But the final painful years of their lives saw them imprisoned again, by their own divided loyalties and mistaken beliefs, cut off from some family members as a decade-long legal dispute took off about their wills.

Aaron had made five wills, the first three an even split of his wealth, the last two excluding his daughter Marcia.

Marcia, who could not understand why Aaron cut her out of the will, hired a lawyer who now has a spreadsheet covering an estimated $6.5 million in cash and bank transactions dealing with Aaron’s assets. Julia, who survived Aaron, whittled away her finances until just more than $100 was left in her account when she died.

For the months before the deaths of her parents, Marcia could not visit them and was later unaware of their passing. Every weekend she visits her father’s grave at a Gold Coast cemetery. “I miss my father dearly and went to his grave thinking I abandoned him,” she says. “He had no idea there was a pending restraining order against me (from seeing him). How this happened, and the fact that I wasn’t at his funeral, it has been eating me alive all these years. I intend to find out what happened.”

THE DECISION THAT SAVED A LIFE

Aaron and Julia’s European home town was close to the Hungarian border, surrounded by churches, their architecture which today is the stuff of picture postcards showcasing the Medieval Period.

Aaron’s family was financially strong, they were hard workers with their cosmetics factory employing more than 100 workers. Aaron was the youngest of seven.

His father died before he was a teenager, but by then, he had been taught about supporting workers, knew his was a good life and describes the family as “happy’.

A new bike could glide through the market place.

GOLD COAST MP SICKENED BY NAZI GRAFFITI

He meets Julia through his best friend, her brother. Despite pressure to educate himself, he enjoys the factory floor, loves talking to people. But by 1938, as a young Jewish man, he cannot see a smooth pathway to his future, as Adolf Hitler continues Germany’s southern invasion of territories.

“I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to marry because I was engaged,” he says. But his mother, aware Jews could no longer own their own factories, cautions him saying it will be impossible to have children. “Because she (Julia) did not have a child — that would save her life,” he says.

THE ROAD TO AUSCHWITZ AND MAUTHAUSEN

A YEAR later wearing just a shirt and trousers, careful to carry as little as possible, Aaron is walking 10kms back to a camp, whipped all the way by a guard. The beginning of three work camps as a Jewish soldier, until he is sent to a concentration camp.

He has, for the first time, thoughts he might die. “Everyone was so afraid, frightened and scared,” he says.

Clearing areas by an airfield, then follows the more dangerous work of cleaning up houses targeted in bombing raids. Digging the frozen earth to place explosives under bridges to stop the Russians, smuggling food for the poor — he must escape, to the forest by night, hides and returns home.

But there is no escape from this. The worst of it is watching the bodies of Jewish friends shot and dumped in the river Danube, or those just starving to death. “It was terrible, terrible,” he says. So empty emotionally, he cannot cry.

Finally, after four nights on a river boat, to Mauthausen. Confronted on arrival by the pyramid of bodies in the front camp yard.

Mauthausen in Austria had a deserved reputation as the worst, where the weak or ill were shot or sent to the gas chamber.

By May 1944 nearly 440,000 Jews from Aaron and Julia’s homeland will be deported, in just a two-month period, taken to southern Poland. Julia arrives by train at Auschwitz, her mother standing between herself and her grandmother. Their arms linked. Josef Mengele marches towards them.

The SS officer and physician, known as the Angel of Death, pushes her grandmother to the ground. He sees Julia is a “chubby girl with rosy cheeks”. “He pushed me and my mother to one side, to the work party. We would later go from camp to camp to work. My mother later found her mother’s belongings among a mountain of clothes. We knew she was dead, “ she says.

THE MIRACLE ON RETURN HOME

Aaron suspects his weight has dropped 40kgs. He is marched with the other survivors out of Mauthausen, under Gestapo guard. They march for days of uncertainty, until they are liberated in April 1945.

