Last night SBS broadcast the first episode of the new series of Who Do You Think You Are: Andrew Denton.

The episode was brilliant, moving. Andrew Denton recounts some of it in this Sydney Morning Herald article.

Only the slight double-bump as I cross the disused railway line into the Treblinka site disturbs this sylvan scene. This is the same line that brought the trains jammed with their human cargo to the death camp hidden here just over 70 years ago. It is the only part of what happened here that is still visible.

I am full of apprehension. This is my first visit to a Holocaust site. Only 24 hours earlier I had discovered that members of my family had been among the men, women and children shipped here like cattle, and I am unsure how I will react. As I step out from the car, what I cannot know is that I am about to have one of the most remarkable meetings of my life.

I am here as a subject of the television show Who Do You Think You Are?. For the last 10 days, the production team has been helping me time-travel in search of my father’s line, originally named Ditkofsky, but changed to Denton in the 1930s because a Jewish name in East London, with the Blackshirts on the rise, was asking for trouble…

Historian Jerzy Halbersztadt waits for me at the entrance to this silent place. He explains that there is little record of those who perished here at Treblinka because the killing was on such an industrial scale it was impossible to keep track of them. Of the estimated six million Jews killed in Europe during World War II, more than 800,000 perished at Treblinka – in just 16 months. It is one of the most murderous places on earth.

I ask Jerzy how he can be sure the Ditkofskys were among them. He describes a meticulous collection of German transport records showing train movements, dates and times, the number of people transported, all cross-checked against eyewitness accounts and court records. He then shows me a table with the numbers and dates of the people deported to Treblinka from the Bialystok region, where Suchowola is located. The dates and numbers square with the accounts from those Poles left behind.

Once off the train, he continues, they would have been first whipped and beaten, then driven through a gate into sheds and made to undress. The women’s heads would be shaved. They would then be commanded to run, naked, into the gas chambers, to be asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from a diesel engine.

From the moment of their arrival to the moment of their death would have been – at most – three hours. Between Commandant Franz Stangl’s morning coffee and his lunch each day, 6000 people died. After lunch, the killing resumed. Unlike the hundreds of work camps that were set up around Nazi-occupied Europe, Treblinka was built for one purpose only: swift mass murder.

The only Jews with any hope of survival were the tiny number picked to work as Sonderkommando – prisoners forced to perform unspeakable jobs: moving corpses, sorting through their belongings, taking gold from their teeth. Members of the Sonderkommando could hope to stay alive for a few extra weeks before they, too, would be executed.

In August 1943, the Sonderkommando of Treblinka staged a revolt, unheard of in the German camps, and 300 prisoners escaped. Three hundred out of the more than 800,000 sent to Treblinka. And of that 300, I was told, only one remained alive: 91-year-old Samuel Willenberg. “He lives in Israel,” said Jerzy, “and he will be here to talk to you this afternoon.”

Samuel Sillenberg, the last witness to Treblinka, is not the hunched, enfeebled survivor I had anticipated. He is a bull of a man, still powerfully built, his voice so strong that our sound recordist has to turn off his microphone and use mine alone to record our conversation.

No sooner have we greeted each other than Samuel takes off, abandoning his wheelchair and pushing through the bushes. Pausing to make sure he has got the spot exactly right, he jabs at the ground with his walking stick. “Here, here is where the fence was.” Then, pointing again, “And that is where the guard post was.”

Samuel has made it his life’s work to remember and speak of what happened at Treblinka…

Lest we forget, indeed. Any of us. Jewish or not. See Treblinka Concentration Camp: History & Overview. And don’t believe any arsehole who tries to tell you none of this happened.

17,000 stones at Treblinka – each one commemorating a city or town and under the field the ashes of 800,000 dead.

Andrew Denton with Samuel Willenberg, 91, the last living survivor of the Treblinka extermination camp. Photo: SBS

Part of the background to such horrors was a German press capable of this – again and again.

Hatred, dehumanisation….

Today I saw an example of the same genre.

Why do I say so? Am I not being a bit over the top? I think not. Now I did not say the Terror and Sturmer are equivalent; I AM saying there is a generic similarity.

The Telegraph story is in two parts online: Man charged over Sydney mall stabbing and an opinion piece Visa dishonesty a sign of the Times. To quote the latter:

AN Iranian refugee to Australia yesterday appeared in court on charges of stabbing a man to death at Westfield Parramatta. Horrified witnesses claimed the man, an Australian resident since being granted a protection visa in 2010, allegedly stabbed his victim repeatedly with a large knife.

The accused killer, Kazem Mohammadi Payam, arrived in Australian waters in 2009. Officials say he carried no identification, yet he was still granted a protection visa the following year…

OK.

1. Is there any actual connection between his being or having been an asylum seeker and the alleged crime? NO.

2. Has the person actually been to court and convicted? NO – but that wouldn’t worry the Telegraph though they do cover themselves by using the word “alleged”.

3. How many people sought asylum in Australia between 2008-9 and 2012-2013? Around 65,000, c.36,000 being boat arrivals.

4. How many instances of criminal behaviour by “asylum seekers”, almost all of it far less serious than the offence alleged in this current case, has the Telegraph been able to dredge up?  Thirty. Yes, three zero. 30.

• About 30 asylum seekers released into the community have been charged with a range of offences, including people smuggling and paedophilia.

Oh panic, good people of Australia! They’re out to rape and murder! All of them!

TWO MINUTE HATE! TWO MINUTE HATE!

Sri Lankan girl Febrina, 3, is claimed to be a passenger on the missing boat of asylum seekers

The effect of the Telegraph front page is clearly to suggest very strongly that ALL 65,000 or so asylum seekers are “assassins” or at least some kind of criminal. What were they thinking when they decided to run this line?

Almost certainly the purpose is just cheap stinking populism to sell their rag to gullible punters. The usual tabloid sewage. Fear and loathing of asylum seekers sells these days. But sewage like this really makes our country a worse place, not a better. Do we really want to ape the journalistic methods of Der Sturmer?

See also The New York Times 4 July 2014.

Australia is pursuing draconian measures to deter people without visas from entering the country by boat. In doing so, it is failing in its obligation under international accords to protect refugees fleeing persecution.

Last fall, Prime Minister Tony Abbott launched Operation Sovereign Borders, a campaign involving the military to divert boats full of asylum seekers to Indonesia before they can reach Australian shores. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison now says that no boat has arrived in Australia in the last six months, and vows to take “every step necessary to ensure that people who arrive illegally by boat are not rewarded with permanent visas.”…

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, said recently that “something strange happens” in the minds of Australians when it comes to asylum seekers who arrive by boat without a visa.

Horrible instances of hundreds of people dying in unseaworthy boats may play a role in this thinking. So may xenophobia. Curiously, though, the hostility to people who try to arrive by boat does not seem to extend to asylum seekers in general. Australia is fairly generous about offering protection to refugees, as long as they apply for protection from overseas, obtain a visa, then enter Australia.

In 2012, there were 29,610 such applications and 8,367 were recognized as refugees. Between 2001 and 2008, when Australia imposed mandatory detention of visa-less asylum seekers at offshore processing centers, 70 percent of the 1,637 asylum seekers were recognized as refugees. But there is something about the boat people that has provided politicians with an exploitable issue that does Australia’s otherwise commendable record on refugees no good.