The Dreyfus Files - The Age
Yesterday was International Holocaust Memorial Day, established to mourn the millions of people who lost their lives in the Holocaust, to honour those who survived, to celebrate those who rescued them, to bear witness and to remember.
On 27 January 1945, the advancing Soviet army entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The Soviets found 7,000 prisoners, many ill or dying. In the days before, the Nazi SS had removed nearly 60,000 prisoners from the camp to trudge off on the infamous death marches in which many thousands lost their lives.
It has been important for the Jewish community worldwide to see that the German people have borne witness and continued to remember. The German president, Horst Koehler, spoke on 27 January 2009 of the need to reject those who deny the Holocaust, saying: "The responsibility for the Shoah remains part and parcel of German history".
Last year, the Germans invited the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, to address the German parliament to help the German people and the world bear witness. In his speech, he called on Germany to bring to justice those still living men and women who took part in perpetrating the Holocaust.
The Americans have also understood the importance of bearing witness to the Holocaust. In Buchenwald, the first camp liberated by the American army, American troops found scenes of mass death and horror. General Eisenhower ordered Germans from nearby towns to tour the camp, to see the horrors perpetrated by the German nation. He ordered American soldiers to visit the camp, he invited journalists and congressmen to visit the camp and he ordered that films and photographs be taken. They help us remember, and Eisenhower was right when he said that he "wanted 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 merely to propaganda".
The Germans bear witness to this day. The Americans bear witness to this day. Many other nations bear witness. And I bear witness by remembering, through a photograph, my German great-grandparents who perished in the Holocaust.
My father has a photograph of Albert Ransenberg, my great grandfather, taken in the yard of the railway station in Wiesbaden in 1942. It is part of a series of photographs taken secretly by a local policeman, showing Jews from Wiesbaden being deported to the east. My father found this photo in 1983, on a visit to Germany looking for family history, as his part of bearing witness.
The photograph shocks us because we know the fate of the group of well dressed middle class Jews shown standing in the railway yard. They are mostly elderly and they are already gaunt from the rationing imposed by then on Jews.
Albert Ransenberg died in Theresienstadt. The journey of his wife, my great grandmother Ida Ransenberg, was a little longer. The Nazis killed her in Auschwitz.
Why must we bear witness? Why must we remember? We must bear witness and remember because the generation who lived through the Holocaust, many of whom settled in Australia, grow smaller in number every year. Most of those with direct memory and direct experience are no longer with us; this requires us to learn as much as we can from our parents, our grandparents, and from those few Holocaust survivors who remain. It requires us to record, to report, to interpret, to bear witness and above all to remember these terrible events.
It is only by bearing witness and remembering that we can make sure that when we say "never again", we know what we are speaking of. Bearing witness and remembering help us to identify the actions of individuals and the conduct of nations in our own time, as the actions and the conduct we must fight against.
