VOLUME 1 NO.2
OCTOBER 2013
Introduction Greetings to all Child Survivors and a warm welcome to this edition of CONNECTIONS. These past months have been exciting and challenging as we aim to build a new framework to provide support and care for Child Survivors in our community. Lena Fiszman, in charge of graphics, layout and surviving endless planning sessions with me, is to be congratulated for her talent and tireless effort producing CONNECTIONS. While the articles we provide are meaningful in many ways, the Child Survivor experience is best expressed through the stories we hear from our many members. My Life… My Story is our opportunity to learn and share your personal journey and to make your voice heard. Importantly your story will educate future generations and continue to honour those whose lives were so tragically
taken. We welcome your stories and photographs. Please send to: Viv Parry Child Survivors of the Holocaust Jewish Holocaust Centre 13-15 Selwyn Street ELSTERNWICK VIC 3185 Tel: 03 9528 1985 or Email: childsurvivors@jhc.org.au To any Child Survivors facing health issues and other difficulties, we send you our caring thoughts for better times, swiftly and soon. Kindest regards, Viv Parry Chairperson, CSH Melbourne
I Married a Holocaust Survivor What has it meant to me to have wed a Child Survivor of the Holocaust? Eva didn’t talk much, if at all, about having had to leave Vienna (aged six) in the wake of the Nazis and spending ages 9-15 in horrendous Soviet gulags and also that dozens of members of her family, including a highly prominent Austrian MP, being gassed in Auschwitz. It was when Eva was 20, and we were in Canada, where I was on British Commonwealth Press Union Exchange to the daily Montreal Star, that Eva began to speak about her experiences, especially when she started making zany animals, which caught the attention of Canadians and Londoners. When asked where she learnt to create such engaging creatures, she replied with a stick in the dirt of a Siberian gulag, in between working from dawn to dusk. Journals began publishing her story and she talked more to me about her experiences and the beginnings of a life-long “campaign” to make the gulags and Holocaust known.
And foster understanding and combat racism, hatred and prejudice. Something she continues to this day, writing a book (A Patchwork Life) about the gulags and life in Vienna and Australia and speaking to more than 10,000 people, many non-Jewish, in the last 10 years. Although I knew about the Holocaust, the camps and the sufferings, I knew little about the dreaded Russian gulags. I had been active writing even as a teenager for Jewish and non-Jewish journals about camps, Israel and combating racism and fostering understanding. My knowledge increased when we both became volunteers, active in almost daily affairs, and being editor of the Centre News, at the Holocaust Centre. My daily contact with survivors, in Australia and overseas (including such people as Nobel Prize winning author, Elie Wiesel) gave me incredible insights into the Holocaust. It was following a disastrous dinner at our Melbourne home that I wrote my London-published novel (God Gave