History shows Jews right to fear deadly menace of ‘words’

So, was it “where’s the Jews?”, was it “where’s your Jews?”, was it “gas the Jews”, was it “kill the Jews”, was it “f..k the Jews”? There are those who take comfort in the supposed bulletproof conclusion that it wasn’t “ gas the Jews” at all, but merely “where are the Jews?”.

That, they say, is benign and therefore shouldn’t have aroused the ire of those damn pesky Jews at all. The very ones who, according to Greens senator Jenny Leong, have their tentacles everywhere.

Those very same Jews who, according to John Lyons, are conspiring to do, well, something. But you see we pesky Jews do not regard “where are the Jews?” (if indeed that was the phrase used) as benign at all.

Let’s do a little journey into history, always illuminating.

Back around 1890 my great grandmother, aged about 26, having had enough of the poverty and pogroms of Latvia, decided to chance all and took a boat intending to go to America, but ended up in Scotland. She had many reasons to leave, not the least of which were that she was a young woman, first widowed and recently remarried, with two small children and two dead ones from husband No.2. Her courage and foresight were remarkable

Back in Eastern Europe, during Easter and Christmas, the Jews would hide their children in separate fields so that the marauding Cossacks or other anti-Jewish civic-minded citizens wouldn’t find them or might find only one.

They barricaded themselves in their houses because, you see, these very same marauders went around shouting “where are the Jews?”, then with their pitchforks or other handy tools massacred as many as they could.

This, by the way, was both pre- and post-war a convenient method of execution. The infamous pogrom of Kielce in 1946 in which 42 were killed and 40 wounded was committed by the locals becoming enraged that a few Jews had the temerity to return from the hellholes of either the camps or exile in Russia, and set upon them with pitchforks and the like.

Likewise in August 1945, the paltry number of Jews who returned to Krakow were set upon by their neighbours, in the synagogue on the sabbath, with three or five being killed and many injured. Professor Jan Grabowski, in his groundbreaking and award-winning work, The Hunt for the Jews, set out in excruciating detail how during World War II the Germans went about hunting down Jews with the help of the Polish Blue Police. The hunt was accompanied by the chant of “where are the Jews?”.

Historian Barbara Engelking, in her work, Such a Beautiful Sunny Day, discusses much the same history, albeit in a different part of Poland. The chants of “where are the Jews?”, “give us your Jews” or similar are not benign expressions of love. These are expressions of hate, being normalised within our community.

Centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes are being wheeled out and used by mainstream commentators online and in the daily media. Words such as “tentacles” would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

The allegations of Jews allegedly being in the pay of foreign powers evokes the anti-Semitic Dreyfus trial in late 19th century France and the infamous forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The failure of those who can to call out this behaviour is egregious. The failure to recognise what trauma those words evoke in the mostly survivor and second-generation community in Australia is blind at best and racist at worst.

Australia was once a welcoming country that gave shelter to many fleeing persecution. It is now arguably becoming a repository and safe haven for racists and anti-Semites to peddle their poisonous messages.

My great-grandmother had the courage and foresight to leave her home and seek a better life. In so doing she saved the entire family. My father’s family, ending up in variously the Belzec extermination camp or a pit thanks to the Einsatzgruppen (mobile Nazi killing unit), had no such luck.

But they all shared one thing – they knew the meaning and the implication of the words “where are the Jews?”. It’s time everyone else did too.

Deborah Wiener is a Melbourne barrister who specialises in family law. She also has a deep interest in prevention of family violence, human rights and racism and Holocaust historiography.