Triumph of Memory

byNina Bassat AM

Holocaust survivor Nina Bassat’s speech from the Yom HaShoah commemoration and 180th anniversary of the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation (the Toorak Synagogue) on 28 April 2022.

Numbers, so many numbers. My mind fails to understand them, my heart cannot open to them. It is too vast, too remote. Even decades after the Shoah, what happened is incomprehensible. The enormity of the loss deprives it of all humanity. But we did not lose numbers – we lost people. Young people, old people, children and babies. So I start to think of individual names, and of places: Cecilia Katz in Belzec, Chaya Wargon in Treblinka, Meilech Przysuski in Auschwitz. Then I think of the names for whom there is no place: Izydor Katz, Srulek Wargon, Rysia Zinger. It is only then that our minds and hearts can relate to what we have really lost. It is only then that we can understand that the reason we are here is to remember and to commemorate the lives not lived, the tears not shed, the laughter never shared. It is the baker, Shmuel from Krakow, and the tailor, Berel from Warsaw, it is the midwife who brought into the world all the Jewish children in a shtetl 60 kilometres from Lwow, the musicians from Vienna who never played the next concert and the mothers who never nursed their babies. Wherever there are Jews in the world, whether it is in Melbourne or in Tel Aviv, in Buenos Aires or in London, in Milan or in tragic, beleaguered Kyiv, on Yom HaShoah we stand as one to think about the lives which were extinguished, the sorrow which many of us will bear to our dying days, and which we as a people will bear beyond that. We have lost them all. We have been deprived of so much, that you start to wonder if the void can ever be filled. You start to despair. And then you start to think not of the losses but of the triumphs: the triumph of memory and the triumph of survival. At nearly every Yom HaShoah commemoration we focus on numbers – “six million Jews”, “one and a half million children”, “most of the Jewish population of Poland”. For as long as we continue to remember, to speak, to teach we have not lost them, for they continue to live in our collective memory - that is the triumph of memory. And in all the cities where we commemorate and where we remember, life has been enriched and in some cases like Melbourne, invigorated by survivors – that is the triumph of survival. When my 3-year-old great-granddaughter giggles at something I have said, and one of my grandsons pats me on the head as he walks past, the despair goes, and it is replaced by love and pride and hope and a sense of triumph.

For from the remnants has grown a second, a third and a fourth generation, generations which are proud to be Jewish and which contribute to the rich fabric of life, wherever they find themselves. And from the remnants has grown a nation. They are the philosophers and the poets, the sportsmen and the artists, the tailors and the midwives who have shown us, and indeed the whole world, that the spirit can survive everything; that no matter to what depths humanity sinks, there is always a spark of hope, a spark of courage that will endure. So tonight, whilst we commemorate the unendurable losses, we also look around us and we know that no decree for a final solution can succeed. It can hurt us unbearably, it can scar us, it can even temporarily cripple us, but ultimately, we will prevail, and we will go on to lead lives full of fulfilment and lives full of joy, and that is the answer which sustains us.

Holocaust survivor Nina Bassat, with a photograph of herself as a baby in 1939. Photograph by Simon Schluter.