Daniela’s story helped me understand the Holocaust

Editor’s note: If you would like to submit a letter for possible publication, please email it to editor@rationalist.com.au. See our Publishing Guideline   The Holocaust is the defining evil of the twentieth century. We have trouble even mentally processing its enormity. The figure of six million is so large it is hard to picture in our mind’s eye. What does 60 MCG grand final crowds actually look like? All dead?  We grasp some of the effect on individuals in survivor memoirs and fictional accounts, often turned into films, such as Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and gain some insight into the mindset that produced it reading accounts such as Hannah Arendt’s book on Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. But the book that has most brought home to me the horror of the Shoah and its impact on ordinary people’s lives is Daniela Torsh’s Crying in the Archives. Daniela’s parents met in a concentration camp and Daniela was born in Prague in the now Czech Republic in 1946. The family migrated to Australia a couple of years later and Daniela grew up in Sydney. She went on to have a distinguished career in journalism, film and TV and is a leading Australian feminist. But her parents were so traumatised by the Holocaust that for her first 11 years they didn’t tell her she was Jewish. She grew up thinking she was a Christian like just about everyone else in Australia at the time. It was only when her father died in 1958 and sh...