Motions

Adelaide Holocaust Museum and Andrew Steiner Education Centre

The Hon. C.M. SCRIVEN (16:07): I move:

That this council—

1. Notes that the Adelaide Holocaust Museum and Andrew Steiner Education Centre were officially launched on Monday 9 November 2020;

2. Congratulates Mr Andrew Steiner, the board, staff and project team on this important achievement;

3. Rejects and condemns all racial discrimination and anti-Semitism; and

4. Endorses the message of ‘Never again’ today and for generations to come.

When the German army marched through Budapest in 1944, a little boy watched the army go past his family's villa. 70 years later, he recalls:

I had no idea that their mission was to annihilate us. However, the next door neighbour's daughter, whose family were Nazis, said to the German soldiers, pointing at me, 'Oh, he's a dirty, nasty, filthy, rotten Jew!' But of course, the Germans don't understand Hungarian—otherwise, [it's] unlikely that I would be here.

This is the story of Andrew Steiner, Holocaust survivor and local Adelaide artist who, for the last 30 years, has spoken to hundreds of South Australian schoolchildren about his experiences and lessons to be learnt from them. One of those students said:

For me, the most beneficial thing that Andrew spoke about was the power of one. This concept is that all of us have an innate ability that we are born with and we should use this for the betterment of humanity. To me, this speaks volumes about how we all have the capacity to safeguard our future and to ensure the events of the Holocaust are never repeated and never forgotten.

Mr Steiner's work culminated this year in the foundation of the Adelaide Holocaust Museum and Andrew Steiner Education Centre, located at Fennescey House in the heart of Adelaide's CBD. The museum was launched as part of the St Francis Xavier Cathedral Annual Commemoration of Kristallnacht which claimed the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of Jewish people living in Germany. In particular, one gallery is dedicated to the stories of six holocaust survivors living in Adelaide. One of the most important and unique aspects of the museum is that it shows how the Holocaust has left a legacy everywhere, even in far-off South Australia.

We are fortunate to have such people as Andrew Steiner willing to share their experiences with us, and it is important to realise that we will not have them with us forever. Through this museum we have the opportunity to ensure that neither they nor their work are forgotten. The name of another part of the museum, the Anne Frank Gallery, reminds us not only of the tragedy of what happened to her and her family, but of the courage of the people who harboured her, people who were all too rare and yet teach another vital lesson. According to one of the University of Adelaide historians who worked on the project:

The history of resistance and collaboration in Nazi Germany reveals the extremes of which human beings are capable. Those who went along with the Nazis were ordinary people but so were those who resisted them. We get to choose what kind of human beings we want to be.

Even among the Resistance, those who stood up directly for the plight of the Jewish people, were rare. Sophie and Hans Scholl, brother and sister among a group of students calling themselves the White Rose, distributed pamphlets in 1942, confronting the German people with the fact that there were '300 thousand Jews…murdered in this country in the most bestial way', and crying for an end to apathy in the face of these 'crimes so unworthy of the human race'.

Back in 1936, Margo Meusel, a Berlin deaconess railed against the indifference and even participation in persecution of the Jews by the churches, demanding:

What shall we one day answer to the question, 'Where is thy brother Abel?' The only answer that will be left to us…is that of Cain. 'Am I my brother's keeper?'

These people did not speak, as we are able to today, with the right to freedom of conscience. Take the example of Austrian farmer, Franz Jagerstatter, executed for refusing to fight in Hitler's war. Even the simplest acts of defiance are known to us by a Nazi official's report of recent prosecutions for malicious statements. For instance, the case of Elsie W. passing a derogatory poem she had authored about Hitler to her workmates, or Wahlburga, P. sending care packages to her son, a deserter in gaol, and declaring to her landlady upon questioning that, 'You had better believe I'm not buying a swastika flag.'

While we consider all of these people heroes today, they were not only punished by the authorities but rejected by their peers. They were accused of a lack of patriotism and denounced for their failure to uphold Hitler's new code of morality, scorned for their position that contradicted the dominant narrative.

The members of the White Rose were turned in by a university janitor. The people of Franz Jagerstatter's home village of St Radergrund saw not a noble act of protest but an embarrassment, the failure to fight for the Fatherland. They also saw what they considered to be the needless abandonment of his wife whom they called a murderess for not trying to persuade her husband to stand down from his objection to joining the Nazi army.

Even women who slept with or married Jewish men had to bear public shame and humiliation to admit to supposedly dishonouring German women. Resistance against injustice was enforced first and foremost not by the Gestapo but by the social pressure manifested by a population under the sway of this Nazi morality. Nor is this a unique instance of injustice, which is why the message of 'Never again' is so important.

In the United States before the Civil War the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, for example, granted Southern slaveholders the right to hunt down and recapture runaway slaves who had escaped to the free states of the North. The return of slaves was seen, even by prosecutors who themselves had abolitionist sympathies, as essential to maintaining the Union and upholding the law. The attempts of abolitionists to intervene, to harbour runaway slaves and help them to freedom, frequently brought both they and the fugitives they sought to help under legal trial. Sadly, they were often condemned by their contemporaries because they did not accept that merely because it was the law it must be right.

These moments in human history show us how blind a society can be to the mistakes of its own times and how vital are the voices of those who speak out against an injustice, particularly one which is unseen, unacknowledged or perhaps even accepted by the community around them. If all people are to be cherished, to be accorded equal value and equal respect, then even in times when we believe ourselves to be making progress, even when we dedicate ourselves to working for this principle with the best of intentions, it always pays to listen to those voices and not to dismiss with ridicule or indifference those actions that may seem to some to be unnecessary, counterproductive or even shameful.

The museum reminds us of all these things. It was officially launched by His Excellency the Governor at an event held at the Mary MacKillop Plaza. About 150 people attended, including the temporary Israeli ambassador, representatives of state government and the opposition, the Lord Mayor, representatives from the History Trust of South Australia, the Department for Education, Catholic Education, members of the Jewish Community Council of South Australia, representatives of the Archdiocese of Adelaide (including Archbishop O'Regan), donors and partners, board members, project team and staff.

A number of interstate representatives attended via live stream and, very importantly, the event included Adelaide survivors and their families, including second and third generation descendants. About 240 people, including additional members of the public, attended the Shoah commemoration service at St Francis Xavier's Cathedral on the same day.

I want to thank and congratulate Mr Andrew Steiner, the board, the staff and project team and everyone who has been involved in this important project. The museum is currently open Tuesdays to Thursdays, 10am to 4pm, and Sundays from 11am to 3pm. Visitors are encouraged to visit the website, which is ahmsec.org.au, to plan their visit and to book.

The Adelaide Holocaust Museum and Andrew Steiner Education Centre will also provide an in-house education program for secondary students in years 10 to 12 and tertiary students across the Adelaide metropolitan area, and this is expected to roll out in early 2021. As the website states:

The Education Programme draws on lessons from the Holocaust with a focus on human rights. It has been developed to teach about the consequences of prejudice, racism, discrimination and antisemitism, and to support students' understanding of the consequences of apathy and silence; of being a bystander.

I hope we in this chamber will acknowledge that this new museum stands for something important, that even in a place that seems as remote from Nazi Germany as South Australia there still live people who suffered through the horrors of the Holocaust, and we bear equal responsibility with the rest of the world to ensure that these lessons are never forgotten. We too have the responsibility of the message of 'Never Again'. I commend the motion to the council.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. N.J. Centofanti.