It was the shoes that did it, in the end. The stories were graphic in their own way and horribly confronting but, ultimately, it was the truth of those few hundred or so discarded, mismatched shoes, piled in a heap under a thick piece of plexi-glass that upended me. Women’s sandals, men’s dress shoes. The child’s shoes once worn by little feet. All of them speaking silently and powerfully of lives felled in a concentration camp, murdered by Nazis.
Actual Nazis, to be clear. Not the imitation parading around various protests in Victoria and other parts, over the past year.
As I write this, I’m still processing a visit this week to Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. It’s as you’d expect but so much more. Whoever imagined quietly weeping over abandoned footwear, nearly a century old?
I’m of a generation that never dreamed there would come a time when the word Nazi would be thrown around so carelessly. With such ignorance of what it means, what it stands for and what they did. With an astonishing ignorance – not just of the disrespect it shows to the dwindling number of survivors but of the trauma it brings to many.
You’re a Nazi. That’s Nazism. You’re a Nazi sympathiser. It’s become quite the insult du jour. It’s not just the debacle engulfing the Victorian Liberal leader and rookie MP Moira Deeming that got me thinking about it before I left Australia. And in truth, it’s not just the word Nazi.
Read the article by Gemma Tognini in The Australian.