The power of speech - United Nations Holocaust Remembrance Day

It is a humbling privilege for me to address you here, especially in the presence of survivors of the Holocaust or ‘Shoah’.

We pause here on the occasion of the 73rd anniversary of the arrival at Auschwitz of the Soviet forces from the 60th army of the First Ukrainian Front.

The liberators would find some 7,650 barely living survivors, hundreds of thousands of personal effects, items of clothing - including shoes, and 700 tonnes of human hair.

This was the place where as many as 1.5 million people – mainly Jews, had been murdered by the Nazis.

In November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 27 January 1945 - the day on which Auschwitz was liberated, as international Remembrance Day to mark the Holocaust.

With awkward humility and abiding reverence, we gather here to reflect upon, remember and honour them all.

In commemorating the dead, we are inspired by the triumph of the human spirit given us by those who survived.

We do so in renewed commitment to one another, our nation and the ideals of mankind.

You don’t realise what you’re learning when you’re learning it.

The most significant thoughts that have challenged, shaped and transformed my own perspective have come in random moments of quiet revelation. It is often when I least expected.

The power is in the story.

Late in 2012, having successfully applied for the position of Director of the Australian War Memorial, I confided the news in a close friend. He said, “You’re going to do what - run the Australian War Memorial? I can’t believe it. You’re wasting your life. You have much more important things to do for Australia than rearrange its history”.

I replied in part that this had much more to do with Australia’s future than its past.  

In a world that is just not changing but where human kind is moving to a new age as it did in the late 15th century, what is most important is that we be clear about who we are, in what we believe and the truths by which we live.

By any standard, the most important year in Australia’s history is 1788.

The British First Fleet arrived with 1420 people, half convicts – including Jews. It devastated millennia of rich indigenous history, culture and custodianship. But from those events and all that would follow, are the origins of the Australia we now are and the people we have become.

The next most important year was 1942.

Australia’s vital interests were at stake – the fall of ‘fortress’ Singapore, bombs fell on Darwin, Townsville and Broome; the gripping struggle along the Kokoda Track, Isuarva and the repulsion of the Japanese at Milne Bay; Coral Sea, Midway, Guadecanal and Japanese midget submarines in Sydney Harbour.

But also in January 1942, a world away in the outer lakeside Berlin suburb of Wannsee was a meeting convened by Reinhard Heydrich.  

Heydrich was the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. He commenced by reiterating his appointment by Reich Marshal Goring as the plenipotentiary for the ‘Preparation of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe”.

Responsibility for handling the final solution would lie with him and Himmler, ‘without regard for geographic boundaries’.

In total, 11 million Jews would be targeted for extermination. Without a whimper, the thirteen officials signed off on the ‘Final Solution’. The minutes would record their decision to ‘cleanse the German living space of Jews in a legal manner’.

This marked the darkest seminal moment in a series of events that would see the murder of 6 million Jews, abhorrence beyond the comprehension of our modern, comfortable lives.  

It was also in 1942 that British poet, TS Eliot wrote these prophetic words:

A people without history is not redeemed from time
for history is a pattern of endless moments.

A nation that does not know – nor understand its history, is dangerous.

The events that bring us here tonight and upon which we reflect, have everything to do with our future and the people we strive to be.

Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free.

First line of our national anthem.

We sing it often, we hear it sung often. But less often do we pause to reflect on what it means.

Life’s paradox is that often it is those things most important to us that we have a tendency to take for granted.

The magic vitality of youth, unknown to us until it is gone.

Families that love us and give meaning and context to our lives.

To be an Australian citizen - whether by birth or by choice, and with it the political, economic and religious freedoms we enjoy.

To live in a nation in which faith coexists with reason; free academic inquiry; a free press and independent judiciary.

And yet support for democracy is diminishing.

We are Australians not only or so much because we have a constitution and the machinery of democracy given us by the British.

We are defined most by our values and our beliefs, the way we relate to one another and see our place in the world.

We are shaped by our heroes and villains; our triumphs and failures; the way as a people we have faced adversity and how we will face the inevitable adversities that are coming and respond to new, emerging unseen horizons.

Nations like people, face ‘moments of truth’.

Moments in history which challenge our very survival and values. Well led, we emerge stronger, more resilient. But if not, they may do us lasting damage.

Those who survived, fled and found their way to Australia in the aftermath of the Second World War and Holocaust, made our nation.

