Mr Lipson claims 45,000 died out in this particular ghetto and another 72,000 people were sent out to an extermination camp.
“They put people on trucks, closed them automatically, put the exhaust pipe back into the truck and travelled four kilometres and after that when they arrived there, everybody was dead and they burned them later,” he said.
For Mr Lipson, 84, his experiences as a Holocaust survivor now serve as an educational tool of what can happen when hatred reigns.
Nazis marched into his Polish town on September 7, 1939 and the first order they gave was to ban Jewish children from school. Within months, ghettos were established and forced labour and exterminations began.
Mr Tuvia was one of few who survived.
“They said to me simply: ‘You are a number, you are not a human being. We choose that you will not live because you are a pest, and pests have to be killed.’
“I was standing with my father and a man came to me and said: ‘Don’t stay with your father, let go of his hand because he’s definitely going to extermination. You’re young and you may survive.’ He pushed me away, and thanks to him, I survived.”
Outside of Israel, Melbourne had the highest number of Holocaust survivors in the world after the war, most being East-European Jews, and mainly from Poland.
The Jewish Holocaust Museum in Elsternwick, Victoria was founded by these survivors who have since built a resilient community in Melbourne. Director of the museum Mr Bernard Korbman told The Epoch Times these survivors were amazing in their clarity of vision.
“The Holocaust can be a most useful tool to teach about injustice anywhere around the world. Why the Holocaust?
Because, a, it’s like a paradigm of all the genocides that have taken place. You can learn the techniques, the methods, the way that people go around subjugating other people, about first robbing them of everything that makes a person, be it language, culture,” said Mr Korbman.
Mr Korbman said Australians should understand “the universal lessons” that the Holocaust teaches, and how totalitarian governments work.
“You can see the patterns – stop the religious practices, stop the language, de-humanise, and then once you’ve de-humanised the people, it’s a lot easier to crush them because they become ‘subversives’, ‘counter-revolutionists’ and all these sort of things.”
Mr Korbman continued: “It’s important to educate about the Holocaust and other genocides so that what has become a meaningless slogan, ‘Never Again’ – and it is meaningless because it’s still happening – can actually become a reality by people not being bystanders.”
The Jewish Holocaust Museum, which will be totally renovated and upgraded at the end of the year, is visited by hundreds of school children every week.
Mr Lipson is one of many survivors who guides and talks to the children.
“The first question they ask me is: ‘Do you hate Germans?’ And I answer straight away; first of all, I will never forgive what the Nazis did to us – not Germans, because there were good Germans and bad Germans. But I don’t hate, because I suffered because of hatred. So we’re talking about tolerance.
“I’m categorising people in two categories – a good person and a bad person, regardless what he is. There are the perpetrators, there are bystanders and there are people who couldn’t care less, because they think: ‘That’s not my business and I don’t want to know about it.’ And that’s the problem, because if a lot of people would start to protest, maybe that [genocide] wouldn’t happen.”
Mr Lipson tells the children: “We are living in a democracy. You are the future of this country. Democracy has not been given on a silver platter. You have to cherish it, you have to protect it, you have to do everything that’s possible to maintain the way we live.”
Director of Education at the Holocaust Centre, Mr Zvi Civins, spoke directly to some school groups while The Epoch Times was there on May 8.
He asked the children ““Does the Holocaust have any value, importance, meaning or message?”
“So we can learn from it” responded one secondary school student.
“Correct. I often say the holocaust is the best way to learn about the worst way people can behave toward each other. Because the holocaust didn’t start with the gas chamber… what did it begin with? Hatred - the worst disease of them all. And hatred is an emotion,” Mr Civins expressed to the school groups.
“So hatred, racism, intolerance, you can see in just twelve years how it took root, took hold in Nazi Germany, grew, spread and you saw the result,” he concluded.
One school group present was a small year 11 VCAL class from Galvin Park Secondary College in Weribee.
“This is a huge part of our program for these students to become community leaders,” stated teacher, Ms Sue Mammarella
“The information we gain from this [excursion] is empowering them to then design programs and do things for our community, understanding difficulty and prejudice. We’ve seen the Pianist to see the Warsaw significance, and then we showed Life’s Beautiful, through the gentle father protecting his child. And we’re going to see Schindler’s List, and we’re probably going to go and see Defiance, because the centre guide here said that that’s quite accurate, not Hollywood.”
Student, Michael King, said he knew only a very minimal amount about the holocaust before his teacher, Ms Mammarella, introduced the topic in various ways into their flexible VCAL curriculum. His trip to the museum revealed further valuable information; the museums’ honoring of the Aborigines protest against the mistreatment of Jews in pre-war Nazi Germany, and a news article titled ‘Aboriginal campaigner took up a faraway fight for the oppressed’ giving him hope and purpose as a young Koori himself.
“Some people actually helped, and they didn’t just sit back and do nothing”, said Michael, referring to his aboriginal ancestors, “If I was there I wouldn’t be sitting there not doing anything. I’d help as much as I could.”
On December 6, 1938, while few others overseas bothered to protest the atrocity, an aboriginal delegation in Melbourne, headed by William Cooper, attempted to present to the German consul general a resolution condemning the persecution of both Jews and Christians in Nazi Germany, but the German consul, D.W. Drechsler, refused them access to the building.
The resolution declared ‘On behalf of the Aborigines of Australia, a strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany, and asks that this persecution be brought to an end.’
“They want to go back now and research very proudly how the aboriginal people protested,” said Ms Mammarella “so this is a new project that they’ll take away and do, and then they’ll empower our aboriginal group in our school that meets, and discuss that. With the agenda that our kids are doing things for the community, they have to learn to do things for the community.”
Mr Korbman believes the element of holocaust education that should really be enhanced is to teach people to never be bystanders.
“People accepted seeing Jews being beaten up, people accepted all sorts of things, participated in it for greed and so on.”
“Because we all cherish Australia, and we cherish Australia’s democratic processes and democratic institutions, what we say to students is, your love of country is not a blind love, it’s a genuine love of country and love of what that country stands for and represents. So that if you see your government, or a group of people undermining that process, or for certain political ends, trying to do away with that process, then go out there and protest.”
“Because it’s not ‘Ruled by Law’, it’s ‘Rule of Law’. There’s a very great difference within that. ‘Rule by Law’ is totalitarianism, ‘Rule of Law’ is when the law embodies all those wonderful virtues that we cherish and admire.”
Mr Korbman says the holocaust is not just a narrative with graphic images, but it’s a narrative that is able to speak to today’s children, that is able to show what can happen.
“One of the things that my generation always had was that feeling of hope, and I think one of the things that current generations have is feelings of hopelessness, because the world is so complex, so hard, it’s a world where people have to fight for everything they get, and aggression seems to be part of everything,”
Speaking to today’s Australian youth, Mr Korbman offers some words of advice, “You have a responsibility. If you want your world to be good, if you want to look at the world through rose coloured glasses you can do that, but you have to work toward making that world that place. If you just stand by and say, well, that’s the way things are, then you’re copping out.”
