Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to join the member for Casey and the member for Melbourne Ports in paying tribute to the life of Peretz Kalman, the father of a friend of mine, Harvey Kalman, who is also a particular friend of the member for Casey. After 2½ years hiding in a ghetto for useful labourers, where he learned to play chess at a very early age and it became a lifelong passion, Peretz Kalman was eventually arrested, taken into detention by the Nazis and removed to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He walked out of there at the age of eight. He was obviously one of the very lucky ones. Sometime in the Second World War the Nazis decided it was too costly to shoot children and waste the bullets, so they threw children into the furnaces. They did that in order to save money, as part of their evil trade.

Peretz Kalman went on to have a very full and very valuable life, determined to make every day count because his God had saved him and he owed it to all those who did not survive to live for them, too. Six million Jews, 1½ million of them children, and others—homosexuals, the disabled, Catholic nuns and priests, socialists and dissenters—died in World War II in over 30 German concentration camps spread across Europe. Auschwitz was probably the most famous—or infamous—where 1.1 million people died. The cruelty, insensitivity and senselessness of this slaughter is something my generation cannot fathom or even begin to imagine. It is not something that can be understood—only reviled and rejected for its inhumanity.

Now many of those who have survived, people like Peretz Kalman, are reaching the end of their lives and we are seeing a common theme. The Age carried an obituary on 26 May of David Pearl, another Jew who had survived the Second World War. The obituary said that his first wife, Anya, was captured and murdered in a concentration camp, leaving him to rear their three-month-old baby girl, Diana. By 1942, eight other members of his family—his father, mother, three brothers and three sisters—had died as well. Once, when captured and forced to strip and dig his own grave, anger overwhelmed him and he struck the Nazi guards with his shovel and escaped, running naked into the woods. Although impoverished and unable to speak English when he arrived in Australia, Pearl proved to be a true entrepreneur with a keen business sense and the stamina for hard work. Despite his material success his prime motivation was to protect his family, something he had been unable to do in Poland.

It is a common theme. The lives of Jews like Peretz Kalman and David Pearl are an inspiration to Jews around the world and a reminder to both Jews and gentiles everywhere of the resilience of human nature and the capacity to grow bigger than one’s worst experiences. The horror of the Shoah has been well documented and represented. Even Hollywood, which has a tremendous capacity for trivialisation, has represented the Shoah well. But to my mind the best moving picture documentation of the Shoah was in La Vita e BellaLife is Beautifulin 1998, directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. It was a story of love simply but evocatively told through the tribulations of a father and son in Auschwitz. Recently I read a book entitled The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, by Irish writer John Boyne. It is the story of the childhood of an eight-year-old boy called Bruno, son of the commandant of Auschwitz, told through Bruno’s eyes simply and painfully and ending tragically with Bruno’s own accidental death in the gas chambers, holding hands with his best friend Shmuel, a Jewish boy of the same age. Again, the story of the Shoah is told brilliantly. It is described not graphically but soulfully and powerfully.

Last week His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI visited Auschwitz. He went as a son of the German people and met 32 of the 200,000 survivors. He said, poignantly:

In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?

Pope Benedict said humans could not ‘peer into God’s mysterious plan’ to understand such evil, but could only ‘cry out humbly yet insistently to God: rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature.’ How true.