I wake up in mourning; haunted by images of emaciated children behind electrified barbed wire fences.
It’s 81 years today since the liberation of the German extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than one million Jews were brutally starved, tortured and murdered by Hitler’s government.
There is no denying of such facts. Today I cherish my friendship with many Jewish families here and in Tel Aviv, some with small children. I have travelled in many Muslim countries and only met kind people: all Jews and Muslims are fond of laughing and playing with their kids.
There is no difference between them or any of us. Racism runs deep, in fact it’s only skin deep – all of humanity shares one blood and it’s red.
My father was an unemployed young man and joined Hitler’s SS, which we only realised after he died aged 91.
We were in absolute shock. I remember him as a most kind, loving and generous father.
What had happened, how had his mind become corrupted? After the war I grew up in a morally bankrupt country called Germany.
Our high school history lessons in the 1970s covering World War II were kept to a minimum when it came to the Holocaust. Denial was the order of the day: better talk about German engineering, Mercedes and BMW, rather than Zyklon B, developed for the Auschwitz gas chambers and the killing of six million Jews.
It deeply saddens me what was, and is, happening nowadays to our First Nation brothers and sisters in a new wave of outright racism and white supremacist sentiment.
It deeply saddens me what is happening today to two million Muslim homeless in Gaza including countless children.
It deeply saddens me what happened during the unimaginable horrors inflicted on innocent Israelis during the October 7 attacks.
And the senseless and brutal murder of our Jewish cousins celebrating with open hearts in Bondi saddens me deeply too.
The Israeli government led by populist fundamentalists Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and their radical cronies does not speak or act for all Jews; the fundamentalist and populist life-negating Hamas does not speak for all Palestinians; Hitler didn’t speak or act for all Germans.
He tortured and murdered not only Jews, but also Social Democrats (Labour), union members, gypsies, Christian priests, innocent children with disabilities, gays and lesbians and anyone else opposing his war and ethnic cleansing.
Is there maybe a difference between a people and their leaders?
I’m grateful and love my Jewish friends with their larger-than-life aliveness, I’m grateful and love the hospitality of Muslims which I met in Lebanon, Syria, Turkiye, Iran, Afghanistan, Malaysia and Pakistan.
I’m grateful, and love our First Nation cousins spiritually enriching all our lives down under. Imagine we’re all one, our shared love and mutual respect for a peaceful coexistence going more than skin deep.
Denying that we have racism against our First Nation people, that there is antisemitism and Muslim-bashing in Australia hurts us all. It’s on all of us to stop this madness by standing up and being counted.
Lest we forget the horrors of Auschwitz, may they never ever happen again.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
