The St. Julie's community today marked Holocaust Memorial Day (27th January) with two lunchtime services.

27th January, 1945 was the day Allied troops arrived at Auschwitz, that most notorious of concentration camps where over 1 million – mostly, but not exclusively, Jewish – people died. Over 6 million people died during that most awful of events in human history that we call The Holocaust.

It's important to mark this special day as those who survived The Holocaust are now few in number. The theme this year was "Keep the memory alive" and we looked at three women's experience of The Holocaust:

Janine - who had recurring dreams for years about the Nazi boots which she saw and heard as they took her family away; an unnamed woman from Ravensbruck (the women only concentration camp just 56 miles from Berlin) who wrote a prayer a asking God to forgive those who had perpetrated evil and Anne Frank whose diary has inspired millions. We looked at some of her diary entries including:

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

We lit candles in their memory and resolved to take up the challenge and start to improve the world today. Instead of waiting for it to get better, we can make it better by our smiles, our willingness to make the most of every moment and by how we treat each other!