Shoah remembrance is not just for Jews

STANDING on a small hillside in Poland overlooking the remains of the Belzec camp where 600,000 Jews had lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis, Dr Stephen Smith pondered his relationship to what had occurred there.

“I was born in a Christian family in England with no connection to the Jewish community, or the lost Jewish world that was represented there,” he recalled.

“I could feel very far away from what I was seeing, but something told me that, because of our shared humanity, I shared in what happened there.

“And that the memory of what happened there is my memory too.”

Shortly afterward, he and his brother, James Smith, founded the UK Holocaust Centre in 1995 and later, the Aegis Trust, which campaigns to prevent genocide worldwide.

Delivering the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commis-sion’s annual Gandel Oration in Sydney and Melbourne last week,  Dr Smith said the job of commemorating the Holocaust was not just for Jews and that everyone has a duty to speak out on behalf of the oppressed.

There was no better way to learn that lesson, he added, than after confronting survivors of the Rwandan genocide, where all of the survivors knew their killers.

“It became clear to me, if it could happen there, it could happen anywhere,” he said. “We are all involved in this whether we like it or not. When it happens to somebody else, it happens to us.”

Genocide was about silence, not about violence.

“It’s about silencing communities, families, individuals. So that the resistance to genocide is speaking out. You might think that the 2.9 million people in refugee camps in Darfur and Chad can’t hear you. They have mobile phones and they tweet. They know when we speak, and they absolutely know when we are silent.”

CHANTAL ABITBOL

Dr Stephen Smith delivered this year’s Gandel Oration in Sydney and Melbourne