Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that 27 January 2021 marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day where we remember the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, and reaffirm our promise to 'never forget' the 6 million Jews and 11 million others including Roma, homosexuals, people with intellectual disabilities, political prisoners, Poles, Serbs and Soviet citizens who were exterminated during the Holocaust;

(2) acknowledges the importance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day in honouring the memory of all Holocaust victims, and the ongoing efforts of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance to advance and promote Holocaust education to ensure the history and stories of its victims are passed on to successive generations; and

(3) further notes that:

(a) during the 1940s, tens of thousands of European Jews emigrated to Australia, and Australia has the largest per-capita Holocaust survivor population outside Israel; and

(b) the Government is committed to supporting Holocaust Museums in each state and territory in Australia, with the most recent museum announced in the ACT on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January 2021.

The 27th of January marked 76 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. As each year passes, as fewer survivors remain, it's even more important to remember the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the suffering of the survivors, and recommit ourselves to the vow 'never again'.

On a per capita basis, Australia is home to more Holocaust survivors than any other nation, from businessmen like Frank Lowy to artists like Judy Cassab. They and thousands of other people picked up their lives and took the opportunity to live in and serve this country. They changed the face of Australia.

While my generation has had the privilege of meeting the survivors, by the time children born in a few years are old enough to understand what happened in the Holocaust, those survivors will be gone. For a coming generation without the survivors, the danger is that the Holocaust will seem as long ago as the pogroms, the crusades and slavery in Egypt. And then it will be up to us to tell the next generation our memory of the survivors and their stories, to help turn our memories into the memories of the next generation. The importance of this task should not be underestimated.

Sadly, we are witnessing a growth in Holocaust denial around the world in two forms. In the Muslim world, as a way of playing into an anti-Jewish message that bolsters an anti-Israel message; in the West, fuelled by social media and a regression to what I've termed the 'pre-enlightenment age', people seem incapable of reasoning and assessing sources of information with the ability to tell fact from fiction. The prescient American General Dwight Eisenhower saw the potential for denial in April 1945. He wrote about Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald he'd just visited, saying:

The things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering … I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations … to propaganda.

Eisenhower organised delegations of politicians, journalists and filmmakers to view firsthand what happened in the death camps in order to bear witness to a sceptical public. One journalist was asked if the scenes in the camp were as bad as they were described in the newspapers. He responded: 'No. They were worse.' But as fewer of the remaining survivors are with us, it becomes much easier for people to say these horrific events never happened. What we can do is to educate the next generation, so they view the Holocaust not as the experience of Jews, Roma, homosexuals or people with intellectual disabilities but rather as a human experience where the most civilised and enlightened society on the planet can quickly turn to monstrous barbarism and engage in murder on an industrial scale.

I want to commend the Morrison government for its focus on Holocaust education, with $3 million for the Anti-Defamation Commission to create a Holocaust education platform and giving Australians a chance to visit Holocaust museums, with more than $23 million in announcements and funding committed to building and extending Holocaust museums in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra. Whenever I visit a Holocaust museum what moves me most are the sections dedicated to the righteous amongst the nations—those non-Jews who risked their lives and those of their families to help save Jews, even when they were strangers. Their sense of morality caused them to act. Their example is the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust—that it's never good enough to be a bystander, that we must confront evil and that we must play our own part in correcting racial prejudice and keeping it at bay.

It's difficult to say something original about the Shoah, but last year Australian Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku did. I have the privilege of knowing Eddie's family. At 100 years of age he wrote the international bestseller The Happiest Man on Earth. Eddie had so many chances to escape the suffering he experienced. He was given a false identity to study, but returned to his hometown on Kristallnacht to see his neighbours turn on him and his family. He ended up on the beach at Dunkirk as it was being evacuated but couldn't get a place on a boat. He was hidden by a family in Belgium. He escaped from Buchenwald, Auschwitz, where his parents were murdered, but each time was recaptured. He ultimately escaped from the Auschwitz death march to be rescued by American soldiers. What sustained him was his useful mastery of machines and his friendship with Kurt Hirschfeld.

What makes this epic tale so special is the humanity and wisdom of someone who has every right to be angry at the world but who has, through reflection on his long life, been grateful for family, friendship and the kindness of strangers. His victory over Hitler is to live a happy life and to give happiness to others. His philosophy is powerful: 'You must remember you're lucky to be alive. Every breath is a gift. Life is beautiful if you let it be. Happiness is in your hands.' Eddie Jaku's life is witness to the truth that we must never forget our own humanity and the humanity of others. That is the ultimate lesson of the Holocaust.

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