An open letter to Louise Adler

I read your opinion piece (21/09) with an open heart and mind. I was originally quite captivated by the headline and excited to read on.

In your opening argument you insisted that concern for the ‘other’ should be premised on shared humanity, rather than a specific Jewish experience. Nevertheless, you went on to share your family’s Jewish history. You wrote that your parents narrowly escaped the clutches of Nazism, fleeing Germany in 1938 for Australia. How lucky they were to secure refuge despite an extremely restrictive immigration policy in Australia. Your grandfather, as a teenager, was a member of the French resistance. Sadly, he was murdered in Birkenau.

That history resonated with me, as a Jew and also a descendant of Holocaust survivors. My grandmother too engaged in resistance during the war. She trained and fought in the Zhukov unit of the Russian Partisans. Almost my entire family, bar my grandparents, were murdered in the Treblinka death camp. And I too, like you, have great affinity for asylum seekers. In fact, after surviving the Holocaust, my own grandparents languished in DP camps for five years. My mother was born in a DP camp in Germany.

You went on to affirm once again, that your father’s decision ‘to take a stand‘ derived from his own father’s experience and horrors of war since then. You wrote that these same experiences contributed to your own ‘understanding’ of the world. I have to confess feeling a little confused as to how this accorded with your thesis that empathy for others should foremost be predicated on shared humanity. Incidentally, I don’t have an issue acknowledging one’s lived experience or the concept of shared humanity to support human rights. In fact, I see these two factors as complimentary to one another.