The following speech has been published by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.

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MEMORIES AND MEMORIALS

Yom Hashoah Com­mem­or­a­tion 
Address to the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies

Dr Brendan Nelson AO
Director, the Aus­trali­an War Memorial
28 and 29 April 2019

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A desire for knowledge for its own sake,
a love of justice that borders on fan­at­icism,
and a striving for personal inde­pend­ence.
These are the Jewish tradition that allows me to regard
belonging to it, as a gift of great fortune……
History has imposed on us a difficult struggle;
but so long as we remain devoted servants of truth; justice and freedom,
we will not only persist as the oldest living peoples,
but will also as before to achieve through our pro­duct­ive labour,
works that con­trib­ute to the enno­ble­ment of humanity.
Albert Einstein

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

You have lived, endured and forgotten more about what brings us here than I will ever know. Yet you invite me to speak.

We pause here 80 years after the outbreak of the Second World War.

A cataclysm spanning six years, it remains the most destruct­ive conflict in human history.

A life was extin­guished every three seconds.

It claimed 60 million lives including 6 million Jews, murdered in the Holocaust along with political dis­sid­ents, Roma, Gypsies and homo­sexu­als. Among them 1.5 million Jewish children

Humankind moved from one age to another.

The world would never be the same again.

We gather 74^th years after the arrival at Auschwitz of the Soviet forces from the 60^th army of the First Ukrainian Front.

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

As many as 1.5 million people – mainly Jews, had been murdered here.

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

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

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

We are also chal­lenged – Jews and members of the human race, to make this history live in ways that evoke and embed memory, leading always to our best inner selves.

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 – often when I least expected.

The power is in the story.

Hearing of my appoint­ment as Director of the Aus­trali­an War Memorial, a close friend 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.

The past holds lessons vital to our future.

History is the guiding dis­cip­line. It informs choices before us. It can also demolish prejudice and leads us to new horizons.

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

The most important year in Australia’s history is 1788.

Millennia of rich indi­gen­ous history, culture and cus­todi­an­ship was dev­ast­ated by the arrival of the British First Fleet carrying 1420 people, half convicts – including Jews.

But from that event 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, from Singapore to the Coral Sea Kokoda and Guadacanal.

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, appointed by Reich Marshal Goring as the pleni­po­ten­tiary for the ‘Pre­par­a­tion of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe’.

The ‘final solution’ would apply to 11 million Jews. This was new.

Heydrich said that the meeting sought to obtain ‘clarity of principle’ and coordin­a­tion of central agencies.

Respons­ib­il­ity for handling the final solution would lie with him and Himmler.

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’.

As Heydrich convened the meeting deport­a­tions from the Lodz ghetto to the Chelmno death camp pro­gressed. They reveal much of the unfolding horror.

Shlomo Frank recorded it in his diary.

Deportees  were….poor, broken, naked and starved….all cried mourn­fully, mothers embraced little children….

From the basement of a derelict building in Chelmno, stripped of belong­ings, naked and showered, they were herded up a ramp through a hole in the wall into the back of gas vans.

The vans used bottled carbon monoxide and later piped exhaust fumes into the van packed with victims. Jewish prisoners pulled the corpses from the vans and dragged the bodies to pits dug by Polish workers.

At day’s end the Jewish prisoners were forced into the pits them­selves to be shot by the SS.

Only four Jews escaped from Chelmno. One was Szlama Wiener assigned to ancillary tasks who made it to the Warsaw ghetto in January 1942.

His depos­ition reads:

The corpses were thrown out of the vans like garbage onto a heap. They were dragged by the feet and the hair. Two people stood at the edge of the ditch and threw the bodies into the grave. Two others placed them face down so that the head of one was placed next to the feet of another…..If there was an empty space, the corpse of a child was stuffed in there……the eight workers were ordered into the pit and shot.

Weiner recounted two German civilians searching corpses for valuables:

They tore off necklaces, pulled rings off fingers, pulled out gold teeth. They even looked in anuses and, with the women, genitalia.

Several of the Jewish forced labour prisoners helped one another suicide.

On 13 January, the unloading crew dis­covered a live baby in one of the vans, hidden in a pillow case:

The SS men laughed. They shot the child with a machine gun and threw it into the grave (Montague, ‘Chlemno and the Holocaust, 96 – 113)

With brutal effi­ciency at Chelmno, less than a hundred SS guards exterm­in­ated some 97,000 thousand Jews from the Lodz ghetto.

Ghetto man­age­ment claimed fuel for 900 trucks to transport clothing and valuables looted from the dead.

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 us, our future and the people we strive to be.

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

The 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 forever.

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

To be an Aus­trali­an citizen – whether by birth or by choice, con­fer­ring us with political, economic and religious freedoms.

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

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 to challenge our very survival and values. Well led, we emerge stronger, more resilient. But if not, we may be done 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 us a greater belief in ourselves and, in the longer term a deeper under­stand­ing of what it means to be an Aus­trali­an.

I have visited Wash­ing­ton on some thirty occasions over two decades.

Irre­spect­ive of time con­straints, there are two places I always visit.

One speaks to evil darkness into which we are capable of des­cend­ing in certain cir­cum­stances, the other to the ideals of mankind.

The first is the Holocaust Museum.

The thousands of shoes – including those of children.

Video footage of Nazi doctors exper­i­ment­ing on the insane and phys­ic­ally disabled, 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 and children looking out from lives never fully 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?

From the Holocaust Museum I go to the Jefferson Memorial.

Thomas Jefferson was first Secretary of State and third president of the United States – a giant of man.

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 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 – cofound­ing 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 forged on an anvil of prejudice.

