Hajnal Black (nee Ban) is a young, avowedly right-wing, female Councillor in local Government in South East Queensland. Both Hajnal and her husband are on Logan City Council.
There are thousands of local Councillors around Australia, but Hajnal is more colourful than most. She has attempted – so far unsuccessfully – to win higher elective office. She maintains a blog. Hajnal has also been involved in some interesting controversies outside politics in recent years. As this blog does not go out of its way to peddle scuttlebutt, I’ll leave interested readers to do their own googling.
A week or so ago, Australia was abuzz with debate about the term ‘climate change denial’, which supporters of action on climate change have been using with increasing frequency despite my unheeded entreaties.
The issue erupted in Federal Parliament when Liberal front-bencher Christopher Pyne claimed to take deep offense at the Opposition being branded ‘climate change deniers’ by the Government. His reason? He argued it was an attempt to smear the Opposition by comparing them with ‘Holocaust deniers’.
Soon the great and the good of the Australian Commentariat took up the debate – a fatuous debate, in my view, because no-one I noticed (except yours truly) posed the question whether the concept of ‘denial’ is EVER an appropriate label to use in relation to ANY debate about history or current affairs, including the event of World War Two. In my opinion, it isn’t.
Within a few days Hajnal Black weighed into the debate. She posted an Open Letter to the Prime Minister of Australia on her blog. As it’s an ‘open letter’, I trust there’s no harm reproducing it here in full:
Dear Prime Minister
My grandfather was a holocaust survivor, the English emancipated his camp and rescued him from certain death in the closing hours of World War II. If it were not for that fact that Grandad survived the holocaust, I would not be here, and as such I regard myself as a holocaust survivor. The affects of the holocaust are still being felt in our family today, Grandad’s first wife and two babies were gassed by the NAZI’s and the pain he felt affected his relationship with other family members until his death.
As a family we came to Australia to escape the ravages of communist Eastern Europe. Freedom of speech was extinguished, and no one prospered for the hard work they undertook every day of their lives.
Since I have been a city Councillor I have worked hard to highlight the plight of local families, indeed the Carbon Tax will burden local families and hurt small business. It is my right to stand up for families and question the science behind human induced ‘climate change’. A prosperous Australia is something I will always fight for, it’s the reason our family came to Australia.
You and your Ministers’ use of the word ‘climate change denier’ to describe me and others who agree with the fact that human induced climate change ‘science’ is questionable and the fact that a Carbon Tax will do zilch to lower Earth’s temperature is offensive. It is clear that your clever use of the English language is designed to paint people with opposing views to you as similar to holocaust deniers; fringe extremists who can’t grapple with reality.
I would like to formally make you aware of the fact that I regard your comments as racial vilification, as they link me to a group of people who I hold with such anathema, such distaste, that it hurts our family’s sensitivities surrounding the holocaust.
I won’t bother writing a letter of concern to the Greens who also part take in this despicable word game, as the Greens are a fringe group. However your antics and the hysteria that you whip up against people opposed to your increase in taxes is most certainly painting you as a Green-sympathising extremist.
Regards,
Hajnal Black (nee Ban)
I imagine in the Prime Minister’s office Ms Black is regarded as an annoying pest – insofar as they think about her at all. The PM may well ignore the letter. I’ve yet to receive a reply to an open letter from a senior politician, but Hajnal may have more luck.
Any such reply, however, would doubtless treat Ms Black’s family narrative with reverence. After all, she says she is a ‘Holocaust survivor’ herself of sorts, that her grandfather was a first generation ‘Holocaust survivor’ – and that members of her family were gassed by the Nazis. They are not the kind of claims to be be treated dismissively in this culture.
Ms Black’s letter makes a couple of specific factual claims about her family’s World War Two experience:
- Her grandfather was in a concentration camp liberated by British troops in the closing hours of the World War.
- His first wife and two babies were gassed by the Nazis
What I found puzzling about her account is the combination of the two.
