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This is a guest essay by Shane Samuel, a Zionist, opinion, and political writer.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, was always deeply personal for me. It was a day to remember my grandparents’ survival, the murder of their families, and the genocide of six million Jews and millions of other victims at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.
But growing up in Australia, it also felt like a story from another time — a tragedy my grandparents had endured and survived before rebuilding their lives in what my grandfather proudly called the “lucky country.”
Today, that sense of distance has disappeared.
As a boy, I sang at Yom Hashoah commemorations in Melbourne. I attended memorial events marking the Białystok Ghetto revolt alongside my grandfather. The Holocaust was never abstract in my family; it was woven into our story.
In 2019, I travelled to Poland with my father as part of the Australian delegation to the March of the Living, the annual program that brings people from around the world to learn about the Holocaust and commemorate its victims. For years, I had promised my grandparents that I would continue sharing their testimony — stories I knew intimately from childhood.
My maternal grandparents were from Białystok, about 200 kilometres northeast of Warsaw. Using maps from the 1930s, I traced where key moments of their lives had unfolded. I was even able to pinpoint the location of my grandfather’s childhood home, once situated beside the Jewish cemetery.
Today, the site is covered by a public park. Nearby stood the remains of the dome of the Great Synagogue, where more than 2,000 Jews were trapped and burned alive on June 27, 1941 when the building was destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators. He also attended the school where, as a Jewish child, he was subjected to antisemitic blood libels — accusations such as the medieval myth that Jews used Christian blood to make Passover matzah.
Before leaving Białystok to join the march, I sat alone on a bench in that park, the place where his home once stood and spoke to my great-grandparents in Yiddish from the heart. I told them their legacy lived on. Their children had survived and rebuilt their lives in Australia. They had raised proud Jewish families. My own children attended the same Jewish school I did in Melbourne, and we were preparing to celebrate my son’s bar mitzvah.
In that quiet moment, I felt I had honoured them and reclaimed a piece of their story for the next generation.
The March of the Living itself was profoundly emotional. Walking through the camps where my grandmother had been imprisoned, after my grandfather leapt from a train bound for Treblinka, was overwhelming. Standing in Majdanek and speaking about her suffering and survival was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.
My grandfather once concluded his testimony to the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation with words that stayed with me:
“You are lucky to grow up in a country like Australia, free from the antisemitism we experienced in Poland. Always be a proud Jew and never let anyone make you feel like a second-class citizen. Be proud, and be kind to all mankind.”
At the time, those words felt reassuring. When my March of the Living application asked whether I had experienced antisemitism, I answered honestly: no.
Today, that answer would be impossible.
After returning from the march, I tried to turn what I had experienced into something constructive. At the global corporation where I worked, I approached the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committees with an idea: Sponsor employees from around the world each year to participate in the March of the Living and return as ambassadors for tolerance and historical awareness. The initiative never gained traction.
Then October 7th changed everything.
As antisemitism surged globally, and here in Australia, I came to a painful realisation: When many people speak about justice or inclusion, Jewish lives are too often absent from the conversation. The warning associated with Auschwitz — that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it — suddenly felt less like a lesson and more like a warning being ignored.
Two days after October 7th, chants of “Gas the Jews” were heard outside the Sydney Opera House. For many Australian Jews, it marked a chilling turning point. The country my grandparents had called the “lucky country” suddenly felt less certain.
During a march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, terrorist organizations’ flags were displayed alongside portraits of the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime whose leaders and their proxies openly vow to “finish Hitler’s job.”
In the months that followed, synagogues and Jewish institutions were attacked and firebombed. Jewish schools and community centres were targeted. For many Jewish Australians, these events evoke memories of a Europe they thought they had left behind — the Europe of the 1930s.
My own children were not spared. “Jew die” was spray-painted on the fence of their school. Antisemitic incidents became disturbingly frequent. In that moment, my path became clear.
My grandparents’ resilience, courage, and determination to survive have always shaped my life. The March of the Living allowed me to stand in the places that defined their suffering and survival — places I might never otherwise have visited.
There were moments on that journey that felt almost like destiny. One stands out vividly. As we approached the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Yiddish song “My Yiddishe Mame” played over the speakers. It was through that very archway that my grandmother, my own “Yiddishe Mame,” once arrived by train. Miraculously, she survived. She endured imprisonment in multiple camps and remained a symbol of resilience until her final day.
Through that journey, I discovered something I did not know I possessed: a voice.
Since then, I have used it wherever I can, writing for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences and speaking on television, radio, and in print to advocate for the Jewish people and for Israel. It is the least I can do to honour my grandparents, each of whom survived the same hatred in different ways: one who leapt from a train bound for Treblinka and joined the partisans after fighting in the Białystok Ghetto revolt, another who survived multiple concentration camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen; and my father’s parents, who escaped to Siberia and in doing so saved their lives.
Today I fight for their memory and their legacy. I share their stories wherever I can. I fight for Jewish continuity in Australia, the country where they rebuilt their lives. Most importantly, I fight for my children’s future. Even when some attempt to silence me through online harassment, doxing, or calls to my workplace, I refuse to be intimidated. I am the grandson of survivors who endured what humanity at its worst can do.
I am also a Cohen, a member of the ancient Jewish priestly lineage traditionally believed to descend from Aaron, the brother of Moses. In biblical times, the Cohen’s (Cohenim in Hebrew) served as priests in the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, performing sacred rituals and blessings on behalf of the Jewish People. For thousands of years since the destruction of those Temples, that lineage has remained a living thread of continuity, an enduring reminder that despite exile, persecution, and attempts at annihilation, the Jewish people endure.
As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel taught, to bear witness is itself to become a witness, responsible for remembering, and for passing memory forward.
When the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen was liberated on April 15, 1945, survivors who still had the strength gathered together and sang Hatikvah (“The Hope”), the song that would later become Israel’s national anthem.
That hope has carried the Jewish People through centuries of darkness. And it endures still.
Jew hatred spreading in the West in places like Canada, Australia and Europe is almost entirely driven by the spread of large scale immigration from the Islamic world. It is apparently something that cannot be admitted, that the Islamic world is just as violently anti-semitic as Nazi Germany ever was and those attitudes follow the people to the West. And feckless pathetic Western governments do little or nothing (They certainly won't admit the reality of it) because they fear upsetting the ever larger Islamic population. So it feeds on itself. That is not to say there isn't lingering anti-semitism among natives of the West. But the thing we are all dealing with today that makes articles like this necessary is driven by Islamic immigration.
Thank you Shane for this beautiful and heartfelt piece. Please know that "Never Again" has meaning because Israel is a global military, intelligence, and nuclear power...all other explanations are window dressing. For Jews living in Australia, Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Africa, complementing our practice of Jewish faith and lifestyle is eminently more confident if our learnings also include Krav Maga situational awareness and self-defense training. Rising from the ashes of the concentration camps, the survivors DEMONSTRATED the meaning of NEVER AGAIN--they did not just speak the words...and shrink away in silence.