Published: 21 December 2017
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The presentation of the document on December 17, 1942 offered a spectacular scene. Sydney Silverman, a British Labour MP, filed an official question in the House of Commons, asking Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden whether the British government had any news concerning the fate of the Jews. In response, the Conservative politician stated: “I regret to have to inform the House that reliable reports have recently reached His Majesty's Government regarding the barbarous and inhuman treatment to which Jews are being subjected in German-occupied Europe.”
Eden then read the official Declaration adopted by 11 Allied governments and the French National Committee that condemned “in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” and re-affirmed “their solemn resolution to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution”. The whole House of Commons stood in silence for one minute, but no specific measures to help the Jews of Europe were promised.
One day later in Canberra, Herbert Evatt, Australian Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs, announced that “the Australian Government has fully associated itself” with the Declaration, as did “the Governments of Canada and South Africa”. The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Peter Fraser, expressed in the name of his government “its sense of horror at the shocking and inhuman cruelties practised against the Jews by the Nazis”.
The main Allied powers of the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States, as well as minor Allies and British Dominions thus joined one of the first international condemnations of genocidal policies in modern history.
The Declaration came after months of intense lobbying by Jewish organisations in Britain and the United States and at the point when the Allied governments were presented with indisputable evidence that made any further delays impossible. It also came at a time when the majority of all the victims of the Holocaust had already been murdered in the gas chambers of occupied Poland and the death pits of Eastern Europe.
Even now, the Allies did not make any specific promises apart from post-war retribution. The Declaration could thus be seen as a failure of the World to respond to genocidal policies, a recurrent theme in our contemporary world, after we have silently watched the massacres in Rwanda, former Yugoslavia and most recently in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
The Australian part of the story did not end with the Government joining the declaration. This official confirmation of the Nazi policies moved rescue advocates to action. The Jewish community organised days of mourning. Both secular and religious authorities raised their voice in protest against the Nazi madness.
On December 12, in anticipation of the Declaration, Lord Mayor of Melbourne Thomas Nettlefold, issued a powerful public statement: ‘If we remember the once enlightened continent of Europe, and picture the abhorrent treatment which the Nazis are meting out to the Jews, our hearts are filled not only with deep sorrow and anguish but also with a feeling of indignation and despair.”
He concluded that “although tomorrow will be a day of mourning by the Jewish people, I am sure that it will also be a day of mourning by free men and women everywhere”.
Nettlefold stressed the universal condemnation of the Nazi policies, but the Declaration also had other consequences, today rarely discussed in Australia. “Despite all the interest in the Holocaust,” the Australian historian Paul Bartrop suggests, “at no time has it been considered an issue which in any way pertained Australia”. This widely shared perception is not precise. As a land of immigration, with almost 10,000 Jewish refugees reaching the shores after the rise of Nazism, there were new Australians who were directly invested in the European events.
Although Australia was far removed from the physical immediacy of the ghettos and concentration camps, thousands of refugees and new Australians spent the war worrying about the fate of their relatives and friends. The story of Australia and the Shoah is not only about closed gates and restrictive immigration policies, a theme that has remained very actual until today.
It is also about individuals and their desperate efforts to save their loved ones in Europe. They remained in contact with the help of the Red Cross, though the correspondence abruptly ended in 1942. The last letter the sons of Hinde Bergner received from Przemyslany, east of Lvov in Galicia (now in Ukraine), in August 1942 read: “I am very weak … it will soon be too late.”
The attempts of recent immigrants to support their families caught in Europe offer a so far rarely-debated perspective on Australia’s involvement in the Shoah
Recent immigrants led the efforts to help the Jews of Europe triggered by the Allied declaration. Jona Machover spearheaded the United Emergency Committee for European Jews in Sydney, possibly the first organisation in the world created with the sole aim to help the Jewish victims of Nazism. Aizik Cymerman, who escaped from Poland to Russia and landed in Australia only in August 1941, founded the Federation of Polish Jews in Australia.
In addition, long established associations, such as the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, especially its Victorian branch under Francis Barkman, took on rescue and relief initiatives. Because the question of rescue was never seriously considered in the middle of the war, the Jewish communities at least attempted to send food parcels to their families trapped in the Polish ghettos.
Not surprisingly almost none of the parcels ever reached the intended addressees. This was also the case with Bergners, whose mother had disappeared, most likely in the gas chambers of Belzec, several months before they attempted to reach her in January 1943.
The attempts of recent immigrants to support their families caught in Europe offer a so far rarely-debated perspective on Australia’s involvement in the Shoah. It is a story of separated families. It is a story of individuals who saved their lives by emigrating to the other side of the world, whilst their elderly parents and other family members remained in Europe, where they were condemned to a slow and painful death in overcrowded ghettos with a complete lack of adequate sanitary conditions and sustenance, before they were put on trains to the death factories in the isolated corners of Poland.
Their relatives in the new world did not abandon them, but they were powerless. They failed, because they simply had to fail. The unsuccessful attempts of recent immigrants to support their relatives makes the Shoah also an Australian story. It also reminds us that there are Australians for whom human rights abuses in other parts of the world are not only easily ignored lines in newspapers, they are the stories of their communities, families and friends.
