Nadine Chalmers-Ross

We must stand against injustice – before it turns to evil

There’s a room in one of the buildings at Auschwitz that stopped me in my tracks – more so than all of the other rooms there that catalogue the horrors of the place.

You can’t take photos, so it doesn’t turn up on the Instagram feeds of travelbraggers. It contains something that once belonged on the heads of the scores who were murdered there.

Their hair. About three tonnes of the stuff lies tangled and almost colourless behind a glass wall in a dimly lit room. As I shuffled past I shuddered to think how callous you’d have to be to strip someone of not only every stitch of their clothing but every fibre on their bodies that may be useful, before determining that they themselves, are not.

I went to Auschwitz in November for a reason. I once felt like it was an unimaginable horror consigned to history, never to be repeated. But after November 8, the world seems so full of hate, that this assumption doesn’t feel so safe.

I’m not the first to draw parallels between President Donald Trump and the Nazis’ rise to power. On his current trajectory, I won’t be the last. He ticks too many boxes on the ‘‘early warning signs of fascism’’ list for comfort.

Trump might ‘‘only’’ be doing what he promised to do if he became president, but promising something awful and then following through to actually do something awful doesn’t nullify its atrociousness. His book Mein Kampf urged the ‘‘removal’’ of Jews from Germany, so you could argue Hitler just did what he promised, right?

I’m not suggesting Trump’s executive order banning citizens of seven mainly-Muslim countries from entering the US equates to the brutal murder of millions over the course of World War II. Of course it doesn’t.

But it’s an ominous warning sign. Singling out an entire group of people primarily based on one common factor, weeding out undesirables and those who look different – that’s been done before, more than once, so we know how it ends.

It doesn’t matter whether Prime Minister Bill English was doing a diplomatic tap dance by refusing to condemn Trump’s immigrant ban, or was worried about the president’s reputation for a long memory and a short fuse.

What does matter is that English had the opportunity to condemn a violation of human rights that is eerily familiar – and instead, he looked the other way.

We’ve grown used to politics being driven by personality not by principles. Eight years of John Key licking his finger to test which way the winds of public opinion were blowing will do that.

But sometimes you shouldn’t have to wait for the polls to make a stand.

For the sake of the people whose hair is still encased in a dark room in a place that’s become synonymous with evil, bugger the politics. Stand up for what’s right.

We’ve grown used to politics being driven by personality not by principles.