I. We have just had a week of celebrations for V.E. Day, marking the 80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and the end of the war against Nazi Germany. It wasn’t the end of World War II, though. That had to wait until V.J. Day and victory over Japan three months later. There was still a great deal of death and suffering to come, which is one reason why the V.E. Day celebrations were and are somewhat ambiguous. Nevertheless we can hardly ignore or discount the great outpouring of joy that greeted the end of the War in Europe eighty years ago. A great pall of fear was lifted and the hope of a peaceful future after six years of war filled many hearts. But those V.E. Day celebrations in May 1945 were not a mere excuse for street parties and jollification. They were about relief and an uplifting sense of release from a terrible burden that those of us who did not live through it – which is most of us – can scarcely imagine. No present-day “celebrations” of V.E. Day can possibly approach or reproduce, even remotely, the spirit of the original ones. We simply haven’t been through what that wartime generation went through, and that generation has almost disappeared. You might think, then, that we scarcely have the right to celebrate V.E. Day, although we can and should commemorate, honour and give thanks for what our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents achieved in those years of war and the struggle to survive. And that was true for the civilian population as well as those who served in the armed forces. Those original V.E. Day celebrations can’t have been without a profound ambiguity. So many people had been killed. So many people had lost loved ones. So many people had suffered life-changing wounds and injuries. So many people were deeply scarred in mind as well as body. So many people had lost their homes. So many people still didn’t know the fate of relatives, friends and comrades – those who had been prisoners of war, or who were still fighting in the Far East, or who were simply missing. It would take more than a few hours of frantic partying to deal with so much grief and unknowing – necessary though it was for many. Celebration must have seemed premature and inappropriate if war’s grim consequences were still all too present, and that was certainly true for those soldiers who only days earlier had liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the unimaginable horrors of Nazi rule. Celebration must have been a long way from the minds of those young men – and women, like the nurse and poet, Joy Trindles. They came face to face with the consequences of both humanity’s denial and its abdication. Even after fighting their way across Europe they were unprepared for what they found in Belsen
– and in the other concentration and extermination camps that the Allied armies liberated as they advanced. The prisoners were in no condition to celebrate their liberation, and their liberators, faced with a task too grim for our comprehension, were too traumatised to celebrate either. But what it did do was to convince those soldiers of the justice of their cause.
II. I must say that “celebrating” V.E. Day now, in 2025, can seem rather contrived and artificial. Remember it, yes; mark it, yes; learn from it, yes; give solemn thanks for it and for those who brought it about, yes: but celebrate it? How can I really do so? I was born two years after V.E. Day – a ‘baby-boomer’ – and I never shared the realities that led to that explosion of joy in May 1945. But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t part of its aftermath, which hasn’t always lived up to the hopes of that day. As a child in 1950s London the evidences of war were still very much around me. I remember the bomb-sites and the ruins. I remember collecting pieces of shrapnel, which still lay scattered everywhere. I even remember the ration-books in a country whose imperial wealth and power were no more, although, of course, I was far too young to understand this. I also vaguely remember the prevalence of anti-German feeling, although I’m glad to say I don’t remember it at home – except, perhaps when my ultra-patriotic old-soldier of a grandfather was around! I knew about the War, of course, but it wasn’t personal! By the time I got to my teens I was learning German at school. My family befriended a young German who had come to work as a teacher. And in 1966, aged 19, I went to Germany for the first time. This was quite a step, as I recall, even twenty-one years after V.E. Day. But I loved it. I went there, with other UYPLers, to a conference organised by the liberal religious youth movement called IRF – the International Religious Fellowship. I got to know many young Germans who, it seemed to me, were just like us. Fighting and killing them was unimaginable. Germans and English even supported each others’ football teams in the World Cup semi-finals that took place that week! The War was an irrelevance, something belonging in a dark past that we were happy to put behind us. I was in Germany again in 1971 for another IRF conference, and this time we went to Berlin, which was still a divided city, with its notorious wall. There was still much war damage, especially in East Berlin where many buildings, like the Reichstag, were in ruins. The great cathedral, the Berliner Dom, was, at that time, still a derelict hulk, although it has since been magnificently restored. I was very conscious of the recent history of the city, but also – in the western sector – of its revival. And as the ruined cathedral in the east was then a symbol of the wartime past, so the beautiful and newly rebuilt Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche in the west was a symbol of the city’s rebirth, its resurrection, rising as it does, from the ruins of its predecessor. Another landmark, though, The Olympic Stadium, built for the notorious 1936 Games, was a powerful reminder of a darker time.
But two later visits, in 1978 and 2002, took me closer to that time. One was to Auschwitz – now in Poland – and the other was to Dachau, both of them places that had a profound effect on me. They were a reminder of why the Second World War had to be fought, and a warning against the anti-democratic, authoritarian politics that produced it – and which are all too evident again in the world today. They are not the sole preserve of any one nation, and they never were. Personal experiences of Germany in my youth, shared with young religious liberals from Germany and other countries too, were wholly positive. They dispelled, for me, any lingering inherited remnants of war’s bitter legacy, any anti-German prejudices, any wish to exult in past “victories”. We were one international community sharing a liberal faith in what, for us, was one world, where diversity was rooted in a deeper unity. But the ruins in Berlin and, later, the haunted Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau were a reminder of what the contrary beliefs can do.
Remembering an event like V.E. Day only has value if it reinforces the good that we inherit. It must neither be trivialised nor misused. It is then up to us to bring that good to bear on the evils that infect our society and our world – and in the world as it is today, that is no mean challenge.
Cliff Reed,
7th May 2025
Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House 