Don't judge a person by their choice of holy book

It was a journey from Nuremberg, where we visited Nazi parade grounds, to Budapest where we moored alongside The Shoes on the Danube Bank – a haunting monument dedicated to the Jewish people shot dead there during the Second World War.

We passed through Regensburg where I visited Oskar Schindler's former home and I saw Europe's largest Synagogue.

My trip was spattered with sadness as I began to see the true human effects of the Holocaust. You hear it all the time, six million Jews, but my brain was never really capable of quantifying the true horror of that number until I saw those iron shoes along the riverbank.

The shoes honour the Jews who were killed by fascist Arrow Cross militiamen in Budapest, who ordered people to remove their shoes before shooting them, leaving their bodies floating downstream.

Their shoes had worth. Their lives, apparently, did not. I sat by those shoes and I cried for those people, killed for nothing.

Sixty pairs on the bank. I couldn't picture six million pairs of shoes, I didn't want to.

I wandered back to the safety and comfort of my cabin and lay down to think about everything I'd seen.

It horrified me then when I took my nightly trip to the lounge before dinner. As I sat down at the bar, a fellow passenger sat beside me and asked where I was from. I told him and he astounded me with his shocked response.

"I hear you have Muslims over there? Is that true?"

It was as though this middle-aged man from Wisconsin was asking if we cohabited with aliens.

Surprised by the question, I answered yes, of course there are Muslims. My friends are from all walks of life and our local economy is supported by a number of businesses operated by people of many religions.

I can't say I pay much attention to what books they choose to live by, what they choose to wear or where they opt to go to bend their knees and pray to their chosen god. Why ask?

They bomb people, he told me. They're maniacs. 'Have you not seen the news?' he asked the newspaper journalist. Aren't you scared?

I stared at him as though he himself was the alien and gave the room a little scan over, waiting for a secret cameraman to come out and shout "YOU'VE BEEN FRAMED!"

Like me, this man had spent his week learning about the plights of innocent people, all treated in the most heinous ways because of their chosen faith. And here he sat, stereotyping, believing that all people that follow Islam are to be feared.

When I think of Muslims, I do not think of terrorism. I think of the little boys that run past me on the way to the mosque on the occasional evening I happen to pass by, laughing and joking as they go. I wondered if the man at the bar would be filled with such terror if he realised that Muslims, like him and me, are just people, trying to go about their business.

Islam is a huge religion of individuals, some bad and some good, as with any religion.

The sooner people like my shipmate begin to see past the few that give their religion a bad name, the more peaceful a world we'll live in.