The Holocaust from Australia’s Perspective

It goes without saying that I would visit whatever Jewish/Holocaust museums New South Wales and Victoria had to offer while we were in Australia.

As it happens, Tom’s cousin Catherine is a volunteer at the Sydney Jewish Museum, and was slated to help with a survivor presentation on our first day in Australia, so we accompanied her to the museum and listened in on the survivor’s talk, which had been arranged for an audience of Boston University students who were on a semester abroad in Australia.

The survivor, John Gruschka, was 100 years old, and sharp as a tack. He had gone from the Sudetenland to a distant relative in Manchester as a fourteen year old (not on the Kindertransport), while his father and sister escaped to Palestine. His mother, who stayed behind with her elderly mother, was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

He described his life in England during the war and his post-war emigration and life in both Israel and Australia. We didn’t think much of the interviewer, but the students were attentive and asked good questions.

After the talk, we spent some time in the museum itself, which although mostly devoted to the Holocaust and its aftermath, also has a very interesting exhibit on the history of Jews in Australia, including some fascinating stories of Jewish convicts who were sent there from England, many for life sentences, and how most of them managed to get their sentences commuted after only a few years and go on to have successful and lucrative careers!

The Holocaust galleries included some unique artifacts donated by survivors who had emigrated to Australia after the war, and a really moving exhibit focused on children, which featured a really heart breaking diary kept by one Jewish mother of her baby’s first years under Nazi rule.

There was a display on the Kindertransport, which I felt told the story succinctly but fairly and without over-glorifying the rescue aspect, and also one on the Dunera boys, also told in an even-handed way.

It is an architecturally interesting museum with a rich collection and a comprehensive look at the Holocaust, Australia’s failure to take in many refugees before the war due to its own racism and xenophobia, its acceptance of thousands of survivors after the war and an exploration of their lives in and around Sydney. Many of these survivors are featured in an innovative exhibit called Reverberations in which segments of their video-taped interviews responding to specific questions such as the issue of forgiveness are played on a life-sized screen.

Their responses are raw and honest, and it seemed a good way to help the public understand how survivors felt about their experiences without resorting to the similar, but somewhat contrived holographic interactive display that is also used in the exhibition.

Before leaving, we had a long chat with the librarian and the resident historian, Konrad Kwiet, who, it turns out, had crossed my path in correspondence some years ago when I was a co-editor or the journal Patterns of Prejudice. They were all acquainted with my dear colleague and friend Tony Kushner and also several other people at the University of Southampton, so it was a nice visit.

I also learned that the museum had a copy of my book on the Kindertransport, which was gratifying. All in all, I was quite impressed with the Sydney Jewish Museum, and found it very interesting to see the narration of the Holocaust from an Australian perspective.

The Melbourne Holocaust Museum is, as its name suggests, devoted entirely to the history of the Holocaust. Its arresting new façade, suggests a European style house such as those that victims from Germany or Austria might have inhabited.

On the wall at the entrance is prominently displayed a sign that acknowledges the First Peoples whose land the museum now occupies.

This is not a one-off. In fact we saw similar signs displayed on every civic building, museum, monument, and public space (and their websites) that we visited, from Sydney’s Opera House to the town hall in Broken Hill. The Sydney Harbour Bridge also flies the Aboriginal flag next to the national flag. Australia has a very long way to go in redressing the wrongs done to the First Peoples of Australia, and these signs as only words, after all. Yet, as a voluntary effort, undertaken by government and private institutions alike, I think it’s a step in the direction of progress.

The Melbourne Holocaust Museum’s core exhibition Everybody Had a Name chronicles the history of the Holocaust through the experiences and artefacts of survivors who came to Melbourne after the war and is driven by a very personal narrative.

Before you enter, you are invited to take one of several survivor cards which you insert into video displays at various points along the timeline, hearing that person’s story over the course of your visit. These testimony excerpts are harrowing and extremely moving.

Another one of the first things you encounter are walls of framed family photos from before the war, which are quite haunting, including an empty frame for all those who lost everything, including their precious family photographs.

The displays on the Kindertransport (which, interestingly, featured a photograph that appears in my book showing children arriving from Poland on a Kindertransport in February 1939) and the Dunera boys are treated with the same evenness as in Sydney. This musuem, too addresses Australia’s pre-war racism, framing it against the government’s treatment of First Peoples.

There was one artefact that really threw me, however.

As you move into the part of the museum dealing with death camps, you are confronted with a very large but somewhat crudely constructed model that re-creates the Treblinka death camp.

It seems so out of place in such a professionally mounted exhibition space. Yet when I moved to the explanation of the model, it became clear why the museum chose to include it.

It was constructed by one of the few Jewish survivors of that unspeakable place- a man who was chosen for the labour of processing the victims belongings and disposing of their bodies. He had participated in and was one of the few survivors of the Treblinka uprising in 1943, and after the war, emigrated to Australia.

Nearly forty years after the end of the war, he had built the model in his own home In Melbourne over the course of four years, and eventually donated it to the museum.

When I thought of that tortured man, living with the memories of the horrors of Treblinka, memories that were so present and overwhelming that they drove him in old age to physically re-build the site of his most harrowing experiences in his own home, I was overcome with sadness for him and I understood fully why the museum had chosen to honour his memories and his trauma by giving it a prominent place in their permanent exhibit.

When I exited the final display, which covers life after the war,  I was both emotionally drained and very surprised to see that I had spent more than three hours in the collection. It is not a huge museum, but I read nearly everything on display, which I do not normally do.

There are two other exhibits at the museum, one on hidden children and one a ‘virtual reality experience’, neither of which I had time to visit. I would have liked to have gone through the first, but am quite leery of the virtual reality concept when it comes to the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, the core exhibit was well worth the time invested and it affected me profoundly. I know this history well, yet when told in such an intimate way, through the experiences of individuals, it has enormous power to move me still.