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Tag: Veronica Zundel

  • Forgiveness Fridays: Forgiving Hitler? by Veronica Zundel

    When is it our place to forgive? Are we being presumptuous when we forgive someone who hasn’t hurt us directly, but who hurt someone close to us? Veronica Zundel poses some important questions to ponder. Do we have the right to forgive?

    Don’t laugh, but I find it much easier to forgive people once they’re dead. Yes, I know they can no longer apologize, but they key thing is, neither can they repeat the behaviour that caused me such hurt. The thing is, I find it hard to forgive someone who I know perfectly well is going to do it again, and again, because that’s what they do. They are a person who carps, or undermines, or pushes boundaries continually. And deep down, I feel they ought to be punished. Or at least to be told the truth of what they’re doing – only being a coward, I’m not going to be the one who tells them. Besides, my feelings of being hard done by seem so unconvincing once I put them into words. Is that really worth making such a fuss about?

    And another thing: how do I forgive someone who has not offended me directly, but has hurt someone close to me? Is it my place to forgive Hitler, or his subordinates, for what they did to my close family – forcing my parents to flee their home, and then killing my grandmother, great-aunt and great-uncle in a concentration camp? Clearly, it has affected my own history and my own emotions, but isn’t it for those who suffered to forgive? Or on a lesser level, can I forgive the ‘demon headmaster’ at my son’s school (who was also known as ‘Hitler’ to the pupils) for what he did to children with special needs? After all, it wasn’t done to me, and my son got off relatively lightly. The same applies to successive governments whose policies had and have horrendous effects on the poor and vulnerable – is it my place to forgive, when I wasn’t one of those affected?

    Most significantly right now, can I forgive my beloved church, the mainstay of my life for 24 years, for closing down? Or its parent body for closing five years earlier, which led directly to the dwindling of the church? The fact is, I’m just not very good at forgiving – in fact I’m much better at finding excuses why I shouldn’t. I’ve always had a keen sense of justice, and forgiving just doesn’t seem fair.

    Members of my church eating together.

    I know that God’s forgiveness of me is supposed to be the basis for my forgiving others. But I became a Christian at 16, before I’d had the chance to do much dramatic sinning, so sometimes I find it hard to see myself as ever having been a great sinner. Others who can see me more clearly may disagree… The saving grace is, the older I get, the more I see my own faults; and the more I realize that God, in fact, forgives me umpteen failures and deliberate choices day by day.

    Ultimately, I know my difficulty with forgiveness causes more harm to me than to the people against whom I bear a grudge – who probably don’t even know the effect they had on me. And my inability to forgive easily makes me more aware how much I rely on the Spirit of God to help me – which is why a couple of years ago my ‘prayer for the year’ was that God would teach me how to forgive. All learning is a process, so maybe I can start with those who’ve left us, and gradually progress to forgiving those who are still alive – even if I know they are almost certain to do it again. One day I might even manage seventy times seven….

    Veronica Zundel is a freelance writer for the Christian market, currently studying for an MA in Writing Poetry, and undergoing cancer treatment. She lives in North London with her husband, adult son and a large, fluffy cat inclined to sudden biting.

  • Home is another country by Veronica Zundel

    No Place Like Home“Where is home when your mother’s tongue is not your mother tongue?” Veronica Zundel’s opening line compels us to read on – and I hope you will, for her thoughts on finding home as the child of immigrants will move you. She speaks of loss and yet an undergirding hope.

    Where is home when your mother’s tongue is not your mother tongue? Let me explain. My Jewish mother and Gentile father left Vienna in 1939 for the UK. Their marriage in London was followed by 14 house moves (well, 14 single room moves) in a few years. Finally they settled in Coventry, where I, their second child, was born. When I was five and my doctor Dad had earned enough (Mum was unable to finish her medical studies), they bought land and had a modern house built, with a large garden including an apple orchard, where I would later pick and eat unripe cooking apples, to the detriment of my digestion!

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    My mother.

    My mother never saw her own mother again – she perished, along with Mum’s aunt and uncle, in a concentration camp. Five of my potential six grandparents (my mother was adopted), died before I was born. The sixth, my father’s mother, along with his brother and sister, lived in Vienna, so I saw them at best annually. Neither of Dad’s siblings had children (though I later learned of my rakish uncle’s secret illegitimate daughter), so my brother and I were the only ‘next generation’. There were plenty of honorary aunts, uncles and even cousins of a sort, but no extended family. We had enough money, but this was a form of poverty not often recognized.

    Meanwhile the family home held a different culture from that of school or playmates; a little enclave of Austria where they spoke a strange hybrid language laughingly called ‘Emigranto’ or ‘Refugäsisch’, where they ate different foods and even held cutlery differently, where everyone spoke at once and I couldn’t get a word in. Better to retreat to my bedroom with a book and explore other worlds, as well as playing with my imaginary English family with five children (including, as in all the best fictional families, twins).

    When I was 13 and he 18, my brother became mentally ill, and was in and out of hospital until he killed himself in 1975 at 27. In the light of all this, it is unsurprising that I found ‘home’ in places rather than people. At 16 I found a new home in Jesus; and about a year later I discovered what would be my first ‘spiritual home’, at a Lutheran community/conference centre I visited regularly and later lived and worked at for six intense months. Yet a few years on, this ‘home’ would be lost, sold by the Lutherans and its community scattered. By then, I had my own flat in London, home of a sort but often lonely.

    Christmas in Vienna.
    Christmas in Vienna.
    Beautiful rural Austria.
    Beautiful rural Austria.

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    Fast forward a dozen or so years to my marriage in 1989, and my parents’ decision to ‘retire to London’ to be nearer us. This was fine, except that I soon learned that the couple (a Jewish doctor and his convert wife) who bought their house, had demolished my bedroom to build an octagonal excrescence containing a new master bedroom and a kosher double kitchen. (All that observance didn’t do the wife much good, she later ran off with her personal trainer!) They also felled the silver birch tree outside my garden window, and losing the other window that allowed me to climb surreptitiously onto the garage roof. All my childhood, gone at a stroke.

    Happily Ed and I had found a new, wonderful spiritual home in the Mennonite church. After a lifetime of taking photographs only of places, I started to take photographs of people, and to find Christ in them, where I had previously found him only in solitude and natural beauty. Could home, once more, be a community? But now that home, after more than two decades, is lost too, with the closure of what was the only English-speaking, non-conservative Mennonite church in the UK.

    Mennonites eating together.
    Mennonites eating together.

    What is left? I have a caring, loyal husband and a delightful son who just turned 22, and we have lived in the same house for 27 years – so is this home? Coventry, which I still visit, still feels like home in a deeper way; and Vienna, which I have known since I was four, another kind of home, yet not home. Perhaps home is always elusive, a state to which we aspire. As Jesus followers we are ‘resident aliens’, citizens of another kingdom, longing for a city which is to come. Only there will we be truly at home.

    Veronica_Zundel_015-1Veronica Zundel is the author of nine books including three anthologies for Lion Publishing, and three books for BRF, of which the latest is Everything I Know about God, I’ve Learned From being a Parent (BRF 2013). She writes regularly for BRF’s New Daylight notes, and a column for Woman Alive magazine, which won a national award, beating columnists from the Mail on Sunday into second and third places. She is is a prize-winning poet who blogs at reversedstandard.com and on the ACW blog, More than Writers.