THE LIGHT IN THE SKY

You may call God love, you may call God goodness, 
But the best name for God is compassion.

Meister Eckhart

Gideon knelt on the bedroom windowsill. He could feel the edges of the dark brown tiles bite into his cold three year old legs and when he looked out into what should have been the night black sky, he was afraid. What, he asked, was the flickering red-gold light which had spread across the edge of the world. Out of the darkness his mother’s voice, sharpened by a terrible anxiety, replied that the light in the sky was London burning; German pilots were dropping fire bombs on the City.

The boy who had learned to be afraid the night the sky burned, now in the aftermath of war learned to hate the enemy who had captured his Jewish doctor father near Anzio and sent him back to Germany and the gas chambers of Dachau. This hatred survived university, Middle Temple and an increasingly successful legal career. In 1978 he was asked to advise the Home Office on the likelihood of successfully prosecuting a former Unterfeldwebel accused of the murder of four Russian Jews, P.O.Ws in the Sylt Concentration Camp on the Island of Alderney.

The evidence against the man was considered to be fairly slim, but there were those in government anxious to prove their wholehearted support for the State of Israel. Gideon accepted the offer, he told himself, as a duty - an almost sacred duty - and he was seized with a curious trembling excitement. He had dreamed for so long of somehow avenging his father’s death. He studied the prosecution papers, pondered various legal opinions and flew to Jersey to interview the suspect.

In a claustrophobic room, windowless and airless, with armed guards on every corner of the corridor outside, he watched the prisoner, grey pale from incarceration, soft voiced and still like a heron watching for fish. This then was his enemy; now was the longed-for time of retribution. He looked into the watery grey eyes and saw in them not the cruelty of the fanatic Nazi who had once perhaps strangled Jewish P.O.Ws, but a but a frail, weary, hopeless, shadow of a man seventy five years old - another pathetic victim of hatred and fear, rather like himself.

This was no blinding Damascene moment, no trumpets sounded in that bleak cell, just his own voice gentle now: “I shall recommend to the Home Secretary that you be sent back to Germany. I think you are not well, and I hope you will be allowed to return to your own folk for what is left of your life.” Gideon stood up, his own fear and hatred wonderfully purged, and he quietly clasped the old man’s hand. He walked out of the prison into the sharp air of a late December evening and shining in the north over the cliffs of Alderney he saw a great light. Not this time the reflection of a city on a fire, he thought, but the radiance of angels on a hillside proclaiming their eternal message: ‘Peace on earth to men of goodwill’.

Naomi