In Memoriam

I had a productive morning today. I read for a while, then sorted out my tax return for last year. As the tax year ends on the 5th April, getting the return submitted on the 7th was impressively good going, I thought. For once I even got mine done before super-efficient M. To be fair, it is straightforward enough - I keep a running total of freelance income for the year and the employed income figure was on my last pay slip - but it still somehow seems to take more mental energy than it deserves. Being able to complete and submit the return online makes it much easier in my opinion, though M disagrees and is much happier filling in the paper form. Each to their own! HMRC now owe me a refund for overpaid tax on account, so it was a particularly satisfactory exercise. To celebrate TG and I watched the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; we then watched the second part this evening, completing our Harry Potter movie binge. 

This afternoon M and I went to Stowe Gardens for the first time since before the lockdown and did a 5 mile walk around the grounds. The Friends of Stowe House had a little takeaway cafe open just behind these steps, and we tried to resist but failed. We ended up sitting on the steps sharing a scone with jam and cream and warming up with a cup of tea. The snow had gone but it was still definitely on the chilly side. I'll post more photos later in the week. For now I want to talk about this one ... 

M decided to participate in a yellow candle project to remember individual victims of the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) which falls on April 7th. Everyone taking part was sent the name of someone who perished along with a candle to light in remembrance of that individual. The name he received was a little girl who died in the Minsk Ghetto, Lyuba Konatopski. I put my research skills to work and was able to discover that she died along with her older sister Vera and her mother Sonya. Her brother, and possibly her father, survived. There are multiple records for her on the Yad Vashem list of Holocaust victims, and it seems more likely that she was born in 1938 and died in 1941, so was actually only three years old when she died, not six as it says on the card. After the Germans captured Minsk, the capital of what was then the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, in the summer of 1941, a total of over 80,000 people were confined to the Ghetto, where they were subjected to repeated killing raids. It seems likely that Lyuba and her family died in one of the earlier massacres. Minsk now has a memorial to its lost Jewish citizens on the site where 5000 people (including many children) were shot in March 1942. 

May her soul, and the souls of her mother and sister, rest in peace.