More than simply help our economic and social reconstruction, they nourished our better instincts, gave a greater belief in ourselves and a deeper understanding of what it means to be an Australian.

I first visited Washington in 1999.  I have since done so in various capacities on more than thirty occasions.

Irrespective of time constraints, there are two places I always visit. One speaks to the ideals of mankind, the other to the evil darkness into which we are capable of descending.

The first is the Jefferson Memorial.

Thomas Jefferson was first Secretary of State and third president of the United States - a giant of man, notwithstanding his views on slavery.

Enshrined in marble, I look up to the words he crafted for the American Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men.

When asked toward the end of his life his greatest achievement, Jefferson nominated not the holding of positon or power. Instead he wanted his life to be remembered for three things.

The first was co-authoring the American Declaration of Independence.

The second was the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

But the third, he said was his single most important legacy - founding of the University of Virginia.

When asked why, after all he had achieved he would nominate that, he replied, “Because education is the defense of the nation”.

It is education more than anything else that is likely to protect us from ideas and attitudes deeply rooted in ignorance and prejudice.

From Jefferson I always then go to the Holocaust Museum.

There is a sinister sense of foreboding walking into the building which immediately evokes a large railway station or prison.

Some exhibits in particular stand out, such as the thousands of shoes – including those of children.

The video footage of Nazi doctors experimenting on the insane and physically disabled. Highly educated professionals who crossed the threshold in 1930s Germany, believing some people’s lives of so little value they could be ended with state sanction.

Then there are the photographs. Hundreds and hundreds of black and white photographs of men, women, adolescents and children looking out from lives never lived.

High up on the second floor is a photograph of Rosa Goldenzeil. 

A Hungarian woman of advancing years, Rosa arrived with her daughters at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. As selection commenced on the rail platform, she quickly grasped the situation. Rosa turned to her daughter holding her baby – “they are saving any women with children, give me the baby”.

Rosa knew by her own age that she was already dead as was the baby.

What moral courage did she draw upon to make the decision to save her own daughter and in doing so her give up her own life and that of her cherished grandchild? In this, Rosa was like so many others.

Six million Jews were murdered in an act of unspeakable genocidal barbarism. So too were homosexuals, Roma, gypsies, the disabled and political dissidents.

It is tempting, human beings that we are, to settle for the broad brushstrokes of history. Too often we settle for headlines, popular imagery and mythology.

Our comfortable lives breed easy indifference to individual acts of moral and physical courage, lives given in the name of all that is good and triumph of the human spirit in death.

A year after I took up this role I had one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, let alone my tenure as Director of the Australian War Memorial.

The Memorial staff proposed a temporary exhibition of artworks by one of the Memorial’s Second World War Official War artists of the. Alan Moore was a name that meant nothing to me.  

I scanned images of his work and asked, “When did he die?” Unsure and following enquiries, I was subsequently told he was still alive and living in a Victorian nursing home. 

Alan Moore had been commissioned as an official Australian War artist during the Second World War, deployed first to the South West Pacific in 1944 and then on to North Africa and Europe.

At the age of 99, Alan was able to leave his Victorian nursing home and come to the Memorial to view works that had never been exhibited together. He had not seen for sixty years. He arrived in a jacket and cravat wearing the beret he had worn through his war service of 1944 and 1945.

Before an enormous media pack, I slowly pushed him in his wheel chair along his works. Through the south west Pacific, northern Africa and a V2 Rocket attack he witnessed and drew in London, we paused as he spoke with emotion of the subject matter depicted.

We then stopped at three confronting works at which point he physically trembled. Alan Moore was with the British when they liberated the Bergen Belsen death camp in April 1945.

He gestured to a charcoal drawing of the SS guards removing dead women and children from the railway carriage to a burial pit.  

“The Welsh guard, the Welsh guard”, he whispered. “I was drawing this and the Welsh guard told me no one will believe it. He was right, so I went and got my camera and took photos”.

The second work portrayed non-descript buildings and a perimeter fence. There were multiple objects of some sort on the ground and a stooped figure standing in their midst. Alan said, “The blind man….the blind man with the stick. He was walking amongst the dead and didn’t know”.

Until that day I did not know that this was the first time since he had done these Holocaust works that they had been hung at the Australian War Memorial. This was despite Alan Moore having been commissioned by the Memorial as an official war artist. When I asked why, I learned that he had been told repeatedly by my predecessors, “people are not interested in the holocaust”.

When Alan died in September 2015, I had his Holocaust works sent to the funeral service in Ballarat.

