A Grandmother's Dandelion Seed

Bina Gibson was born in Berlin in 1920 and now lives in a quiet village in Devon, England. Her life embodies many of the struggles of this past century. Hers has been a journey of fears and faith, of joy and pain, of war and peace. This bold grandmother compares her latest move - a call for a UN World Day of At-One-Ment - to a dandelion seed. 'I keep blowing hopefully in different directions and ask God to bless the thought which he put in my head until it finds fertile soil.'

Being of Jewish heritage, she fled with some of her family to South Africa in 1933. At the outbreak of World War II she and her two brothers volunteered for the army and by the end of the war she was a captain in British Intelligence. She was involved in interrogating German prisoners in Italy and in the denazification of Austria, where she learned through the Red Cross that her father, whom she had not heard from since the beginning of the war, had died in Auschwitz nine days before the Russians reached the camp. The hurt was so deep that she could not speak of it for 40 years.

When she returned to South Africa, she became involved with the Black Sash movement against racial segregation. Then in 1947 she went to England to marry the British officer who had been her boss in Intelligence. For the next 40 years, they were both involved in education.

In 1980 she plunged into the peace movement and was even arrested for demonstrating against nuclear weapons at the Ministry of Defence in London. Her protest was driven by her conscience as a Christian and her experience of the results of the lack of resistance in pre-war Germany.

In 1994 she went to Auschwitz to honour the memory of her father, to mark the passage of 50 years and, with Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus, to inaugurate a Pilgrimage for Peace and Life from Auschwitz to Hiroshima. There she met members of One By One, a Massachusetts-based non-profit organization created by people whose lives had been deeply affected by the Holocaust. Members include both children of survivors and also children of perpetrators of bystanders in one of the most evil chapters of human history.

'The thought of being in the same room with a former member of the SS, the children of Nazi officials and mass murderers repelled and terrified me at first, ' she says. 'But when I saw their tears and despair and felt their grief, I could let my own tears flow and realized almost for the first time that the anguish of victim and perpetrator is the same.' Some became her friends.

While she was in Auschwitz she wrote in a poem about her father, 'I pray with others for those of good will and also for those of ill will, for after all we are part of each other ... May God forgive you and me. Forgive what you did to them. Forgive me for having hated you.'

Her proposal of the UN instituting a World Day of Atonement draws on her work with One By One, her experience of Yom Kippur and example of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She sees it as a celebration of the new Millennium.

She compares this approach with President Lincoln's call in 1863 for a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer. 'We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity,' he said. 'We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and have vainly imagined that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behoves us then, to confess our national sins, and pray for clemency and forgiveness.'

Since Lincoln's day, she says, we have become a global village. Our children may not repeat our many transgressions if we acknowledge our past with truthfulness and remorse.