Some of you may know that I was born in Leningrad – a place with some tragic history. During the Second World War the city was besieged by the German army. The siege lasted just under 900 days and included a fiercely cold winter of 1942. With no water, no electricity and no food, 1.5 million of the 3.2 million population perished – almost a half. The majority died of hunger. All cats and dogs had already been eaten in the beginning of the siege and the daily norm of bread – 125 grams – did not make much of a difference, especially since the ‘bread’ barely even contained any flour. Miraculously, the city carried on living and resisting. Shostakovich’s famous Leningrad symphony was premiered there in 1942. Exhausted malnourished actors performed on stage. The radio never went silent. Realising that victory won’t be easy, the Nazis were conducting regular air raids but the city stood strong. My great-grandmother, who was digging trenches outside Leningrad in the beginning of the war, lived long enough to tell me some stories, and anyone born and growing up in Leningrad and later St Petersburg could not escape the stories of the war. The survivors of the siege came to every school to talk to children, we watched documentary footage and visited every possible museum dedicated to the siege. We all saw a piece of that bread. 27th January, the Holocaust Day everywhere else, has a very different significance for the people of Leningrad: it is the day the siege was lifted. Every year on this day people paused and cried at the memories of terror. And on 9th May, the Victory day in the Soviet Union, we went to the local memorial cemetery, to lay flowers on the mass graves of half a million unnamed people who died during the siege.
The war happened well before my generation were born but we knew about it and remembered what we knew. But somehow, we did not even notice how, slowly, over the last 20 years, the words of sorrow have been replaced by jingoism celebrating war, how the memories of terror, death and fear have been substituted by newly manufactured memories of glory and the thrill of victory, how the parade on 9th May turned from a commemorative act into a demonstration of military might, how the ‘never again’ became the ‘let us repeat’ – a slogan that appeared on T-shirts and bumper stickers. The people who were brought up to be well aware of the horrors of war started to believe that war is somehow not only noble and honourable but desirable.
Of course not everyone believes this, but enough do to have allowed another war to begin. The responsibility is with the very few who gave the orders to invade Ukraine, but the war is fuelled by people’s support. It seems that their awareness of the cost of war and their desire for peace were among the first victims, well before the army started its advance across the border.
Peace is a fragile thing in practice, but it is even more fragile in our minds. The shift from ‘never again’ to ‘let us repeat’ was so seamless it went unnoticed, and then it was too late. This is a sobering reminder to us gathered here today. Like us, the Russians gathered every year to remember the war and gradually forgot why. But do we remember why we are here?
It won’t sound nice or comforting but it is important. We are here to mourn, to think of death and devastation, to remember the cost of war – the nearly 900,000 British soldiers who died in the First World War and almost 400,000 in the Second World War, the thousands of others from around the world, the thousands who died in other conflicts and the millions whose lives have been and continue to be ruined by war. There is nothing glorious and nothing noble about it and God forbid we ever feel like there is. This occasion, the Act of Remembrance, must continue to bring tears to our eyes, however many years pass.
Yes, it has been a century since the First World War, but I feel that this day is still needed now, perhaps more than in the recent decades, to exercise our peace muscles. We must never forget not for the sake of never forgetting but because as long as we remember the price that has been paid for peace, we will always feel sick at the thought of war. This is our immunity against it.
I think it is significant that every year we gather in the church. We gather within the walls that welcome people every day to come into the presence of the Prince of Peace, of the one who told us to turn the other cheek and to love one another, even our enemies. Whether you have a faith or not, I think these are pretty good principles to live by and I pray that we all may take them seriously, for the sake of those who have paid for peace with their lives in the past and those who may have to defend it in the future. Amen.