During half term, with my family, I visited the Anne Frank House in the centre of Amsterdam. Our visit was at the end of the day, pushing into the evening, but the crowds were still substantial, as we made our way slowly around this otherwise unremarkable house in which Anne, her parents and elder sister, and four other Dutch Jews hid out of sight of the Nazis for some two years, prior to their arrest in the early August of 1944.

In each of the rooms, the excellently curated information on display contains quotations from Anne’s now famous diary, creating an almost unbearable sense of poignancy as you immerse yourself in the story of those terrible times. Her youthful naivety and profound sense of hope is palpable, and all the more moving in the light of her eventual fate in the disease-ridden huts of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

My wife, my teenage sons and I were pretty silent by the end of our visit – and we were not alone. Despite the exit of the exhibition containing the inevitable café and gift shop, the atmosphere was muted and subdued. Being brought face to face with the horrors of the Holocaust made personal in such a very particular – and in some ways, very unremarkable – setting, it was as if we were all, inwardly, echoing the words which we just heard from Saint Paul: What then are we to say about these things?

Anne, of course, would not have been silent. Her answers to that rhetorical question fill her extraordinary diaries. “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” she wrote, “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

And, of course, that goodness of heart is one of the things that, today, we gather to remember. The sacrifices of so many, especially in the two world wars, who rose up to fight against those who sought to dominate and subjugate others through acts of intimidation and violence and warfare. The thousands upon thousands who gave their lives to ensure freedom and peace for others. That sacrificial generosity should never be forgotten.

So it is, indeed, good that we should speak of ‘these things’ – that we should know what to say about them. For such sacrifices should inculcate in us, and in those who come after us, a similar desire to live out such radical generosity, and demonstrate that Anne Frank was not wrong about the fundamental goodness of humanity.

But that is no longer enough. When Paul demands of us to speak about ‘these things’, there is more to say. For if we talk for just a few more moments about the Holocaust, then we should note that, despite the 1.2 million visitors that come to the Anne Frank House each year, in Anne’s native Holland, a recent survey showed that 12% of Dutch adults believe the Holocaust to be a myth, or to be very greatly exaggerated. And if you focus on those under 40, that figure rises to 23%.

In Britain, the same percentage said they had never heard of the Holocaust, or – at best – knew very little about it, and over half were unaware that it resulted in the death of six million Jews. The figures for the United States are even more alarming.

More broadly, over 40% of British adults surveyed could not answer correctly which country was the principal enemy of the Allied forces, and over 50% did not know what the D Day Landings were. That, to my mind, suggests that our communal attempts to do some ‘remembering’ are not working as well as they should – and the consequences of this failure are alarming.

Writing in today’s Observer, the distinguished British historian Sir Anthony Seldon, powerfully recalls the optimism of the post-war government of Clement Atlee, who sought to deliver ‘a new Jerusalem’ for the people of Great Britain.  https://observer.co.uk/news/opinion-and-ideas/article/in-1945-we-said-never-again-yet-already-weve-forgotten

Seldon contrasts it painfully with the reality we experience today, writing:

Unemployment, ill health, homelessness and despair are reaching levels that would have shocked the architects of the new Jerusalem. Nigel Farage’s Reform party has a credible chance of winning the general election due in 2029. Abroad, we see Europe divided and at war. In Germany, [the far right populist party] Alternative für Deutschland achieved its best results, with 21% of the popular vote. Far-right parties are performing strongly in France, Italy, Austria and Belgium. Russia is intent on beating Ukraine, and is shamelessly destabilising Eastern European countries.

In short, to summarize Sir Anthony’s words, the world feels as if it is an ever more dangerous place, despite the fact that we ought to know better. All of which says to me that we are not doing this ‘remembering’ thing properly. All of which says to me that we are not using our memories. Or, to put it in the language of St Paul, we have not come up with a proper answer to his blunt question that opened our second reading, when he demands of us What then are we to say about these things?

If you were to open your Bible and glance back at Romans Chapter Eight, from which we have just heard, you would find Paul explicitly addressing what he calls ‘the sufferings of this present time’. But he is clear that for God’s children, present-day sufferings do not diminish the hope of our calling – our calling to change the world, our calling to make the world a better place, our calling – like Atlee – to build ‘a new Jerusalem’ fit for a people committed to peace and justice. And Paul, as we heard, is clear that if we strive to do this, then nothing in all of creation ‘will be able to separate us from the love of God’.

But that’s only going to happen if we start remembering properly, and using our memories to fulfil that vision. Sir Athony reflected on the celebrations this year of the 80^th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War:

We have … forgotten the lessons of the second world war. This summer, on the 80th anniversary, the bunting came out, books were published and war films and documentaries were shown. It felt cheap and vulgar. We were remembering winning a war, not why the war had been fought.

And with that forgetfulness, we find ourselves incapable of knowing how to answer Paul’s demanding question: What then are we to say about these things?

When the young Alice of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian children’s novels steps through the Looking Glass, she encounters the White Queen – a confused and confusing individual who explains that she lives ‘backwards through time’, as a result of which, she has a memory which ‘works both ways’. And when the bewildered Alice explains that she is unable to remember things before they have happened, her new friend exclaims, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”

Whether Anne Frank knew Lewis Carroll’s books, I have no idea, but she would, I am sure, have agreed with the White Queen. For Anne was clear that, in her own words, “I want to go on living even after my death” – a fate that has been amply fulfilled by her remarkable diaries. Fulfilled, because her diaries that chronicle her memories of this most awful period of human history have been shared across the globe in every generation since those darkest of days. Shared, in the hope that we are called to realise, the hope that such terrible times could nor arise again.

But we will only be able to do that if we can work out, as Saint Paul demands of us, What then are we to say about these things?

And if we are serious in sharing Paul’s belief that the ‘sufferings of these present times’ can make us ‘more than conquerors through him who loved us’, then we need to make our memories work forwards, and not just backwards. For to do anything less is to dishonour those whom we remember today. And then we might, just possibly, start to change the world to be more Christ-like – to achieve that vision of ‘a new Jerusalem’. For as young Anne said in one of her last recorded remarks, “How wonderful it is that no one has to wait even a minute to start gradually changing the world.”

Amen.