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I want you to imagine.
You live in the town where you were born, where you have family and friends, where everything is familiar. One of your friends or family is getting married, and you put on your best clothes, pick up the flowers you have bought, and catch a bus to the Church.
Or you are on your way to or from work, looking forward to a coffee and a day or an evening with people you know and like - or perhaps love.
Or you are on your way to fetch your children from school.
And then comes the round-up. You are living somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe at some time between 1939 and 1944 and the Germans are arresting hostages - anyone who is available, in the street, in Church, anywhere, aged 16 and above. The hostages, normally between 50 to 100 of them for each German allegedly killed, will be driven to the forest and shot. Suddenly your life is over. There will be no Priest to confess to.
The wedding party will wonder where you are. They will find out, because the Germans will post on walls and telegraph poles a list of the names of those they have murdered.
Your children will wait and wait at the school. They will not know where you are buried.They will have to grow up without you.
And you stand in a queue, waiting to get on the bus or lorry which will take you the forest to be shot, like the two Polish ladies to the left and right foreground, in your best clothes.
Thinking about it brings me to tears. I know people whose relatives died in this way.
And prayers.
IF YOU READ THIS, SPARE A PRAYER FOR THEIR SOULS AND FOR THOSE MEMBERS OF THEIR FAMILIES WHO MAY STILL BE LIVING.
