Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust - and the Servant Way

The Forgotten People of the Holocaust - and the Servant Way -  Matthew 5:1-12

This past Tuesday was international Holocaust Memorial Day.  I know some churches like All Souls held an annual Holocaust Memorial Day Service last week on Sunday. 

Now when we think of the Holocaust, our minds rightly turn to the six million Jewish men, women, and children who were murdered, many in death camps and gas chambers. Any act of remembrance that forgets them would be a betrayal of truth and history. And yet, what many people do not realise is that the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust represent just over half of all holocaust victims murdered by the Nazi regime.  If one includes the mass murders and starvation of Soviet Prisoners of War, as some Holocaust scholars do, the Jewish component would be closer to a third of all deaths. 

Considering the more conservative figure of 11 million (held my the majority of scholars) , alongside the 6 million Jewish victims there were at least 5 million others whose lives were deemed unworthy, sub-human and extinguishable by the Nazi regime:  

These included up to half a million Roma and Sinti people (often labaled Gypsies in older sources); 
-roughly a quarter of a million people including children with physical, intellectual or mental disabilities; 
-about 2 million Polish non-Jewish civilians as well as 1-1.5 million Soviet civilians killed through executions, forced labour, and policies of starvation and terrorisation – killed to make room for Germany’s policy of creating Lebensraum (living room) for the German people;
-up to 5000 Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused loyalty oaths and military service; 
-between 5000 and 15000  mostly gay men and others persecuted for their sexuality dying in camps or from brutal treatment;  
-several thousand people of colour living in Europe whose numbers are uncertain due to poor documentation; 
and lastly  up to 100 000 political dissidents and trade unionists; those who resisted or refused to conform.

They are the roughly 5 million, sometimes called, the forgotten victims of the Holocaust - not because their suffering mattered less, but because memory itself can be selective, and injustice is often layered.

To remember them is not to dilute the horror of the Holocaust, but to understand it more deeply. It is also to understand that the Holocaust was not just about anti-semitism even though Jews made up just over half of the 11 million victims normally recognised by museums and memorials.  Some believe that the 3-3.5 million Soviet Prisoners of War killed by the Nazi’s  through starvation, exposure and neglect should also be included because their deaths were also racially and ideologically motivated. 

What these five to eight million ‘forgotten’ victims remind us is that the Holocaust was not driven by antisemitism alone, but by a deeper sickness, a world-view that ranked human lives by worth, some superior than others.

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with ideas and with values that quietly shaped a society’s imagination.

The Nazi world-view exalted:

-strength over compassion
-racial and ethnic purity over shared humanity
-blind obedience over conscience
-power over mercy
-conformity over dignity
-usefulness over inherent worth

Some lives were declared strong, productive, pure, and valuable, while other lives were labelled weak, burdensome, degenerate, less than human, and dispensable.  Once that logic takes hold, cruelty no longer needs to be justified, it becomes a duty.

This is why remembrance matters. Not only so that we remember what happened, but so that we recognise how it happens.  And it is precisely here that today’s Gospel reading speaks with unsettling and profound clarity.

As we have been seeing, Matthew is very deliberate about how he tells the story of Jesus.

Matthew 5 opens with Jesus going up a mountain to teach.  This is not and incidental detail for Matthew.  As Moses once went up the mountain to receive the law, so now Jesus ascends the mountain. But this time, the law is not handed down on tablets of stone. It is spoken into human hearts and lives.

Matthew wants us to see that Jesus is not abolishing Israel’s story, he is fulfilling it. He is reliving Israel’s vocation, and bringing it to its true purpose.

The rhythm of Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:1-12 echoes the rhythm of Sinai. Where Israel received the Ten Commandments, or the Ten Words, Jesus speaks a series of blessings. Not commands, but invitations. Not laws to enforce, but a way of being to embody.

And as Matthew understands Jesus, this way of being, expressed in these blessings or Beatitudes is drawn directly from the vision of Isaiah’s Servant of God passages. 

