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Good Morning.

Among our emails, there’s sometimes one which gets you in the heart. I stared at my screen in sorrow: ‘Sandra Wellington has died.’ We were friends; her grandfather saved my families’ lives.

He was Robert Smallbones, Consul General in Frankfurt in nineteen-thirty-eight. Today’s date, November 10, found him in London. Throughout the previous night, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Nazi thugs had rampaged through the towns of Germany and Austria, smashing Jewish buildings, burning Synagogues, arresting thousands of Jewish men and murdering many.

Robert received a call from his wife: she and the consulate staff had been up all night trying to comfort thousands of Jews who’d sought sanctuary there. ‘You must do something.’

He did. He created the ‘Smallbones scheme’ enabling thousands of persecuted people to obtain life-saving temporary visas to Britain.

My grandfather went into hiding after Kristallnacht, but gave himself up for fear of endangering his family. It was Smallbones and his team who obtained his release from the Dachau concentration camp.

‘I usually worked about eighteen hours a day,’ Smallbones wrote. Once he dozed off at his desk. ‘After two hours sleep my conscience pricked me. The feeling was horrible that there were people in concentration camps whom I could get out and that I was comfortable in bed.

His granddaughter Sandra and I became friends; it’s not to everyone that you can say, ‘Your grandfather saved my grandfather’s life.’ We talked of writing a book: How our grandparents’ lives touched.’

I was in Glasgow last week, representing EcoSynagogue at the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

It was shattering. I’ve been a climate activist for years, but this has shaken me. It’s different from reading about global warming, when the person sitting next to you talks of walking miles for a pitcher of water and says, ‘That’s what climate justice is about.’

Today, it’s climate change, as well as wicked regimes, which forces people to become refugees, as my family were.

My key COP moment was when Reverend Bhagwan from the Pacific Conference of Churches told us how rising seas were making his people homeless. ‘Who’ll relocate us?’ he asked. I’ve just two Biblical questions for you,’ he concluded: ‘Are you my neighbour? Are you my keeper?’

Sandra’s grandfather knew how to answer. His ‘yes’ saved thousands, including my grandparents and their children.

It’s all the world’s children whose futures are now at stake. Have we the wisdom and moral courage to respond with the same determination that Robert Smallbones did?

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