By Rachelle Unreich

I was sitting in my living room in Melbourne, getting ready to light my menorah for Chanukah, when an alert came through on my phone at 7.15pm, from our Jewish security community group. It said there was “an incident in Sydney this evening, which may have occurred at a community event.” I wasn’t too alarmed; I was used to these kinds of alerts. But only minutes later, my phone started pinging with texts of more details. People had been shot, killed at a Chanukah gathering in Bondi Beach. Fatalities kept rising. In the end, they would amount to the largest terrorist event ever to occur on Australian soil. Fifteen dead. Forty in hospital. It was – and still is – impossible to comprehend it.

Bondi Beach is a sunny suburb in Sydney that’s best known for its iconic beach, but I knew it well because I had lived there for two years, choosing it precisely because of its Jewishness. I lived in an apartment belonging to a Holocaust survivor – she had been in Auschwitz with my mother who was also a survivor – that was situated right above a kosher butcher, with a Jewish social club a few doors away. Years later, after I’d written my book A Brilliant Life about my late mother Mira, I appeared at a Sydney Jewish writers festival in a building that opens up to the beach itself, and only steps away from the park where the Chanukah event was held.

There are so few Jewish people in Australia – around 120,000 of us, in a population of a little over 27 million – that we are all connected. I knew plenty of people who had been at the beach or near it that evening; I was remotely connected to three of the victims. I attended the Melbourne funeral of one:  Reuven Morrison, a grandfather who tried to stop one of the gunmen by chasing after him, throwing a brick at him. Footage surfaced of these final moments; Reuven kept up his fight, even though – in the end – he would succumb to the wounds from eleven bullets.

When you hear the stories of everyone who was murdered – all these good people, Jewish and non-Jewish, who would have contributed to the world in so many different, marvelous ways – it is easy to despair. I, for one, veered between grief and anger when I first heard the news, since it felt somewhat inevitable. Although no one could have predicted the scale of violence or brutality of the massacre, I was among many Jewish people who had been warning others of its possibility. Two weeks before Bondi Beach, I wrote an article for Vogue magazine (Australia) about antisemitism – which had become so rife in Australia – explaining that hate leads to harm “first with violent words, then with violent actions.”

I wasn’t prophetic; I had simply observed the lessons of the Holocaust that my mother taught me. Jews weren’t gassed from one day to the next in the 1940s. There was a slow, unyielding campaign that began against them, leading to them being set apart from their peers, being stereotyped, being restricted in their ability to work and move freely. My mother Mira described her childhood village in Czechoslovakia as a place that was free of antisemitism, at least in her eyes. The local priest would take weekly walks with the local rabbi, walking arm in arm. Her father was an unofficial leader of the town, retaining strong connections with his fellow villagers and police. And yet, by the time Mira was 17, her parents, only sister, youngest brother, two first cousins, uncle and grandmother were all taken to concentration camps – as was she. But she was the only one to emerge alive.

And yet, what do we do with all this pain? How do we respond to our greatest fears coming true, and the agony of Jewish people being targeted – as they have been especially relentlessly for the past two years? Whenever I am lost in darkness, I return to my mother’s words as a guiding post. She was only a teenager of 17 when she went through four concentration camps and a death march, and yet she went on to live with joy and curiosity and adventure. When she gave a testimony about the Holocaust, she was asked by the interviewer if there was anything she had learned. “In the Holocaust, I learned about the goodness of people,” she said. It seemed impossible, and yet it was  what she chose to focus upon, and where she let her gaze lie. Again and again, she told me stories of bravery and courage, of the people who risked their lives to save hers. A fellow prisoner named Elza, herself in her 20s, who twice volunteered for Mira’s work detail in Auschwitz because she didn’t think my mother could physically survive it. A non-Jewish house-keeper who hid Mira’s family in her home. The hairdresser who took over my grandparents’ shop, but ensured they retained a wage – and special exemption papers – to avoid the first rounds of deportations. A Belgian major who found my mother in a Prisoner of War camp after the camps were liberated, and nursed her back to good health. Sometimes I wondered if goodness happened to Mira in particular, or if it happened to many people and she zeroed in on it more than others, giving the cruelty she had experienced much less of her energy. This was truly what helped her survive, I think. Mentally, one needed to have the fortitude to overcome the past and truly embrace the brighter aspects of life. She was a shining example of that.

I take her lead in the days after the Bondi massacre. Good people all around me send me text messages; a neighbor brings me a candle, and flowers appear in overflowing bouquets at the entrance to my synagogue. A non-Jewish friend hangs a sign, written on a bedsheet, on the fence outside her home. “We stand against the hatred of the Jewish people,” it says. Non-Jewish allies I know start wearing Magen David charms around their necks, or kippot on their heads. When I speak to them, I tell them how much I appreciate their efforts, how miraculous they seem to me. And then, I tell them another truth: they have to keep going, for all our sakes. My mother was a lamplighter, illuminating both the brightness in the world, and the truth of it. I do everything I can to make sure that her lessons are not in vain.

Rachelle Unreich is the author of A Brilliant Life: My Mother’s Inspiring Story of Surviving the Holocaust (Harper Collins). It has been shortlisted for four literary awards. She is also a contributor to the anthology On Being Jewish Now (edited by Zibby Owens).