I then looked more closely at what was told of the Holocaust in the galleries of the Australian War Memorial – seven small images.

I told our staff we would appropriate an area adjacent to the Second World War and construct a permanent Holocaust exhibition.

Not everyone was happy with this.

One critic said emphatically, “This has nothing to do with Australia and the Australian War Memorial. You are breeching your charter. I will never walk through it”.

“Why”, I asked, “do you think we were fighting the Second World War at all if not against Nazism and fascism?

This has everything to do with us, for we are part of human kind”.

In a world grappling with the mass movement of people; the persecution of political, ethnic and religious minorities; the push for euthanasia; and a generational struggle against resurgent totalitarianism principally in the form of Islamic extremism, we must remind ourselves not only of why we fought wars but that of which human kind is capable and the circumstances that lead to it.

The Holocaust: Witnesses and Survivors opened late in 2016.

The exhibition presents the Holocaust through the stories of survivors who made their new lives in post-war Australia.

We present the rise of Nazism, the Wannsee Conference, transportation, the horrors of the gas chambers, ghettos and persecution.

The raw, powerful drawings of Bernard Slawik when he was interned at Janowska, depict death. They present a harrowing and deeply personal account of the callous, bureaucratic killing of the Jews of Lvov. He would eventually escape and make his way to Australia in 1948 with his wife Alma who had also escaped independently.

Of the Bunk Beds he drew in the Janowska concentration camp, reflecting on those incarcerated before their transport to the Belzec gas chambers near Lublin, Bernard Slawik wrote:

Three-high, the bunks. Two to a mattress - 400 souls in one barrack.
Like logs they lie, exhausted. To sleep, sleep, sleep….rest, forgetfulness.

400 broken people. Not father, not wife, not child, not brother, not sister; just 400 broken beings……some screaming wrench themselves from sleep.

Nightmares? Memories? Surely it is all one fantastic nightmare.

His drawing of the naked women before their murder by camp guards hangs next to another of begging children brutally forced into cattle cars for the journey to the Belzec gas chambers.

Artefacts, documents and relics from the Jewish Holocaust Centre here have enabled us to bring individual stories of suffering and survival to life.

Finally, Alan Moore’s works at the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen are now permanently and proudly displayed.

In my opinion Jewish identity has been shaped by three forces:

• Anti-Semitism which remains a repugnant, ugly force in deep inside far too many people and in many parts of the world
• The Holocaust or ‘Shoah’
• The daily existential struggle of the State of Israel in a region dominated by theocracies and autocracies

Anti-Semitism is far from a feature of modern history.

The Roman Empire embraced Christianity. In doing so, anti-Semitism played a catalytic role in building the foundations of the religion that would supersede Judaism. European and western civilization was largely defined by Christianity which at various times used anti-Semitism to meet its political and theological objectives.

Anti-Semitism at different times has been seemingly ubiquitous, found in major religions, the political left and the political right, educated classes and amongst the illiterate poor.

It was into this context that the 19th century arrived.

Scientists drove a fascinated culture of order and control. Race emerged as a feature of the nation state along with nationalism. Populist perceptions rooted in race ran in parallel with social Darwinism and eugenics. The First World War would herald the introduction of industrialised killing on a scale never before seen.

Then, the bitter hardships experienced by Germans after the First World War radicalised anti-Semitism. The Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933 legitimised violence as a form of control that was acceptable to the educated, upper classes.

Hitler was able to take advantage of two key things.

The first was that the majority were indifferent to the plight of the minority.

The second was that in Germany – as in other parts of Europe, anti-Semitism was deeply rooted – religious, secular and racial.

Anti-Semitism did not end with liberation of the death camps, nor with the end of the war, the Nuremberg trials and nor even formation of the United Nations. 

Anti-Zionism, Holocaust denial, distortion of truths, glorification of Nazism have all featured at different times in the world since.

As we gather here today, troops are deployed across Europe protecting synagogues and Jewish places of congregation. Fire bombings, desecration of cemeteries and other violations of freedom are real and present dangers.

In recent years, crowds in some circumstances have even chanted ‘Gas the Jews’ and ‘Death to the Jews’.

Only three years ago the United Nations General Assembly debated anti-Semitism.

In Plato’s republic in 400 BC, Socrates concluded that the root of all evil is – ignorance.

Jefferson in nominating ‘Education as the defense of the nation’ echoed a similar sentiment.

Who am I to argue with either?

