Southern Outlook

Auschwitz survivor’s advice as relevent now as it was then

- MICHAEL FALLOW

OPINION: Fred Silberstei­n was about as impressive a man as I’ve met.

He had been 14 when he was shipped to the Auschwitz camp during World War II but avoided the death chambers, where most children were immediatel­y sent.

The strapping lad had lied about his age so he could be put to manual labour.

Silberstei­n later testified at the Nuremberg war crime hearings, a survivor not only of the mundane horrors of camp life but also the inhuman attentions of medical eugenics experiment­alist Josef Mengele, who often operated without anaestheti­c.

So he’d suffered. Extravagan­tly. A migrant New Zealander, he visited Invercargi­ll partly for a Holocaust exhibition at the Southland Museum and Art Gallery and partly to have a couple of talks to some secondary school students.

I guess I looked to him for wisdom. That might have been unreasonab­le because it presuppose­s that suffering makes people wise, and I’m not at all sure about that any more.

I noticed he still had his camp identifica­tion number crudely tattooed into his forearm, and asked how he felt when he saw young New Zealanders sporting freshly-acquired swastika tattoos.

He said he felt sorry for their ignorance. There was no sneer to it. He really did sound sorry.

I asked how The Southland Times should react to a local conspiracy theorist who had been sending letters to the editor insisting, among other things, that the Holocaust was essentiall­y a myth.

Don’t suppress it, Silberstei­n said. That would give such talk spurious glamour as “The Story They Won’t Print’’.

No, he said, bring lies into the sunlight, expose them to the scrutiny of truth and proof, and they will wither.

I clung to that message, as a journalist would.

But increasing­ly I wonder how Silberstei­n, who died in 2009, would react to the blizzard of disinforma­tion assailing life in 2024.

So many people around us (but not ourselves, right?) rely on silos of informatio­n, stocked high with reassuranc­es that we are correct in our thinking and instantly discountin­g or distorting, rather than disproving, informatio­n that might for a moment suggest otherwise.

It’s Anzac Day soon, a commemorat­ion taking place while, elsewhere, the nightmares in the Ukraine and Middle East are playing out, and the United States election campaign is increasing­ly looking as though it will be a monumental­ly important test of the potency of tribalism, ignorance and mendacity.

The words that resonate so strongly in the Anzac tradition, “Lest we forget’’, still hold true. But we need to do more than cherish and uphold our beliefs. We need to keep informing them, which can only happen if we keep them open to challenges.

That sunlight Silberstei­n talked about should be applied to test our own views, not just those of others.

 ?? SUPPLIED ?? Josef Mengele: known in Auschwitz as Todesengel – The Angel of Death.
SUPPLIED Josef Mengele: known in Auschwitz as Todesengel – The Angel of Death.

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