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