Brisbane Catholic Education has facilitated the staging of an exhibition on the Holocaust to help school students realise the importance of good people standing up in the face of bad situations. ROBIN WILLIAMS reports.
CONFRONTING, disturbing and overwhelming were just some of the words used during a recent visit to the “Courage to Care” anti-bullying exhibition in Brisbane.
Courage to Care, an initiative of the not-for-profit Jewish community organisation B’nai B’rith aims to educate visitors to understand the role of bullies, bystanders and victims using stories of the Holocaust.
It includes volunteers sharing first-hand accounts of the suffering they endured as victims of the Holocaust, and stories of those who helped rescue them.
It is only the second time the exhibition has visited Queensland and over a three-week period 3000 students and 750 adults had a chance to hear and then reflect on the breadth of suffering victims can experience at the hands of persecutors or, on a lesser scale, bullies and how bystanders can make a difference.
The exhibition was brought to Queensland by Brisbane Catholic Education’s religious education team.
Visit co-ordinator James Robinson said students returned to school empowered.
They were able to see how the Holocaust was an example of how terrible things could happen when good people stood by and did nothing.
The students could then relate that to the school situation and cases of bullying.
“They return to school feeling really empowered and they feel like they can do something when they see someone using power inappropriately,” Mr Robinson said.
“Rather than a sense of helplessness they feel like they can speak up and do something, so they are leaving (the exhibition) with a sense of hope.”
Visits to the exhibition begin with a short video containing statistics from the Holocaust and presents a contempary schoolyard-bullying scenario.
The video then leads visitors through definitions of the three schoolyard groups involved – the victim, the bystanders and the bullies before reflecting on how bystanders could have changed the outcome.
The introductory video is followed by an oral history presentation from a Holocaust survivor such as 94-year-old Lena.
Although born in Poland in 1919, Lena chooses to begin her story in 1939 at the beginning of the Second World War.
She tells how countries all over Europe fell to the Germans within days, with just one city – Warsaw, the capital of Poland – holding out for one month.
With no deliveries of fresh food in that month Lena said the Germans organised soup kitchens as soon as they entered the city but Jewish residents soon learned that for them it was the beginning of an unimaginable nightmare.
“People were standing in the (soup kitchen) queues with their bowls waiting and little boys, children of our neighbours, children we used to play with, were running between the rows of people and pointing out the Jews who were expelled from the queues because Jews don’t have to eat,” she said.
Lena told students that was just the first of a string of continual worsening public indignities and persecutions of Poland’s Jewish population.
“They were trying to kill our dignity in the first place. It broke my heart to see my father have to leave the footpath and then bow down to young German soldiers as they passed in the street,” she said.
Lena said the move by the Germans to segregate all Jews into ghettos and isolate them behind high walls was originally seen as an escape from the daily persecutions but worse was to come.
“They put 450,000 people into a small area about the size of Bondi in Sydney,” she said.
Lena’s account of her time in the ghettos and what was to follow didn’t include “any of the really bad things” because she said those listening were “just students” and didn’t need to hear such horrors.
The stories she did tell included how Jews from the country would arrive with babies and small children sedated and hidden in the one suitcase they were allowed to bring with them.
She told how people became desensitised to seeing corpses littering the ghetto footpaths and roads, due to a typhus epidemic.
“Typhus is only transferred by a louse and if it was infected and you found it on you, you knew your lifespan was now around two weeks; there was no medicine,” she said.
Then notices began appearing on the walls of the ghettos that seemed to offer hope and, as emotion laces her voice, Lena describes the horrors that came next.
“The notices were for those that wanted to work for the German war machine. They could take their families and go to factories in the east,” she said.
“And people were doing it willingly until the first escapees came back from the east to tell us the truth of a camp called Treblinka.
“Over there everybody had to strip naked and then, first women and children, and then men were taken to the showers, except the showers were not really showers.
They were pouring poison gas and they were killing thousands of people.”
Volunteering stopped until another notice appeared seeking people wanting to work within German factories set up inside the ghettos but Lena said, once again, it was a lie and the Germans simply “selected” people from those who had volunteered, including her parents, and sent them to Treblinka.
By the time there were 35,000 of the original 450,000 Jews left in the ghettos Lena tried an act of defiance, expecting to be shot rather than sent to Treblinka.
Instead she met two German guards who risked their own lives in choosing to helped her escape.
That escape led to two years hiding first in the bathroom of a large house then underground, before the war ended.
“When we were told we were free, all this time when I lost my parents when I lost my boyfriend when I lost all the people I ever knew I didn’t cry because I was waiting for my turn next but when I heard that I am free I just sat there and I cried because in the whole world there was no one waiting for me and there was no one to go out to,” Lena said.
Ernie’s story is just as harrowing but, while Lena was 20 and a law student when the war began, Ernie, who was born in Vienna, Austria, was only a child.
He was six when the war began and, as his mother had been born in Hungary, the family moved there for safety.
By the time he was nine he had lost his father and he and his mother had been saved at least once but still ended up in a ghetto and lived with the fear of what the next day would bring.
He was also shovelling snow two hours a day to earn one extra piece of bread that he shared with his mother.
Their daily ration, Ernie said, was one bowl of soup and one slice of bread and that extra slice of bread helped keep both alive.
He told students while memories of that time (including the persecution he suffered at school) opened painful wounds he hoped its telling would leave behind a legacy – “not to discriminate, not to be prejudiced, not to judge people because they are blond, blue-eyed, or for the colour of their skin.”
Reactions from BCE senior students following their visit indicated a passion and determination to ensure such “bullying” and misuses of power did not happen in their lifetime.
Ernie’s story and his ability to find good in the midst of the inhumanity and brutality of the Holocaust resonated with Year 10 students from Carmel College, Thornlands.
Their comments included: “When he said his mother got taken away for two days and he didn’t know where or if she would be back I don’t know what I would do if that happened to my mum”, and “He said after all the things he’s been through he’s not angry and he still sees that people are good.”
One student remembered that “(a German) soldier saved him and now he has a whole family and a whole other life just because that one soldier helped them”.
Year 11 students from Unity College, Caloundra, who heard Lena’s story found hearing it first-hand created greater impact than classroom study.
“It was pretty confronting, you hear a lot of things but to hear that much precise detail and to know she has been through that (makes a difference),” one student said.
Another remembered “the humiliation of what the German soldiers made them do, like dance in the streets and bow to them”.
“It was pretty sad how she said she was all alone when the war was over. She was free but that was no consolation when she had no one left,” a student said.
“No one should have to get used to walking among corpses,” another said.
Mr Robinson said the students could be the last generation to hear such stories first-hand.
“The whole exhibition is based on story and we are the last generation who are going to be privileged enough to hear from survivors,” he said.
“To hear from people who were actually there, (in future) we are going to be watching video testimony or we are going to be hearing from custodians – cherished loved ones – who have been given the story by a survivor.
“I hope the message to really listen to these people who have lived through this horrific time and have embraced life and meet life with joy and have compassion and forgiveness, is the core message people take away with them.”