Another two or three days of walking, and he suspects he will die. In his hospital he is too sick to eat food, so they hook him up with tubes to feed him. He is in a place where the body, and the mind, can no longer feel the hunger. Here was the most strange, surreal moment.

“We were all dead, dead but still alive,” he says.

By some sort of miracle, the teenagers who yearned to marry arrive back within a day of each other at their home town. All the surviving Jews, they just returned home.

For Julia, an extreme range of emotions. She admits a ‘great happiness” yet distress on seeing her fiancee. Aaron is in shock at how well she and her mother are compared to him. He soon learns his mother has died in Auschwitz, and he has lost his brothers.

GOLD COAST VETERANS GRAPPLING WITH REALITY OF LIFE BEYOND COMBAT

His sisters are alive. They meet again, briefly, and as quickly soon die from ailments. He reflects how they all survived just to say a final goodbye. Aaron sees it as a warning of sorts, almost about death from the camps always catching you up.

He and Julia marry, and Marcia is born, but Aaron knows his work back in the factory will not be enough to feed his young family. The last of the gold jewellery from his father, hidden in his pockets at great risk during the camps, is traded for food.

For six months they wait in Italy, to make a choice from three countries offering up safe haven. Australia beckons because an old friend in Sydney offers to sponsor them.

REBUILDING IN SYDNEY BEFORE RETIRING ON THE GOLD COAST

Aaron works by day in a cosmetics factory, and by night walks door to door, selling home goods. His humour, ability to talk to anyone and business instincts enable him to start a profitable business in Sydney’s growing northern suburbs.

A son, Damien, is born. Marcia notices she is closer to her father; Damien is closer to her mother. Marcia finds Julia to be moody and physically threatening. By contrast, her father on seeing a homeless person in the street, will cry.

“My father didn’t have a mental condition she had. I think everyone came out with a different form of ailment. She was the worst one,” Julia says.

Her parents retire to the Gold Coast. Aaron collects art, Julia has a lot of jewellery, they are proud of their apartment with its beach views. Julia has the coin to spend three days a week, from 9am to 5pm, on the pokies.

But health issues, all buried from the war, are catching them. In 2005 Aaron has a mild stroke. A second will again divides his assets between his daughter, son and wife — 25 per cent, 25 per cent, 50 per cent.

About six months later Aaron appoints his son as the Enduring Power of Attorney. Marcia and her son agree the “turning point” came several months later after they lodged an official complaint with authorities, in June 2007.

Out of the blue, she is served with a restraining order protecting Aaron. “I took the matter of my father’s care to the authorities because I was restrained from seeing him and this was causing grief,” she says.

Orders would have sought an independent person, someone with financial experience, to administer his estate. It would enable Aaron to later be moved to a care facility chosen by all of the family. As part of this process, he is examined by doctors.

But the intervention never occurs as planned.

Marcia alleges all of her father’s telephone calls are being monitored by his wife who listens in on an extension line. Marcia recalls as his health worsened him being confused, Aaron became hostile increasingly convinced this intervention where his assets will be checked as “a return to Nazi Germany”.

ISOLATED ON HIS DEATH BED

In mid-2007 a restraining order is issued against Marcia. By year’s end the proceedings in the Supreme Court are dismissed, by consent of both parties, with costs paid by her father. Aaron is spending more time in hospital, and fears the court case will impact more on his health.

In early 2008 Marcia and her son make a private visit to her father in hospital as he continues to receive treatment. He is in his early 90s, and confronting organ failure.

He seems confused and asks her “why did you take me to court”. Marcia explains it is him who took out the restraining order.

Marcia’s son recalls them walking in. “He was crying. It was crying of joy. It was a relief,” he says.

But her father speaks to lawyers. He instructs them: “I don’t want to see her”. Aaron later signs a hospital directive which prevents Marcia and her family visiting him. A month later he refuses treatment.

Marcia receives an urgent phone call at work after an obituary has been written up about Aaron. She is working just street blocks away from her father’s bed. She is unaware of his funeral. Walking inside the cemetery, she goes from grave to grave, until she finds her father’s resting place.

