Auschwitz was

liberated eighty years ago and it is absolutely right that there should have been something special made of this occasion.  We need to remember these things through our ancestors and then through our own memories. The horrors of the concentration camps are not something we can simply sweep under some sort of carpet or brush aside. Those horrors were real and there are still people alive today who experienced and remember those things. They have had to remember them all the rest of their lives because it is impossible to forget such things only possible to learn to live with them.

Many years ago now someone came to the late Senior Cart. This man brought with him a small branch from an olive tree. He asked the Senior Cat to make something called a "holding cross" from this. For those of you who do not know a "holding cross" is something occasionally given to the ill and the dying as a comfort and, perhaps, an aid to prayer. Although often given by a priest they can be given by anyone. I know very little about such things apart from the fact that they are shaped to fit comfortably into the hand of the recipient. They can be made from any sort of timber but olive wood has special significance for some people and this olive wood was considered to be something very special indeed because it came from a tree that had been grown from another on the Mount of Olives, the ridge that runs just outside the oldest part of the city of Jerusalem. 

The man who asked the Senior Cat to do this was the son of a man who had fought in Jerusalem in WWI and never returned home. In a long and complex series of events this now elderly man had come to this country and brought with him what became the tree. Olive trees can live for hundreds of years. This one is almost certainly still alive somewhere but this branch had been taken from it for the purpose of providing comfort for a concentration camp survivor who was now dying. 

The Senior Cat, a man who believed in what he called "practical Christianity" rather than ritual, set about fulfilling the request as carefully and as well as he could. He passed the finished cross back some little time later along with a second one he had been able to cut from the timber he was given. When he returned from having delivered both crosses he was rather quiet and I wondered if they had not been well received. Far from it, the Senior Cat sat down to lunch and said quietly, "You know, he hugged me - and he had tears in his eyes. I am so glad I made both of them."

Olive is a timber I recognise - in more ways than one.