’Never forget’: Horrific stories shared at new Holocaust Museum
Through the voices and stories of Queensland survivors, we take you inside the Queensland Holocaust Museum.
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Ron Fresco was a three year old when the Nazis decided to “drown’’ him in a 44-gallon drum. It was for fun, you understand – a little game played by a group of young, bored, German “good ol’ boys’’ guarding the Westerbork Transit Camp in the German-occupied Netherlands in 1944.
The game involved the guards pushing little Ron under the water and holding him there until he was about to die and then releasing him, laughing delightedly as he shot upward like a cork from a Champagne bottle, spluttering desperately for air.
There was no intention to kill him. If they had, the camp commandant would have been furious.
The transport trains arrived every Tuesday at Westerbork to take the Jews away to places like Auschwitz, Sobibor, or Bergen-Belsen, where they were usually killed upon arrival.
But Ron, his dad Hermann and his mum Joanna never got on those trains, solely because Hermann was a good cook.
His challah, that sweet braided bread usually baked for Jewish ceremonial occasions and holidays, was, as they say, “to die for’’.
For the Fresco family, it was to live for.
The camp commandant and the senior Gestapo officials were obsessed with Hermann’s challah and insisted, each time the trains arrived, that the Fresco family must remain intact and safely behind the wire at Westerbork so that their menu would remain in good order.
So the family stayed in the two-room cottage that served as home until mid-1945, when they were released after an inmate scrawled “concentration camp’’ on a large sheet of paper and waved it at the sky to discourage Allied planes from bombing it into matchsticks.
Ron Fresco recounted his childhood dances with death with little emotion at the opening of the Queensland Holocaust Museum in June.
It was just another vignette from the genocidal madness that gripped Germany in the mid-20th century – one of millions of largely untold tales never brought to dramatic life in a Spielberg cinematic extravaganza, or recounted in a novel.
Yet those first four, formative years of life in a concentration camp are so indelibly branded on Fresco’s brain that he has suffered a lifetime of psychological damage which has manifested itself in the most curious manner.
He can’t write. He can read and in an abstract sense knows perfectly well how to go about formulating letters on a page.
Fresco even carved out a hugely successful career in Australia as a veterinary products salesman, and became so familiar with national horse racing identities he was on “g’day’’ terms with Bart Cummings.
But in all of his 83 years he’s never been able to write words. To reinforce his point he asks my name, acknowledges the spelling but declares he could never hope to put it on paper, “not even if you offered me $10 million bucks”.
This Holocaust, this shorthand word for humanity’s ingenuity for unspeakable cruelty, appears to many of us a flickering black-and-white newsreel from a long-ago world called “history”. Yet some of the people in that newsreel still live and not only in some exotic European capital or New York or Brazil or Israel, or even in a crumbling terrace house in Kaufbeuren, Germany.
Ron Fresco lives in Robina.
There are scores more Holocaust survivors scattered across the Sunshine State – on the Gold Coast, in Indooroopilly, up at Noosa.
One even lived out in the far north west for a few years. Kitty Fischer, born in Olomouc in what was once Czechoslovakia, did a four-week stint in Auschwitz at the end of the war before migrating to Australia, landing in Mount Isa in the 1970s and running, of all things, a newsagent and novelty shop.
That strange emotional intensity of one of humanity’s most hideous tragedies – the one British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described as “the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the history of the world’’ – has been reverberating through the lives of countless Queensland families for generations, and will continue for generations to come. The horrors spun their way across the globe and landed on the kitchen table of a house in the outer Brisbane suburb of Durack in the 1970s, where a young girl heard directly of the cruelties suffered by her “dziadek’’ (Polish for grandfather) Hipolit, who died in 2003 after suffering in both German and Russian slave camps.
That young girl grew up to be Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, and her personal familiarity with the Holocaust was evident when she spoke movingly at the official opening of the state’s Holocaust museum on June 30, calling it a significant milestone in Queensland’s cultural history.
