The monthly letter from Fr Yenda.

February 2010

My dear people of S Mary’s.

Last month I had the great joy of a visit to Berlin. It is a city I have for a long time wanted to visit, with its chequered history, and its culture, and of course its architecture – I have never really understood why I have waited so long to go and see it.

So, with the aid of the net, and cheap flights by Easyjet, and a very cheap hotel, off I went. I did not, however, expect to end up in one of the places that I did; I fell over on the snow and ended up in A and E in Berlin. Not quite what I had expected – but to cut a long story short (the first time ever a Vicar will do you that kindness!) nothing was broken, and after a day on crutches, I progressed to one crutch and decided to carry on touring round.

The first tour I made was around the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. People so very often say to me ‘I could never go and look around somewhere like that – it must be horrid and depressing; how can you go to such a place?’

Well I have to say that it is the 3rd concentration camp I have been around, and this time the tour guide was the most informative I have encountered anywhere. It was freezing cold – thick snow – and to add to this I was hobbling around behind everyone else only just managing to keep up – and sometimes not quite managing it! But that gave me a very different perspective to what I might have had if I had gone on a lovely spring day, with sun in the sky and at full usual speed!

Looking around Sachsenhausen I was aware that for those people who had been imprisoned there any cold would have made their lives dreadful given the thin clothing they were wearing, and any injury would in many cases be the beginning of the end. As we were shown the more unbelievable aspects of concentration camp suffering, I was aware also of how privileged our group were to see this dreadful place having not had to see it in full operation.

The next day I went on a tour entitled ‘Red Berlin’ which took us around parts of the former East Berlin, showed us parts of the Berlin Wall which were still standing, and again an informative guide gave us some of the history and information about the Communist times in the city. Seeing the wall itself, and seeing where cars can now pass and people can now walk over where the wall once stood is incredibly moving, and some of the stories that people can recount is almost unbelievable. How a city was divided in that way, and people locked behind a wall never able to leave just sounds now like something out of a novel or a horror movie – yet it did happen.

One of the most interesting things was that the U-Bahn – or the metro – passes from the West to the West but goes through the East – for the years when the wall was up, those stations in the East of the city were simply ghost stations, where the train would not be able to stop – with a security guard there to make sure that no one tried to board a train from the East to the West. The idea becomes even more unbelievable, because at the opening of the station thee would be 3 solid at either end, so no one could get there – and also the guard himself would be locked in his little booth, so that there was no chance of him escaping either!

Yet what really brought home to me the actual suffering for the people was a taxi driver I was chatting to (who fortunately spoke English) who was telling me that he grew up in West Berlin, but his mother’s sister lived on the East. In all the years that he was growing up, he and his mother went only twice over to the East – just for a day each time – to see his aunt. His mother, in short, might just have well been living at the other side of the world, for all that she was able to see her sister, but her sister was simply a few streets away yet they couldn’t visit each other. I found this incredibly humbling to listen to.

As we begin the season of Lent with Ash Wednesday, I am aware that Lent is the sombre preparation for Passiontide – the time of Our Lord’s greatest suffering, which we have to live through before we get to Easter.

Thinking about the plight of the people who suffered in the concentration camps, and those who were divided from their families, and who were unable to enjoy the freedom which all mankind should be entitled to gives us the opportunity to see great suffering and to understand during Lent, how we can identify more closely with Our Lord’s suffering on the Cross.

As always it remains my tremendous privilege and immense joy to serve as your parish priest,

All good wishes,
Fr Yenda