Have you ever been treated like “the other” - not accepted or belonged with people calling you names such as “Ching Chong”? These behaviours all ignited from prejudice, a trigger of negative emotions associated with unacceptance of diversity and biased opinions gained without personal experience embedded in narrow-mindedness that is ready to inflict upon people at any time. The pernicious feelings & after effects prejudice bring upon its victims are devastating; as individuals, how can we overcome our own prejudice and treat everyone equally?
Adolf Hitler – a fearful name representing the extent of brutality racism can result in with the massacre of approximately 6 million Jews kindled by his extreme hatred of Judaism. As Jews were the scapegoats of German’s political and economical crisis, they were propagated as ugly, unworthy inferiors that don’t deserve to be treated humanely. Hitler believed only the master race – Aryan race will create a great nation: aggressive, blue eyes, blonde hair, tall. Not only Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled are also portrayed as the inferior that weakens and are parasitic to the nation.
"Out with them, from all professions and into the ghetto with them; fence them in somewhere they can perish as they deserve" - Adolf Hitler 1939
Hitler aimed to make Judaism into a race. While German children were encouraged to graffiti insulting statements about Jews, 1.5 million young Jewish children were slaughtered to prevent the spread of their culture. At Sydney Jewish Museum, 1.5 million droplets of water in the fountain represented the children’s tears, wishing them peace and harmony.
Kuba, a Jewish holocaust survivor was 13 when the war broke out in 1933. His entire family was ordered to leave their apartment in Southern Poland and sent to the entirely over-crowded ghettoes. Later on, they were transported from one concentration camp to another, helplessly separated and forced to watch people getting hanged and lashed, the only way to survive was to work. The Jews were not only publicly humiliated, stripped of their clothes, identity, Jewish women were also forced to shave their heads, losing their last vestige of dignity to achieve the Nazi’s purpose of making them alien-like.
Kuba claimed he didn’t personally resent Hitler, instead he blamed the older German generation as they were also the perpetrators of Nazism - “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”. After Germany was liberated in 1945, he decided to start a new life in Australia; even though he still dreams about the dreadful things happened in the camps, he overcame the prejudice against him by leaving the Nazism aside and gradually freed himself from the