“This will ensure future generations never forget – because Queensland’s survivor
stories will now be heard for generations to come,’’ she said.
The Queensland Holocaust Museum and Education Centre (QHMEC), funded by both state and federal governments – which put in a combined total of $7 million, with the Brisbane City Council contributing $500,000 – is a world first in many ways.
It features the first purpose-built online Holocaust museum experience as well as one which can be taken across the state, to teach schoolchildren what occurred.
QHMEC chairman Jason Steinberg says we all have a responsibility to ensure the tragedy is never forgotten, and this museum is this state’s attempt to meet that responsibility.
Situated in Charlotte St, Brisbane, on land owned by the Catholic Church, the museum is using the connectivity of the 21st century to translate the story in a readily accessible manner to the rising generation.
“Our multifaceted and engaging museum tells the story of the Holocaust in a way that it has never been told – through the voices, stories and artefacts from Queensland survivors,’’ Steinberg says.
About 27,000 Holocaust survivors migrated to Australia in the years following 1945, and of the thousands who made their way to Queensland, up to 200 who were directly or indirectly involved with the Holocaust, are still living.
Noosa’s Suzi Smeed, a strong supporter of the museum, was only two when the Nazis invaded Budapest in 1944, marking the start of five years of terror for her family under the occupation of first the Germans, then the Russians.
In her book, The Courage to Care, Smeed recounts one of the more poignant illustrations of the human toll of the Holocaust, and it’s encapsulated in two photographs taken 60
years apart.
She was just one when the first photograph was taken with her grandparents, in the little town of Papa in Veszprem county, Hungary, where Jewish culture thrived
It was a bright, sunny day, with a steeple of St Stephen Catholic Church rising behind the trio.
When Smeed returned to the same spot in 2002, her husband John took the same shot from the same angle.
The church spire was still there, yet the local synagogue was in ruins and all the Jewish people who had lived in that town, along with their descendants, had disappeared.
Smeed learned that, of the 2793 people who were herded into cattle trucks during the war years, only 300 returned.
Her grandparents were butchered in Auschwitz and today, as she understands it, no Jews live in Papa.
“And thus, the Nazis’ original, obscene, objective – to make Papa ‘Judenfrei’ – was finally, horribly, achieved,’’ Smeed writes.
And yet for all the horror of the Holocaust, so many survivors have transcended it.
It’s as if, through the commission of their own lives, they have created some strange form of redemption, not for the perpetrators of the horror, but for the horror itself.
Born into the madness, they came to Australia, rose above the trauma and carved out stunningly successful lives.
These success stories are not limited to the rags-to-riches fables of such worthy figures as Frank Lowy and Jeno Schwarcz (later known as John Saunders), who created the retail empire Westfield. These stories are manifested in people who fly way below the public radar.
Take Queensland’s own Edgar Gold, CM, AM, QC, whose life story seems utterly outlandish in the telling, but is nonetheless true.
He was born in 1934, the son of wealthy chocolate maker, Joseph Gold, who lived in Hamburg and employed about 120 people in his factory.
There’s a photo in the museum of little Edgar with a tricycle when he was about three years old, and Edgar distinctly remembers that bike, along with the prosperous and happy life it represented.
He also remembers something else: “Kristallnacht’’, the Night of Broken Glass.
It occurred between November 9-10, 1938, when the Nazi Party’s paramilitary forces and Hitler Youth used a political assassination as the excuse to mount an open and well-co-ordinated pogrom on the Jews.
Jewish businesses and places of worship were destroyed in showers of broken glass, costing the equivalent of billions of dollars in damages, as the violence exploded across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland in then Czechoslavakia.
It was an event in which more than 90 Jews are estimated to have been murdered, with hundreds more losing their lives from post-arrest beatings, and several subsequent suicides.
“I was by a window, and I heard the mob saying ‘let’s hang the Jew Joseph Gold’,’’ Edgar Gold recalls in what is now, for all its horrors, a valuable contemporaneous record of one of the pivotal moments in the historical record of the Holocaust.
