Halina Wagowska. (Picture: Pete Bannan)
As Australia heads to the polls, a former refugee and Holocaust survivor slams the policies of both major parties.
Halina Wagowska was just 18 when she travelled to Australia on a boat packed full of fellow war orphans.
Having survived incarceration in the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where she was given the job of loading bodies from the gas chambers into furnaces, Ms Wagowska says she was touched by the kindness of a few good Samaritans when she first arrived in Melbourne.
“Total strangers walked out of the woodwork and helped us find accommodation and work,” she says.
“When I asked one older couple how I could ever repay them, the answer was…‘When you become well-off, help those who are not and that will repay us’,” she says.
“That sort of thing restores your faith in humans, counteracts the effects of evil in the past.”
But it’s a different story today, the human rights advocate, University of Melbourne graduate and former medical scientist, 83, says.
She’s concerned both major political parties now vie to “outdo each other” with harsh asylum seeker policies.
“This will be considered by future generations as a dark period in Australian history. They will say, ‘whatever possessed them to behave like that? It became a political ping pong’,” she says.
“I feel terrible about it. I think it’s absolutely frightful.”
Ms Wagowska, the only member of her 19-person family to have survived World War II, says she’s particularly concerned that a culture of “scapegoating” refugees is pervading Australian politics.
“Hitler could not have succeeded without Germany being economically oppressed. He gave (the German public) a scapegoat, something to shift the blame,” she says.
“Scapegoating works, so often and so well,” she says.
Ms Wagowska, who in her retirement has run houses for homeless youths and raised funds for an Aboriginal school in Healesville, says it’s still painful to talk about World War II.
But she says she resolved as a young adult “not to become a victim, not to nurture hatred or trauma,” she says.
“It’s not productive,” she says.
“I want to do something productive before I drop off.”