Isaiah, in chapters 40-55, speaks of a servant who is called by God not to dominate the nations, but to heal them (Isaiah 42:1–9; Isaiah 49:1–6; Isaiah 50:4–11; Isaiah 52:13–53:12)

This servant:

-does not cry out or force obedience
-does not break the bruised reed
-is faithful in suffering
-bears grief and carries sorrow
-brings justice without violence
-restores the broken and gathers the lost
-is a light to the nations

Strikingly, Isaiah sometimes calls this servant Israel, and at other times speaks of the servant as one who must restore Israel. Matthew sees this tension resolved in Jesus.

For Matthew Jesus is the embodiment of faithful Israel where Israel had faltered and failed. Jesus is Israel renewed in human form. Jesus is the Servant not only announced, but embodied. And then, astonishingly, Jesus turns to his disciples and speaks these blessings over them inviting them to share in his servant vocation. 

Now it must be remembered that the Beatitudes are not random virtues. They are the inner meaning of the commandments, revealed through the Servant’s life. (What intrigues me is that there are 10 Commandments in the OT and nine blessings spoken by Jesus – there are also 9 spaces in between the 10 commandments, a space for each of the Beatitudes… symbolising the fact that the 9 Beatitudes express the true inner meaning of the 10 Commandments. … they are also the manifesto and blue-print for Jesus life as the Servant of God. 

What the Jewish religious law sought to shape from the outside through commands and prohibitions, Jesus now forms and embodies from within.

    • The Servant’s humility becomes:  Blessed are the poor in spirit.

    • The Servant’s grief over suffering becomes: Blessed are those who mourn.

    • The Servant’s refusal of violence becomes:  Blessed are the meek.

    • The Servant’s longing for justice becomes:  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness/justice.

    • The Servant’s costly compassion becomes: Blessed are the merciful.

    • The Servant’s integrity becomes:  Blessed are the pure in heart.

    • The Servant’s reconciling work becomes:  Blessed are the peacemakers.

    • The Servant’s faithfulness under persecution becomes: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness or justice’s sake.

For Matthew, Jesus is not only Isaiah’s Servant of God, he is forming a Servant people – a renewed Servant Israel.

Discipleship is learning the Servant way of Jesus by walking behind him.

And it is here that the contrast with the values that produced the Holocaust could not be starker.

The Nazi movement had its own unspoken beatitudes, its own vision of who was “blessed”:

Blessed are the strong, for they shall dominate.
Blessed are the racially pure, for they shall exclude.
Blessed are the blindly obedient, for they shall belong.
Blessed are the ruthless, for they shall prevail.
Blessed are the useful, for they shall be spared.

History shows us where such blessings lead.

Against every ideology that worships strength, purity, and power, (which seem to be on the rise across the world today), Matthew’s Jesus stands on the mountain and speaks a radically different truth:

Blessed are the vulnerable, tender-hearted those free of ego.
Blessed are those who grieve, feeling the pain of the world rather than harden.
Blessed are the gentle who refuse to crush.
Blessed are those who ache for justice and fairness not just for themselves but for others.
Blessed are those who show mercy when vengeance would be easier.
Blessed are those who make peace rather than enemies.
Blessed are those who suffer rather than surrender their humanity.

What is the call for us today?  The Holocaust reminds us that evil does not necessarily come from anarchists and degenerates, but dressed up in national pride, waving flags and banners, clothed in order, efficiency, in military discipline and in seemingly moral certainty.

The Beatitudes however remind us that God’s Kingdom comes quietly, through lives shaped by compassion, humility, and courage.

Matthew’s Jesus does not merely ask us to admire the Servant. He calls us to become the servant Israel, the servant people of God.  To stand with the forgotten. To resist every system of superiority and domination that declares that some lives more worthy or valuable than others. To embody a different set of blessings in a fractured world.

And perhaps that is the most faithful act of remembrance we can offer in the light of Holocaust Memorial Day, not only to remember the victims of the past, but to live in such a way that the values of power, authority, and superiority which destroyed them never find a home in us and in our hearts again.

If one were to add a 10th concluding Beatitude that sums them up, perhaps it would be: Blessed are those who walk the Servant way.