In the 1930s, my maternal grandparents fled Nazi Germany, seeing the writing on the wall. My grandmother was 18, my grandfather not much older. They were each alone. Any family who remained were murdered. My family had lived in Germany for at least several hundred years and fought for it in World War I.

My grandparents met in South Africa. Recognising that deeply troubled nation’s bleak future, they uprooted their lives again and came to Australia in 1960, among the first of a wave of South African Jews.