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Year 8 student Olivia Campbell,winner of the Whitlam Institute’s What Matters? Writing Competition for young Australians.

“Well,” she says,“I suppose I should tell you. Once I’m dead,someone needs to be there to remember.”

Safta strokes old fingers against the worn blanket and begins to speak. A yellowed family portrait. Eight women. Four men. Five children. Safta bites her lip and digs her fingers into her collarbone as she tells me their story. Two emigrated to Australia before World War II broke out in earnest. On August 25,1942,the Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing squad of Nazi Germany – rounded up the rest and shuttled them to the Treblinka concentration camp. They were dead on arrival,slowly asphyxiated in the gas vans that transported them.

Safta shows me the picture of a boy who built a radio from spare parts in the Lodz ghetto in Poland and was shot by a firing squad where he stood when he warned his friends of what would happen to them.

She tells me of Sonya and Lily Lublinski,my great-grandmother’s closest friends. When Sonya was taken,she made her sister promise to care for her children. They were both under 10 – too young to labour as slaves in camps. And therefore they were disposable. When the Einsatzgruppen came,Lily forced herself into the cart,too,because she refused to leave them alone as they died.

Finally,Safta shows me her father’s approved passport. And here,she stops. She rolls away her mother’s lace cloth,and her father’s family portrait,and the pain of that time in history. She kisses my cheek and wishes me shalom as she shows me the door. Because she wants this to be the end of the story.

The family portrait shown to Olivia Campbell by her grandmother. The two people circled,Hela and her husband Lonek,came to Australia. The rest were murdered by the Nazis.

It would take 5000 hours to say the name of each of my people murdered in World War II – 208 days,without rest. Three seconds for each of the six million. These people will always be gone.

And Safta still dreams,after 75 years,that she’s a little girl in her nightdress running from Nazis.

Not discussing the Charlottesville massacre or the Yom Kippur shooting doesn’t make those tragedies any less real. And my culture is not alone. I imagine my closest friend’s Nani and my neighbour’s Jida doing what my Safta has done with me. Describing the Christchurch mosque shootings or the attacks on Indian students in Sydney and Melbourne in 2009. Explaining why the head of the Gandhi statue in the public park in California was smashed in. Or telling the story of the 14-year-old Palestinian girl who was shot in the eye and will never see her holy land returned to her.

I wonder how long it will be until they each have the weight of 5000 hours of stolen lives on their shoulders. I picture each of us explaining to our own grandchildren our peoples’ history. YouTube clips and Facebook posts alongside crumbling photographs. And I see those 5000 hours growing further and further. Infinitely. Until they span lifetimes.

Nobody deserves to be persecuted because of their faith – their burka or kippah or sari. This mantra matters. So please,recite it until you cannot forget,until the whole world echoes with it and nobody can forget. And remember that for each moment of silence,our clocks are ticking.

Olivia Campbell is in year eight at Presbyterian Ladies’ College Melbourne and the overall winner of the Whitlam Institute’s What Matters? Writing Competition for young Australians,2021. Read all the shortlisted entries viawhitlam.org.

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