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.

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

Alan Moore had been com­mis­sioned as an official Aus­trali­an War artist during the Second World War, deployed in 1944.

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

At the age of 99, Alan was able to come to the Memorial to view works that had never been exhibited together and he had not seen for sixty years.

He arrived in a jacket and cravat wearing the beret he had worn through his war service.

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 a 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”.

That day was the first time since he had done these Holocaust works that they had been hung at the Aus­trali­an War Memorial.

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 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 state sanc­tioned 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.

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

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 escape and make his way to Australia in 1948.

Of the Bunk Beds he drew in the Janowska con­cen­tra­tion camp where lay those who would be executed in the Belzec gas chambers, 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.

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 19^th century arrived.

The bitter hardships exper­i­enced by Germans after the First World War rad­ic­al­ised anti-Semitism. The Weimar Republic then 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 or formation of the United Nations.

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

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, present and escal­at­ing dangers.

Crowds have even chanted ‘Gas the Jews’ and ‘Death to the Jews’.

In 340 BC in Plato’s Republic, Socrates concluded:

“The root of evil is ignorance”.

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

Who am I to argue with either?

Yet when I think back to Wannsee, to the thirteen German Ministers and public servants who signed off on ‘The Final Solution’, nine had the best uni­ver­sity education Europe had to offer – masters degrees and PhDs.

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 and 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’.

The stories of 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 museums and memorials are vital to our common future.

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

It is tempting, human beings that we are, to settle for the broad brush­strokes of history, 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.

The key is to invite people to look beyond the narrow prism of their own lives to that of others.

These stories – your stories, are ones of indi­vidu­al per­se­cu­tion, survival in the face of unima­gin­able adversity and yet also the lib­er­at­ing power of hope and of love.

Often just one image or one story can captivate the ima­gin­a­tion of others, educating and inspiring them to be better people.

The paradox of the Aus­trali­an War Memorial is that it is not actually about war.

Instead from the horror and bloodshed emerge stories of love and friend­ship; love for friends and between friends; love of family and of country; of honouring men and women whose lives have been devoted not to them­selves, but to us – and their last moments to one another.

The most engaging and popular story depicted in a mag­ni­fi­cent bronze by Peter Corlette is that of John Simpson Kirk­patrick and his donkey carrying a wounded man on its back.

Dis­obey­ing orders to retrieve only the most seriously wounded, Simpson used a donkey to rescue forty wounded men from the gullies and ravines over twenty one days.

He was shot and killed by a sniper.

His mother penned the epitaph for the grave she would never see above Anzac Cove:
                   HE GAVE HIS LIFE SO THAT OTHERS MIGHT LIVE

Military purists and his­tor­i­ans struggle to under­stand the appeal of the story to the wider public.

My response to them is that there is nobility in a man that loves animals and a man and animal risking life to save others. The ideal and the lesson is that a life of value is one spent in the service of others, irre­spect­ive of the cost to yourself.

The second is also a Corlette sculpture of ‘Weary’ Dunlop.

A surgeon who wore humility more com­fort­ably than a steth­o­scope, Dunlop tended to the men suffering and dying under Japanese brutality on the Burma ‑Thai Railway during the Second Wold War.

Gazing down, hat in hand, he evokes care and com­pas­sion for others in the most extreme cir­cum­stances. Doing so, he engages a story of inspiring humanity rather than the heinous events in which it was given.

People cannot com­pre­hend war unless they have been in one. But they do engage and relate to the human emotions and motives evoked by these two images and the stories they tell.

Two simple but powerful offerings for memory that we have also done.

Every night from dusk to dawn, onto the front of the Aus­trali­an War Memorial, the name of each of the 102,800 Aus­trali­an men and women who have given their lives for us in war and peace­keep­ing over 120 years is projected.

Just beneath the Dome above the Tomb of the Unknown Aus­trali­an Soldier, each name appears for 30 seconds four times a year. With the dates and time of pro­jec­tion available on the website, people quietly stand in front of the Memorial in the early hours of the morning just waiting for a name to appear.

Some have driven across the country to do so.

Early in my tenure I proposed that we arrange for year six students the length and breadth of Australia to record the name and age of death of each on out our nation’s 62,000 First World War dead.

On a single day, students went into the ABC’s regional studios to so record the names. Google built an app for us entitled Remember Methat allowed schools to log in. Students download the names and ages, record and upload them to the Memorial.

Teachers had their students research the story on the men and women whose names they were recording.

Visitors who walk along the First World War Roll of Honour hear these young voices reciting names and ages of death.

At the launch, I publicly asked one of the students what it meant to him? He replied, “I now know they were real people just like me and weren’t made up”.

Therein lays the key challenge and response to Holocaust memorials.

We need to per­son­al­ise in a public and engaging way the stories of indi­vidu­als so the next gen­er­a­tion doesn’t simply think they were ‘made up’.

People engage not so much with the horror, but the inspiring human qualities that emerge from it.

Memorials to the Holocaust need to be ‘main­streamed’. Too often they are confined to Jewish insti­tu­tions, sacred Jewish places and con­greg­a­tion­al com­munit­ies.

They should be visible reminders to us all not so much of what was done but the human spirit and qualities informing character that inspire us to be better people – repos­it­or­ies of love and ennobled memory.

In the end, we honour them best by the way we live our lives, shape our nation and con­trib­ute to a better world.

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.

Hope is most sustained by men and women reaching out in support of one another.

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

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.

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.

The Shoa and those who survived it teach us many things.

It includes a com­mit­ment to one another; 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 18^th 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”.

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

With respects to John Donne, I ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.

….for we young and we are free.