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

Let me pay tribute to those who have already spoken in this debate and associate myself with their words, particularly the members for North Sydney, Bennelong, Macnamara and Hunter, as well as my friend the member for Adelaide, who's going to speak shortly. I associate myself with everything they have said about the Armenian genocide, although, in my remarks today, I'm largely going to focus on the Holocaust.

There is of course a link between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. It is the phrase the member for North Sydney reminded us of, when Hitler famously said: 'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' That demonstrates what happens when people forget what's happened and they misunderstand the particularity of what's gone on in a particular genocide. I'll return to that thought at the end.

In recent years, the consciousness of the Holocaust has been placed in sharper focus in Australia by a wonderful book by the late Eddie Jaku, The Happiest Man on Earth, which he wrote at 100 years of age. Eddie died earlier this year. Despite the extraordinarily difficult war that he faced, despite the fact that he repeatedly escaped and was drawn back in and despite the fact that he saw most of his family murdered, he managed to maintain his humanity and the wisdom of someone who had every right to be angry at the world but who, through the reflection in his book, was happy and grateful for his family, his friendships and the kindness of strangers. His victory over Hitler was to live a happy life and to give happiness to others. He beautifully said in his book:

… you must remember that you are 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 was witness to the truth that we must never forget our humanity or the humanity of others.

Eddie Jaku was one of many Holocaust survivors whose numbers are gradually thinning in this country. On a per-capita basis, Australia is home to more Holocaust survivors than any other nation on the planet. People like Frank Lowy, Judy Cassab and Eddie Jaku have changed the face of Australia. While my generation had the privilege of meeting and knowing these survivors, by the time the children who are born in a few years time are old enough to understand what happened in the Holocaust those survivors will be gone. For a coming generation without survivors, the danger is that the Holocaust will seem as long ago as the pogroms, the crusades or slavery in Egypt, and it will then be up to us to tell the next generation our own memories of the survivors and their stories to help turn our memories into the memories of the next generation. The importance of that task shouldn't be underestimated.

Sadly we're witnessing a growth of Holocaust denial around the world. This comes in two forms. In parts of the Muslim world it is a way of playing into an anti-Jewish message that bolsters an anti-Israel message. In the West it is fuelled by social media and a regression to what I've termed the 'pre-Enlightenment age', where people seem incapable of reasoning and assessing sources of information with the ability to tell fact from fiction. Former US President and Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Dwight D Eisenhower saw the potential for denial in April 1945. He wrote about Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald which he'd just visited:

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 firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the near future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda'.

Eisenhower, remarkably, organised delegations of journalists, politicians and filmmakers to go in and see what happened firsthand.

The traditional view is that it is up to us to educate the next generation so that they view the Holocaust not just as the experience of Jews, Romas, homosexuals and 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. That has been the traditional view of the importance of Holocaust education. But I have been struggling with a rather arresting series of podcasts and a book by an extraordinary Jewish American author, Dara Horn, which has just come out, with the confronting title People Love Dead Jews and a companion podcast series, 'Adventures with dead Jews'. Dara Horn is critical of the way we remember these events, because they lose their particularity. She says in particular that, when going to the US Holocaust Museum in the United States in Washington, you are encouraged to think of yourself as a child going through the same set of circumstances—it could be any one of us—and we forget the particularity of the culture that was lost in the Holocaust. Similarly, to take us back to where we began: when we fail to remember it, we forget the culture of the Armenians.

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