‘How did they survive?’ How often I have heard people ask this question with humbled amazement after meeting a survivor or a child from the Kindertransport. Tuesday 27 January will mark seventy years since the first troops of the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. How powerfully Primo Levi described his first sight of them, four soldiers on horseback ‘throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at the few of us still alive…oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint’.

Reading accounts by survivors, gripping, terrible, often also inspiring, is apt to give a distorted impression. The overwhelming majority of Jews in lands occupied by the Nazis did not survive. Of most of the victims, we know only passing sentences about the gaps they left in the lives of a loved one, perhaps the sole individual from a family of twenty, or forty, to see the summer of 1945 and to testify afterwards in the archives of Yad Vashem concerning the names of those who never came back.

Many, perhaps to some degree all, who survived did so partly by luck. To return to Primo Levi, whose acute and discerning honesty, neither self-dramatizing nor self-pitying, makes him the greatest of witnesses, it was not necessarily the best who survived the cruel struggles forced upon them by the cunning degradations devised by the Nazis and their collaborators. Many of the best, he wrote, gave away their bread, and perished.

Yet, besides chance, that this hiding place was not discovered or betrayed, while that one, metres distant was, one senses – both in the testament of those who did survive and in the fragments, letters, drawings, memories of words stealthily uttered, of those who did not – that there is something else, something penetrating and enduring, something pure, which remains to testify, alongside the vast evidence of unimaginable cruelties, to an essential vibrancy and humanity which has not even now, seventy years later, been extinguished, and never shall be.

Among some, there remained a deep faith. ‘They walked upright and they sang’ Roman Halter, one of “The Boys”, recalled about the Hasidim who advanced next to him towards the infamous selections. ‘I asked, and they told me it was a verse about entrusting themselves to God’s care’. For many more it was not faith in God alone, or faith in God at all, but faith in life, the inestimable beauty and tenderness of life itself, which imbued their hearts with such defiant tenacity, even though their own life was in all probability about to be stolen from them.

Such is the evidence in the picture from the camp at Gurs in the Pyrenees of the light-winged, multi-coloured butterfly perched on the very barbed wire which denied the painter the freedom of the mountains beyond. Such is the testament of the child who wrote in Theresienstadt, ‘I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining’. Such too is the testimony of Gerda Weissman-Klein who wrote, recalling the conversation between her parents about their love for each other which she overheard on the last, sleepless night before the dawn of their separation, that it was this very love which sustained her in Poland and Germany, through camps and ghettoes, when all else was taken from her except what she treasured in her own heart, and the stalwart ski boots her father had insisted, despite her protestations, that she put on her feet on that hot day in June when they were forced from their family home.

This precious testament is our inheritance, together with the legacy of bearing witness against all cruelty and evil wherever it is committed on this earth. We must garner this ineradicable faith, this unquenchable love, in our hearts. It is our deepest treasure, our greatest ally, as we, the generations of those now here, carry our life-time of responsibility for the destiny of humanity and the fate of all the creatures on the earth.

Now, when once again the world is louring, replete with potential cruelties yet to unfold, we need every breath of that love and faith, every glimmer and reflection from that eternal light which God illumined in the heart of humanity and which shall never yield to being extinguished, to guide us on our path.