OPINION

FROM me, our politicians get no congratulations for turning back the boats.

In my hand, I’m holding an ornate, oval silver frame. The photo is of my maternal grandmother, Elza “Medy” Knacker. She has the glowing skin of youth and smiles broadly, so her teeth are visible. In my lifetime I never recall her smiling like this. By then, the murder of her mother, Priva, and her older sister Elizabet, by the Nazis at Auschwitz concentration camp had cast a long shadow. Elizabet Frank was just 33 when she was killed. Her young son perished too.

This picture was taken in Slovakia in the late 1930s. I don’t know when, exactly. Like so many refugee families, our story is a blanket full of holes that can never be mended. The missing pieces are lost in history. What I do know is that in early 1939 Elza left her hometown of Hurbanovo, as it is now called, and made her way from southwest Slovakia by train through Europe and boarded a boat.

She must have been afraid. She was 25 years old, poor and alone. She was uneducated and spoke no English. Elza’s boat made it safely to England and she was accepted as a refugee. For that, I’m eternally grateful.

Others were not so lucky. Within weeks of my grandmother’s boat departing for England, another boatload of desperate Jews left the German port of Hamburg on a hefty transatlantic ocean liner called the MS St Louis.

When the boat arrived in Havana, Cuba was awash with anti-Semitism and bitter political infighting. Only 29 of the MS St Louis’ 937 passengers were permitted to enter Cuba. The rest were refused entry. The boat sailed so close to Miami that passengers could see the twinkling lights on shore. But the United States turned them away. Canada also denied the Jews asylum.

Eventually the ship sailed back to Europe and four countries took the remaining passengers in.

The continent became engulfed in war and a quarter of those previously on board MS St Louis, 254 people, died at the hands of the Nazis. The doomed journey became universally known as “The Voyage of the Damned”.

Dr Scott Miller is the director of curatorial affairs at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. In 1995, he set out to trace the fate of every passenger aboard the MS St Louis, including the five who ended up in Australia.

He says the reason his team wanted to uncover “what happened to all 937 passengers, one by one” was to “show that there are individual consequences to a government’s actions [and] inactions and, more specifically, individual consequences to a less than generous refugee policy in time of crisis”.

Even though Dr Miller’s search started 20 years ago, he still tries “to imagine what it must have been like for the passengers to come so tantalisingly close to the shores of Miami Beach” and yet be “denied entry”.

“I still reflect all these years later on the personal disappointments and feelings of betrayal,” he says.

For years, the MS St Louis has sailed uneasily through my consciousness. My grandmother, after whom my own daughter is named, got on the right boat. That’s the only reason I’m here.

The United Nations’ Refugee Convention was approved in July 1951 and ratified by Australia three years later. It was created so the world never again displayed such indifference towards desperate people attempting to flee persecution.

And yet, since 2013, the Abbott Government has turned back boats. The Howard Government also turned back boats under Operation Relex.

According to Australian Government data, 88 per cent of asylum seekers who arrived by boat in 2012-13 were found to be refugees. Under the convention, a refugee is a person who is found to have a “well-founded fear of being persecuted”.

Meet Mustafa Jawadi. He is a strapping young mechanic, based in Canberra.

Like my grandmother, Mustafa’s family fled their homeland because they feared for their lives. They are Hazaras from Afghanistan, a group of people who have been systematically persecuted and massacred by the Taliban.

When I interviewed him on ABC radio in 2012, Mustafa told me the story of his family’s treacherous journey through Iran, Malaysia and Indonesia where they boarded a boat to Australia in 2001.

The boat was intercepted by the Australian Navy near Ashmore Reef, Mustafa explained, and someone set the vessel on fire. The smoke was overwhelming. Mustafa, who was 10 years old at the time, held hands with his parents and jumped into the water.

“We had no choice because the boat was burning,” he said.

Despite having a life jacket, Mustafa was afraid. He could not swim and described floating in the open ocean among huge waves with dozens of other people for hours. One man had no life jacket and kept grabbing onto his mother and pulling her under water.

When navy personnel finally pulled the Jawadis out of the water, they were taken to live in appalling conditions on Nauru for three years.

Despite the persistent and disturbing allegations about what occurs in Australia’s offshore detention centres, some might count the Jawadis as fortunate because they were granted permanent Australian residency.

Since it came to office, the government has made it clear that no one arriving by boat can hope to be resettled in Australia. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton cites the turning back of 20 boats carrying 633 people in the last 18 months as “a significant achievement of the Abbott Government”.

It’s impossible not to wonder just what circumstances those people were turned around into. How have we allowed our hearts to be hardened against the plight of desperate people, even though our forbears may have been among them at some stage? Is our memory so short?

Listening to the anti-Islamic speeches of Reclaim Australia supporters, I’m struck by something powerful. These are the same things that have always been said about Jews. They are not like us. They are bad at their core. They will not assimilate. They will wreck our way of life.

Labelling asylum seekers “illegals” is pure political expediency that preys on fear and xenophobia. It is simplistic and unfair. People fleeing death and torture are not doing something illegal by seeking asylum in Australia. This is a right under international law.

Australia is a wealthy country that takes a modest number (13,750) of refugees each year in comparison to nations like the United States (70,000), Germany (47,555), Sweden (33,025) and France (20,640),

None of this makes the issue less complex. Between 1998 and 2013, more than 1500 people are believed to have drowned while attempting to enter Australia on unsafe boats. Many of those coming here by boat do so at the hands of people smugglers, a trade steeped in exploitation. And, as the Coalition has pointed out numerous times, there was a marked increase in boat arrivals when the Rudd Government scrapped the turn back the boats policy in 2007.

There is a middle ground in all of this, although you wouldn’t know it if you watch our politicians on the TV.

There are ways to legitimately assess asylum seekers that wish to settle in Australia, just as there are mechanisms to deal with people smuggling through diplomacy. It doesn’t make a sexy headline or political slogan, but as academic Alex Reilly argues, engaging with the region could offer a viable and humane solution.

Whatever asylum seeker policy the government implements, humanity must be at its core. These are people just like those that boarded the MS St Louis in 1939. People like Elza Knacker and Mustafa Jawadi. People just like you and me.

Ginger Gorman is an award winning print and radio journalist, and a 2006 World Press Institute Fellow. Follow her on twitter: @freshchilli