THE COST OF THE LEGAL BATTLE

A year later and more legal action, launched by Marcia to contest her father’s will.

Lawyers acting for Julia, as the executor of Aaron’s will, refer to earlier discussions with Aaron. They allege he had complained of Marcia visiting him in hospital, how he described her being tough on her mother and only wanting his money. Both parents and their son experienced abuse, they alleged.

But Marcia strongly denies these accusations, recalling the strong relationship with her father, and how he loved her. She recalls how he enjoyed meeting at a park, but her mother would try to stop the weekly visits. She remembers her father contacted her several times a day until her mother removed the phone from his hospital room.

The threats, she maintained were not from her, but from her mother who was deluded, thinking she might ask her father to sign documents.

This was the reason, Marcia believed, for the restraining order on her, and letters preventing her from hospital visits.

To explain her unique relationship with her father, she mentions a special piece of personal jewellery, not of high monetary value but extraordinary value to him as it gave him luck which he gave to her.

Her legal bills reaching up to $200,000, she settles out of court for the same amount, only to later regret it. The estate, at that point, she estimates its worth up to $8 million. Julia’s lawyers believe it to be much lower, less than $2 million in assets apart from the apartment. Marcia’s lawyers in preparing for court admit there is no doubt that her relationship with her mother became strained in the final years of her father’s life. They say the conflicting evidence about the signing off on documents needs to be fully investigated, tested and ruled upon by the court.

A MOTHER’S FINAL WORDS TO HER DAUGHTER

Julia’s health, under scrutiny since 2010, now takes a slide. By 2013 she is in hospital for falls, and a year later returns but declines an operation. She is on medication for her nerves, tries nicotine patches but continues to smoke, up to 20 cigarettes a day, a habit started at the onset of war.

Marcia is unable to make contact. She suspects her mother may have died. By early 2015 she calls the police and lodges a missing person’s report. She is only told “your mother is at home”.

One last visit to a hospital. Julia in a blunt remark tells her daughter: “I have no more money to give you, Marcia.” Marcia sees her mother crying. “I never asked for anything. This was the belief they had, that we were there to get their assets,” she says.

Julia wants a full time carer. But the instructions are “not to talk to the daughter”. She dies a month later in hospital. Again Marcia and her family are unaware of the funeral. Little more than $100 remained in her bank account.

THE ENDURING LOVE BETWEEN A FATHER AND A DAUGHTER

Today Marcia carries a black binder thick with hundreds of photocopied sheets of statements and health documents. Her lawyer is building an accounting spreadsheet. He is investigating about $6.5 million in cash and bank transactions dealing with Aaron’s money.

Marcia estimates her father’s estate to be worth much more when properties and businesses are included, up to $11 million.

The folder includes a signed statement, from a carer, who took Aaron to hospital, two years before his death. She loved his calmness, and noted his forgetfulness from slight dementia. “He said he wished he could see Marcia more often as he loved her. I contacted her and said she could see him there as her mother did not visit,” the carer wrote.

“It was lovely to see the happiness and love between Marcia and her father, and he begged me not to tell his wife that Marcia had visited him.”

The carer recalls Julia’s moods, always changing, sometimes yelling and difficult to appease, never sure if a door should be open or closed.

“Aaron gave Julia a lot of affection, and I sensed that Julia didn’t like anyone else getting this affection,” the carer wrote. Marcia now sees the bigger picture, is convinced her mother was undiagnosed, like many Holocaust survivors, suffering post traumatic stress disorder and unable to let go of the relentless death the war forced them to endure.

Aaron had sensed this first himself on returning to his home town, finally recognising the impact of the war on his family, unable to help as his surviving siblings quickly passed.

The death inside of you which was the everyday living in the camps, was the death which would finally catch up with you.

His spark, his generous smile, the light his daughter saw from him, just shone brighter than the others until it was extinguished.

* Names have been changed for this story.