We turn a blind eye to hatred at our own peril

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reacts as he is shown exhibits at the Sydney Jewish Museum on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

I remember exactly when I first learned about the Holocaust. It was Mrs McLeod who gently led the girls in my class to Anne Frank and her life in hiding in an Amsterdam attic during the Nazi occupation in World War II. Until then I had been immersed in the nano drama of Anne of Green Gables.

Sitting around the librarian’s feet in a semicircle, we would talk about our experience of The Diary of Anne Frank, shuddering at the thought a neighbour could trigger police to come to your door and take you away just for being a Jew.

The atmosphere of an ordinary Brisbane suburb suddenly felt unsettled. It was 1983 and we were listening to the radio and taping our favourite songs, having swimming lessons and playing in the street until dark.

There were a few Indian and other Asian kids in our classroom. Religious education classes were held at the three churches across the road: Uniting, Catholic and Church of England. Some kids stayed in their classrooms while the rest of us filed out to sing hymns, Jesus songs, and listen to stories about morals. It wasn’t unusual for us to swap which class we went to, to be with our pals. The clergy knew most of us by sight and would mark us on the roll.

Rock stars were singing about global politics, Sting reminding us of the ever-present threat of World War III. The bomb was a quiet night-time anxiety for teens. We were awakening in an era of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, when journalists were heroes, things were being spoken of.

The Diary of Anne Frank was a rite of passage and, once read, could never be forgotten. I knew of only a couple of Jewish children at my state school, but it was in St Lucia, a university suburb, and filled with academics’ kids. For a year we had the Nairobian boy, who was uncommonly tall and shy; the German twins; the older boy from Taipei; and a family of six kids from Ukraine, all in one term.

The focus was on Sunnyboys at lunch, incessant ballgames and avoiding skids on the asphalt.

There was a heatwave when we were reading the diary aloud, in turn, in the classroom with no airconditioning. Fidgeting stopped when the teacher asked us: “What would you have done to help Anne’s family?” There were ideas, heroics and genuine puzzlement. How would you stop the Nazis if it were here, in Brisbane, in 1983?

I had heard references to Nazi Germany enough times to recall them when we saw Liza Minnelli in Cabaret; there were shows on the ABC; visiting architects from Israel; my brothers’ godparents from Poland and Czechoslovakia, with their rich European accents, who started Brisbane’s first cosmopolitan restaurant, central figures in the arts, hosting visiting stars with a new sophistication Queensland had lacked. The five of us knew symbols of Judea, candelabra, certain foods, unmentioned loss.

I gave the book to my reader daughter at 12 and I waited. The fury soon came to her. She had seen Schindler’s List, but the intimacy of Anne’s “blog” shattered the fourth wall of distance for her, as if Anne were there. “What the f..k is wrong with these people? Why didn’t the Germans see what was happening and stop it?” she said to us at dinner.

I don’t like my kids swearing but, really, I couldn’t bring myself to remonstrate with her. How do you say people get selfish, then scared, then they get weak? How do you explain that some people need to hate others to feel OK themselves, that persecution is a tool for those who don’t think? How do you say to your children that most of us are indifferent to other people’s suffering?

So we would trot out the truism: “For evil to flourish, good people need only do nothing.” They understood this from their school anti-bullying campaigns about being a good bystander and how that prevents a culture taking hold of targeting and bullying kids. It’s a work in progress in schools; online, it is anyone’s game.

This has happened in religious orders where children have been preyed on; in companies when insiders trade information; in aged-care homes where old people are neglected; in political parties when there is corporate capture. People know, they see it. They do nothing, turning a blind eye.

Teaching kids the value of history is like layers of paint. Sometimes I need a spray can: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, our travels to Berlin and to Jerusalem, the beauty of Hadassah Children’s Hospital where everyone is treated together, regardless of faith. One of our own posted a message of solidarity on TikTok for the people affected by the Melbourne synagogue firebombing; the response from some friends was so shocking it has ended relationships.

Anne Frank

This week, what has hit me is the quiet. Another capitulation to injustice. Like the descent into online hate rooms, teens hooked on vapes, Aboriginal kids in police cells, authoritarians on the ascendancy. Quiet resignation from ordinary people like me.

A German pastor, Martin Nie­moller, reflected in a sermon on his own guilt about being anti-Semitic, voting for the National Socialists, complicit in the years leading up to the war. I used contemporary groups in parentheses for my own community: First they came for the communists (teachers and scholars) and I did not speak out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists (nurses and doctors) and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists (tradesmen and professions) and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews (secular people) and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to everyone everywhere. Just put the shoe on your own foot and walk around in it. The last word is for Anne Frank: “I don’t believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago!”

Chloe Shorten is a writer and director of non profit organisations. She is an advocate for mothers, children and people with disabilities. She is the author of two books on families.