Tampa
What have we learned in a year, or indeed, in 60 years? asks Paul Valent. (extract)
' It was a clear night with dark feelings. I was a four-year-old boy,
sitting on my father’s shoulders. My father’s shoulders were
my anchor to the world. My mother was too distant, somewhere in the dark,
part of the rustles in the field around me. I heard accelerated whispers.
Barking dogs in the distance caused fear in the group. I knew because
I felt its wave envelop me. I was a good boy, as I numbed my desire to
scream and cry. That became a habit.
Sixty years later I found epithets for that experience. My parents and
I were queue jumpers, liars, criminals colluding with people smugglers,
seeking a change in lifestyle. To us, we were refugees from Slovakia,
where first my nanny, and then all my father’s family were forcefully
deported to concentration camps. My father’s business had already
been taken over, and we had been evicted from our flat. We had to flee
before we were taken over too. We were lucky to have money to pay a smuggler.
Those who did not had to remain behind.
We made it across the border, but one day my parents were apprehended.
First, they were put in jail, and then they were handed over to the Slovak
border police. Trains took them to a series of detention centres. They
were loaded on to the final train, a cattle car headed for Auschwitz.
Minutes before the train pulled out, they escaped after the guards were
bribed. Eventually my parents and I were reunited. The wounds of that
separation took many years to heal.
We lived illegally as local Hungarians on false papers till the end of
the war. Even as a fouryearold, I had to lie well for us all to survive.
After the war, we applied to immigrate to Australia. It took many months
for one of the few permits to Australia to arrive. The Iron Curtain slid
down immediately behind us. We arrived by boat in 1949.
My family relished the safety and friendliness of our new country. My
father, who had abhorred the totalitarian lies of Europe, found freedom
of speech lifegiving. He admired the Australian passion for democracy
shown in the referendum that defied the government and defeated the outlawing
of the Communist Party.
Almost five decades later, I had the privilege to be an Australian delegate
at the first international conference of the millennium. It was the International
Forum on the Holocaust, held in Stockholm in January 2000. Fortyfour heads
of state attended. The Australian prime minister did not attend. The aim
of the conference was to ensure that lessons from the Holocaust would
translate into the new millennium.
Led by Germany, the heads of state of many nations acknowledged their
countries’ roles in the destruction of the Jews. They each said sorry.
The Slovak and Hungarian heads of state seemed to speak to me personally
as they detailed and regretted what we had suffered.
The delegates confirmed some earlier outcomes of lessons from the Holocaust.
They included the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Refugees,
and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. According
to them, my family had a right to seek refuge in Hungary! I had a right
to exist, be free and have an education.
At the conference, Dr Michael Naumann, German minister of state for cultural
affairs, detailed common precursors to genocide. He warned that nations
had to reverse them while there was still time.
The first step is that a government identifies a specific group of people
as scapegoats for its own shortcomings, and current political and economic
anxieties. It uses the media to misinform, dehumanise, vilify and demonise
the identified group. It fans anxieties and mobilises nationalist, racist
and religious prejudice. By rallying the population behind it against
the scapegoated group, the government maintains power.
All members of the scapegoated group are lumped into one faceless or caricatured
entity. They are placed outside usual laws, and special laws may be promulgated
for them. The group is constrained economically, and sometimes geographically.
If incarcerated, people are identified by numbers, not names. They are
humiliated and equated with animals. They may be kept as longterm scapegoats,
or ultimately be expelled or killed.
I returned from the conference to my democratic, multicultural country,
grateful for how totally it had absorbed the lessons of the Holocaust.
Through my profession I continued to heal victims of atrocities from other
countries.
But recently I felt reverberations of the old fear. I heard those epithets,
which described my family’s quest for escape from persecution, being
hurled at a new wave of refugees. I did a check. Of course, this was nothing
like the Holocaust. But in its treatment of refugees in detention centres
and on the high seas, Australia was far along the process described by
Naumann. It was condemned internationally for breaking humanrights conventions
relating to refugees and children. What was happening to my country and
its values? This time I was not going to be a victim, or a bystander.
'
Paul Valent is past president of the Australasian Society for Traumatic
Stress Studies and the Melbourne Child Survivors of the Holocaust. His
writings include From Survival to Fulfilment and Child Survivors of the
Holocaust.
For the full article by Paul Valent, see Eureka Street September 2002
print edition.
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