On the 75th Anniversary of VE Day

I’ve been spending a lot of time, recently, on the phone to our older members. “What memories do you have of VE day?” I asked a sprightly (and doing quite nicely in splendid isolation) nonagenarian in the Shul.

“Oh it was great,” he replied, “we did all sorts of things you’re not allowed to do today.” I didn’t press the matter. I mean there are all sorts of things that aren’t allowed today.

Another shared, “I went to Trafalgar Square, by myself, I was only 14. I remember a lot of people and getting crushed in the crowd.” Ahh crowds.

Other members were celebrating, “But only in Hendon, my father wouldn’t let me leave Hendon for the celebration.”

“We were on a boat,” shared another member. She and her family had spent the war in Canada, and her mother, homesick and desperate to return, arranged berths on a cargo ship leaving North America on 30th April I a convoy, surrounded by smaller Canadian ships. “On the morning of 8th May, I remember all these little ships hooting and hooting. And then they all headed back home. At that point our rudder broke. The journey should have taken 10 days, we were at sea for a month.”

And other members weren’t really celebrating at all. One of our oldest members spent VE day on a military engineering course. For him, VE Day marked only the end of the war in one theatre. He was off to Benghazi, the North African front, after this ‘great day’ passed. Others, also, were not celebrating - at this point, no longer quite sure why. Was it exhaustion from the conflict or the sense the war was not yet over? "Perhaps the latter," one said.

The line, in my mind, was Churchill’s, from November 1942, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The symbol of this time is the rainbow. We are waiting for the good news that we can come out of our claustrophobic arks, and back into the world we miss. But this epidemic isn’t going to end with a rainbow. There may come a little loosening of restrictions, heavily laden with counter-warnings. There will still, rightly, be much nervousness and tentative baby-steps, even after we are allowed out.

Our emergence from this time of darkness – when and as it will come - will not come like Noah and his sons emerging into a new world. Instead, it will come like VE Day for those who knew that the war was not yet won. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pause to acknowledge the heroic steps forward as they are taken. That was the best reason to head for Trafalgar Sq 75 years ago, and to celebrate this anniversary today. Indeeed pausing to celebrate the moments of joy as they come is perhaps the single best way to make it through this time - day by day - keeping our attention on the present. The sun is shining today. That's a good place to start.

In contrast to the utter horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War, this lockdown is strange, rather than atrocious, even for those of us who have suffered, and I know many have and others will.

But for the mere gift of our survival, as a Jewish community on the other side of the Holocaust, I am deeply grateful and in awe of the courage and sacrifices of those who fought on the side of the Allies, on the European Front and further abroad. Their heroism inspires me today, as it inspires all of us. It is good to be alive. It is good to live in a democracy that despite its faults, values all human life. It is a blessing to be able to celebrate 75 years since the end of that awful tyranny. May we never again know its like.