Today’s Scripture Reading (April 12, 2017) Ezekiel
22
Prince Charles remembers his grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, as
an amazing woman. Princess Alice, who was born deaf, married Prince Andrew of
Greece and Denmark and lived in (and out)
of Greece for the rest of her life. Princess Alice is the great-granddaughter
of Queen Victoria and the mother of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and
father of Prince Charles. And Charles is right;
she was an amazing woman.
Princess Alice went through a number of life crises over her lifetime. On
December 1, 1916, during World War I, she and her children were forced to shelter
in the palace basement during the French bombardment of Athens. By 1917, the
neutrality policy of Greece had proved to be unsustainable,
and as a result, most of the Greek Royal
family were forced to flee into exile. She returned briefly to Greece in 1920 but was forced into exile once again in
1922 as her husband, Prince Andrew, was banned from the country for his actions
during the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922).
In 1930, Princess Alice was diagnosed with schizophrenia and confined
to a sanatorium in Switzerland. At this time, she grew apart from Prince Andrew, and the husband and wife lived separately
for the rest of their lives. In 1935, the family was welcomed back into Greece. Her daughters had all married German
men while she was recovering from her mental illness, and when war once again
engulfed the world, Princess Alice found herself in the unenviable position of
having sons-in-law fighting in the German military, and her son, Prince Philip,
serving in the British Navy. Apparently, the
occupying German forces in Greece assumed that the princess was pro-German on
the basis of her sons-in-law involvement in the German Army, which included one
son-in-law, Prince Christoph of Hesse, who was a member of the Waffen-S.S. When
one German general asked her “Is there anything I can do for you?” she is
rumored to have replied, “You can take your troops out of my country.”
But the action that Charles most
admires about his grandmother is that she hid a Jewish widow, Rachel Cohen,
along with two of her five children, from the German Gestapo who were arresting and deporting Greek Jews to the
death camps. During the war, 60,000 Jews out of a population of 75,000 Jews
living in Greece, were deported to concentration camps; and only around 2,000
of those deported Jews survived the war. The Cohen family were among the lucky
ones who found safety in the home of Princess Alice.
God’s complaint against the Princes of
Israel is that each one of them used their power to commit violence, a violence that was perpetrated primarily against those who could least defend
themselves – the foreigner, the widow,
and the children. The legacy of Princess Alice, the beloved grandmother of
Prince Charles, is that she did precisely the opposite. She was an amazing
woman who lived a hard life, and yet
still had the compassion to use her power to protect those that she could.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 23
No comments:
Post a Comment