But of the thirteen German Ministers and senior public servants assembled at Wannsee, nine had PhDs, Masters Degrees and the best university education Europe had to offer.

Adolf Eichmann – Heydrich’s henchman in charge of implementing all this, said at his trial that Heydrich had expected opposition to the plan from the bureaucrats. Not only did they not resist, they embraced the heinous idea with enthusiasm.

It is more than education. It is character.

Character derives from the Greek word meaning the impression left in wax by a stone seal ring. The Greeks called it ‘the stamp of personality’.

Transcending everything else in life – rank, power, money, influence, looks and intellect, is character. Character is informed by values, worthwhile intrinsic virtues.

In my opinion, ethical and responsible citizenship relies on three things.

First, a minimum level of education - including scientific literacy, is required for people to understand and be resilient to change in society, including the technologies upon which it increasingly is built.

Second, we all need to be imbued with what Professor Graeme Davison described in The Uses and Abuses of Australian History as, the imaginative capacity to see the world through the eyes of others. Almost all of life’s pain, suffering and misery in my experience stems from people and nations making themselves the centre of their own world.

Third, people need to be imbued with a deep value system that informs character. As both Benjamin Franklin and Edmund Burke observed, ‘Men must be virtuous and have strength of character to enjoy freedom’.

As Education minister, I oversaw the introduction of Values Education into Australian schools. Teachers would not only teach a set of values derived from wide, national consultation, they would also act them out. At the end of the initial trial in twelve schools, one teenaged girl remarked as a result of the programme, “We now have more freedom”.

One secondary teacher critical of the initiative said to me, “You don’t understand. My job is not to tell these kids what to do or not do. My job is to present them with choices and allow them to make their own decisions”. My response was in part to say that in the end, we have to tell them what we think is the right thing to do.

Imagine being a teenager growing up in western society today, including Australia. It must be very tempting to embrace values for the world you think you are going to get - impatience, materialism, detachment, cynicism and mistrust, as distinct from values for the world you want.

The stories of these survivors, the qualities embodied in their humanity and spirit are surely one powerful values guide to the future.

Among those values: courage – both physical and moral; endurance, devotion, independence, loyalty, honesty, love of others and never forgetting from where you come, who gave you what you have and made you who you are.

And that is why these museums are vital to our common future.

The responsibility we all share in this common endeavour is to make these stories live. They need to be engaging to and engaged by a new generation.

To our political class, lead us to where in our best selves we need to go.

Our nation craves a vision that is human and social as much as it is economic.

If all economic and scientific problems were ever solved, all important questions would remain unanswered.

The most powerful yet fragile of human emotions is – hope.

We all have to believe that tomorrow will be better than today, next year better than this. Not only or so much for ourselves but those whom we love and our country.

Israel is not a perfect country, none is. But in my opinion it is the repository of that most fragile yet powerful of human emotions – hopeful belief in the freedom of man and a better future.

Israel is a nation built on the belief in political, religious and economic freedoms; the equal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Christians, Baha’is, Arabs and all peoples.

And yet every single day, Israel has to justify its very existence and fight for it – politically, diplomatically and militarily.

It seems we live in a world of fundamentalist intolerance and moral relativism.

My grandparents fought and defeated fascism in the 1930s and 40s, my parents’ generation stared down communism.

We now face a resurgent totalitarianism, principally but not only in the form Islamic extremism. Disparate groups have hijacked the good name of Islam to build a violent political utopia, opposed to the equal treatment of women and the liberating power of education.

We live in vast ignorance of the decisions we make and that are made for us, facing extraordinary global uncertainty and immense technological change.

What we need most is one another.

No human being, no Australian who believes in the dignity of man, of freedom and democratic principles, should ever allow through neglectful indifference these events, these people, their lives and stories, to become a distant stranger.

These heinous events and those who survived them teach us many things.

It the importance of commitment to one another and belief in what is right; of conscience and knowing the right thing to do and when to do it; feeling the pain of others and seeing the world through their eyes.

Most importantly they inspire us to have the moral courage irrespective of personal consequences, to act on what in our hearts we know to be right.

In the words of the great 18th century Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant: 

“Every human being is an end unto to himself and not a means to be used by others. Respect for one’s own humanity will be found in respect for the humanity of others – and morality is freedom”.

That is, doing what you know to be right on the basis of respect for the humanity in others will make you truly free.

Failure in this will render us blind to injustice, deaf to despair and indifferent to the future.

….for we young and we are free.