acted at great personal risk; but they saw a choice between good and evil and they chose the right side.
Few of us will face choices so stark, but there are times when all of us should remember the moral courage of people like the Foleys. Sometime we should ask ourselves - what side are we on?
This week a plaque was unveiled to remember those people who made a special effort, sometimes at considerable personal risk themselves, to save Jewish people from the Holocaust.
The official British government record in terms of effective action to protect people from being murdered by the Nazis was mixed. There were undoubtedly some enlightened official decisions which allowed many thousands of people who would otherwise have been killed by Hitler's regime to escape to this country, to America, or to what is now Israel. However historians who examine the record as a whole will always ask whether there was more that the Western powers could have done.
That question will not be asked of Captain Foley, the British Intelligence head of station at the Berlin Embassy, who saved a very large number of people - probably thousands though nobody knows the exact number - from death in Nazi extermination camps. He was one of a number of individual British officials who saw what was coming, and granted visas for Britain to every Jewish refugee they possibly could, sometimes literally securing their release from concentration camps to leave the country. In many cases Captain Foley and his wife personally hid Jewish refugees in their own house.
Men and women like Captain Foley and his wife acted at great personal risk; but they saw a choice between good and evil and they chose the right side.
Few of us will face choices so stark, but there are times when all of us should remember the moral courage of people like the Foleys. Sometime we should ask ourselves - what side are we on?
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