Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Macnamara for bringing this very important motion today. Just last week I had the pleasure of meeting the honourable member's former high school teacher Sue Hampel, co-president of the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, who spoke with great affection of her former student and pride for what he is doing in this place. She also spoke with great respect and affection of my predecessor in Kooyong, Josh Frydenberg, who, as I think all the speakers in this debate have noted, has made an incredibly important contribution to the field of remembrance of the Holocaust.

Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and it honours the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism. It's a solemn day of mourning and of reflection—a day to remember the millions of people lost and to honour their memories and their legacies. Many victims of the Holocaust are ancestors of Jewish people around the world today. For many, however, their lives were taken before they had an opportunity to begin their own families.

The devastation of the Holocaust would be too vast to begin to understand were it not for the courage of survivors telling their stories in the hope that the world never forgets those horrors and so that we can say: never again.

One such survivor is Phillip Maisel, who passed away last month, just days after he celebrated his 100th birthday. A Polish-born Jew, Phillip was 21 when he was imprisoned in a Nazi labour camp. He survived, then dedicated three decades to reporting the testimonies of 1,000 fellow Holocaust survivors in Australia. A few years ago, he explained:

If people survived, it was a miracle. When I want to convince people to give a testimony, I just tell them 'You had the privilege to survive the Holocaust, you should talk for those that can't do it anymore'.

Phillip Maisel was a Kooyong constituent, and I am honoured to know his story.

As we have noted in this chamber today, antisemitic incidents are disturbingly common in this country. They are worsened by ignorance—ignorance we have to continue to fight on every front. Holocaust Remembrance Day calls upon us all to condemn and guard against intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief. It's an opportunity to recommit ourselves to ending religious persecution, racism and discrimination in our own countries and around the world. We honour the memories of disabled people, LGBT people, the Roma and the Afro-German people, all of whom were persecuted under Nazism. We honour the survivorship of Jewish people, exemplified by the extraordinary contributions made by the Jewish diaspora across the world and here in Australia.

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