“It was madness, the screaming … you know, I could not understand it. I was four years old. I could not understand what was going on. They (relatives) kept just telling me ‘stay away from the window, stay away from the window’.
“I remember thinking, ‘why would they want to hurt my father?’”
His father was not only Jewish but politically active at the time, and his politics did not dovetail with Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism.
Yet Joseph Gold had a few attributes which helped save his life in the Holocaust.
One was that he was a superb athlete in great physical condition. The other was that he was a benevolent boss, well liked by his workers.
Some of his workers shielded his business from destruction and prevented the crowd attacking him on Kristallnacht, but the years ahead were to be horrific.
Joseph Gold was arrested, went to the US, was deported back to Germany and forced into a factory where he helped build German submarines, some of which he and colleagues sabotaged by creating faults in the design.
He avoided being shot for that – many others did not – and from there it was on to places like Auschwitz, where he was forced into one of the death marches as the Soviets approached in 1945, before ending up in Austria. It was from here he was released at war’s end, taking 18 months to get his health back.
Meanwhile, life for young Edgar Gold went on normally for some time with the protection of relatives but, by 1943, with the war intensifying, the happy life represented by that tricycle was gone forever. There was no refuge left in Germany for a nine-year-old Jewish boy, even one who was blond.
He had some protection from his beloved grandmother but often had to disappear and lie low in a forest for days at a time, fending for himself, living on his wits, roaming the countryside, stealing food when he could and occasionally benefiting from the charity of kindly farm folk.
A sister – one of the few survivors of about 70 members of an extended Gold family which could rightly claim to be victims of familicide – had escaped Germany before the war and it was she who later arranged for her brother and father to get to Britain, where Joseph Gold applied for visas to Australia, Brazil and the US.
The Australian visa came in first, so Edgar Gold as a teenager went to school in Melbourne.
He then went to sea, became a master mariner and ship captain, received a PhD in maritime law and moved to Canada.
Gold was a founding member of the Dalhousie Law School’s marine and environmental law program, and was on the board of governors and a visiting professor at the World Maritime University in Sweden.
In 1995 he was appointed Queen’s Counsel and was an adjunct professor at the University of Queensland from 2000 to 2010. He is a recipient of the German Commander’s Cross of The Order of Merit, the Order of Canada, and the Order of Australia in 2005.
As Gold approaches his 90s, he’s living in Noosa, fit and active and with an incredibly agile mind, and still seeking out more challenges.
Yet, in perhaps the most extraordinary turn of events of all, he appears untainted by anger, bitterness or resentment.
“My father always said to me, ‘You can never hate a nation; there are always good people everywhere.’”
For Ron Fresco, his regular life began in a garage in Sydney, which his parents rented when they arrived in 1952 and which his mother turned into a home.
The family could not settle in Europe, fearful of a resurgence in anti-Semitism, so the father went ahead to Perth and finally brought them to Sydney, telling the then Aaron that he was now “Ron’’ and the family was to avoid any reference to their religion.
His mother, Joanna, was a kindly person but never quite psychologically sound after the war. The family suspected she was sexually abused by the Nazis in the camp but she never spoke directly of the experience, only saying how much she dreaded that “tap on the shoulder’’ from a guard.
Both parents worked hard, eventually learning they could be openly Jewish in Australia and not be deported or sent to a concentration camp.
Their son was ignored by his teachers because he could not write but managed to carve out a career as a salesman, his wife Sally acting as his writer and interpreter of words.
With two daughters who have built their own successful lives, the couple, with 20 years of Gold Coast retirement behind them, are more content and happy than they ever dared hope to be, given the past.
“Out of all that horror came a peaceful life for him,’’ Sally Fresco says.
“And do you know what the turnaround was? “It was coming to Australia.
“That was the turnaround: coming to this country, and coming to understand that, here, there will not be a knock on the door one night before you are dragged away to your death.’’
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