According to mainstream ‘Holocaust scholars’ such as Deborah Lipstadt, there were no homicidal gas chambers on German soil. Claims of that nature were made in the decades following 1945 – and were used to convict at the post-war Nuremberg trials – but the current ‘official’ Holocaust scholarly view, as far as I can establish, is that homicidal gas chambers existed but were confined to camps located in Poland, most notably Auschwitz (see for instance page 82 of Lipstadt’s well-known book ‘Denying the Holocaust‘ or this less sympathetic discussion of the topic from the Institute of Historical Review journal).
On the other hand, it seems quite clear from the historical record that British troops did not liberate concentration camps in Poland. That task fell to the Soviets. British troops were, however, first on the scene in some of the northern German concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen, around the time the war in Europe was coming to its bloody conclusion.
Hajnal Black is on Twitter, so I sent here a tweet as follows:
@HajnalBlack Sad to read about your grandmother & aunt. Which concentration camp were they in? How long after did the British liberate it?
She replied shortly afterwards:
@SydWalker It was g/d’s first wife and children. approx 9 months. Mum says Auschwitz Dad says Bergen-Belsen. So it may not have been British
Now, I’ll admit that I approached Hajnal with some skepticism. Hence my quite precise questions. Nevertheless, my expression of sympathy was genuine. If she remains upset about the events of that period, I’ve no wish to add to her angst.
However, an open letter to the Prime Minister published on the internet by an aspiring politician is… a very public document. Surely it can be discussed by the public? If it contains apparent factual discrepancies, surely that can be discussed too? I think so – and it’s on that basis I continue with this brief analysis. This is NOT an attempt to vilify Hajnal, her ethnicity, her family history or anything else. It is an attempt to ask reasonable questions of a public figure regarding the veracity of her public claims.
If I was puzzled by Hajnal initial open letter, her tweet simply added to the confusion.
Now it appears she’s not actually sure which concentration camp her relatives were in. It seems her mum says one thing; her dad another. The former says Auschwitz (where orthodox Holocaust scholars continue to claim homicidal gas chambers were utilized – although not in the last months of the war). But Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets, not the British. The latter says Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated by the British – but where it is now generally accepted by all interested historians that no homicidal gas chambers were ever used.
Perhaps there’s an explanation for this apparent discrepancy. Hajnal’s grandfather might have been separated from his wife and children in different camps? We may not have been told the whole story.
On one key fact, however, I doubt Hajnal will change her narrative: the claim that her relatives were gassed.
Any expression of skepticism on my part regarding that might well be construed as ‘racial vilification’ or ‘religious persecution’ – or some other such damn nonsense that’s increasingly being seeded into our culture to help ring-fence certain contentious (but socially and politically important) topics from open public debate.
So I’ll re-iterate my earlier expression of sympathy to Hajnal. I regret she feels pain about events that took place so long ago. My own family and network of friends was not entirely unscathed by that hideous war; hundreds of millions of families were blighted by the war. So I do know where she’s coming from. These days, I increasingly see World War Two as an unnecessary or ‘forced’ war, contrary to the view I was taught in school. But that’s another subject…
I simply don’t know how on earth anyone can be certain her relatives were killed in a specific way if she doesn’t know for sure where they were at the time. Maybe she isn’t certain they were gassed? If that’s the case, perhaps Hajnal Black could acknowledge it? The public respects honesty in politicians.
One other quibble…
Hajnal’s Open Letter says”As a family we came to Australia to escape the ravages of communist Eastern Europe. Freedom of speech was extinguished, and no one prospered for the hard work they undertook every day of their lives.”
Yet according to Wikipedia, her place of birth was Afula, Israel. Does she consider Israel to be located in Eastern Europe? What were the freedom of speech problems her family experienced in the Zionist State?
Happily Hajnal can relax now. This is Australia, where we do enjoy free speech – and where the population is determined to retain it!






