We publish the short reflection given by author and potter Edmund de Wall at the Holocaust Memorial Day event organised by CCJ at Lambeth Palace.
Last year, Edmund welcomed our student leaders to his studio for a workshop where they created candle hadlers that were used at the HMD ceremony. The main bowl used during the event was created by Edmund in that occasion.  

I went to visit my father yesterday. He was 96 in February. He is Jewish. In 1939 he arrived here with his mother, father, grandfather and brother. His grandmother Emmy took her life not thinking she would be able to escape. His beloved Aunt and Uncle died in Theresienstadt. His Parisian cousins were deported. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in his twenties. Today I am thinking with you about memorial. Tribute and restitution and memorial sound like the end, sound like closure. But as Jean Amery, who survived Auschwitz wrote,

“I do not have clarity today and I hope I never will. Clarification would amount to dispersal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history […] nothing is resolved, nothing is settled, no remembering has become mere memory”

I feel this is true.

History is happening. It isn’t the past, it is a continuous unfolding of the moment. It unfolds in our hands. That is why objects carry so much, they belong in all the tenses, unresolved and unsettling.

What can we do?

I make porcelain and I write books. I know that things will break – I think of Job on his pile of broken shards.

I don’t repair, I can’t repair. I mark loss, I show where damage has happened. And I think that you can light a candle. The light of a candle is a kind of prayer too. They are fragile. They flare and they pass. They are something understood.