A formidable woman of integrity and devotion

URSULA FLICKER October 27, 1926- August 20, 2024

No one who met or worked with my mother was likely to forget her. She was feisty, opinionated, ruffled feathers, had high expectations, was blunt, loyal, and honest – a formidable force of intelligence, integrity, and devotion.

Born in the mid-1920s, Ursula Flicker OAM was raised in Bialystok, Poland. Her parents were Aron and Helena Biszkowicz, and she had a younger sister, Jareczka. Her father was a successful textile merchant. Her paternal grandfather, Rabbi Chaim Nachman Biszkowicz, was the Crown Rabbi of Bialystok and a highly respected Jewish religious scholar.

Life before 1939 was carefree. Aron and Helena and their daughters were among Bialystok’s Jewish elite – wealthy, not religiously observant, Polish (not Yiddish) speaking, and living in a luxurious apartment with servants. Ursula and Jareczka attended the Druskin Gymnasium, a private Jewish school. Ursula was a bright student, and also very athletic. She dreamt of becoming a brain surgeon.

Life changed in 1939 when WWII broke out. Under Soviet occupation until 1941 (the Nazis and the Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that divided Poland between them), Bialystok was “sovietised”. On June 20, 1941 – two days before Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis) began – Ursula’s parents and grandparents were arrested by the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) as “enemies of the people” – her father as a capitalist, and the rabbi as a man of religion. At the time of their arrest, Ursula’s sister was at a school camp. Pleading with the Soviet authorities that Jareczka was not with them as they boarded the train to exile in Siberia proved fruitless. They were never to see Jareczka again.

Life in Siberia was not easy. The first few months were spent on a kolhoz (collective farm) near Biysk (a city in the mountainous Altai Krai) as slave labourers. Then, as Polish citizens, they were “liberated” as the Soviets had switched allegiances, joining the Allies in fighting the Nazis. Ursula’s family moved from the Kolhoz to the city of Biysk.

Ursula resumed her schooling and, aged 15, she also ran the household, a single rented room. She traded goods at the market, cooked, and cleaned. Her mother was out of her depth, often unwell, or crying over the loss of her favourite daughter, Jareczka. In Biysk, Ursula completed her matriculation, as well as a diploma qualifying her to teach mathematics and physics.

After the war, Polish citizens were repatriated to Poland. Ursula’s father and grandparents had died in Siberia. So, it was only Ursula and her mother who returned to Bialystok hoping to find Jareczka and other relatives. They found no one, not a single member of the extended Biszkowicz family had survived the Nazis. They learnt Jareczka had returned to Bialystok from the school camp and had stayed with relatives until they were all herded into the Bialystok ghetto. It was presumed Jareczka had perished at the Treblinka death camp following the liquidation of the ghetto.

Ursula Flicker.

Ursula and her mother decided that they must find a new home outside Poland. Initially, they went to Stockholm to join Ursula’s aunt Mika, who had been saved from Auschwitz by the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte. (A year later, Mika married and immigrated to Canada.)

Ursula and her mother went to Warsaw where they registered as Jewish refugees, and began the search for a country far away from Europe. Ursula’s mother knew of a family friend who had immigrated to Melbourne before WWII. She wrote to him, and he was willing to sponsor them to come to Australia. They boarded the El Sudan in Marseilles and arrived in Melbourne in 1948. They were met by the Jewish Welfare Society and housed at the Bialystoker Centre (run by Bialystok expatriates) in St Kilda. Ursula soon met my father, Felix Flicker (also from Bialystok). They were married at the Elwood synagogue in 1949.

The unconventional Ursula was not the traditional Jewish mother or grandmother. After the war, she abandoned any Jewish religious beliefs she might have had. I was sent to MLC for my schooling. Searching for spiritual meaning in life, she immersed herself in Buddhist teachings, the wisdom of Krishnamurti, and explored Jewish Kabbalistic philosophy. She had many non-Jewish friends and prepared Christmas festivities for them in her home.

Ursula’s love of Israel evolved over time. Initially, she worried that Israel was just another Jewish ghetto. The Six-Day War of 1967 was a turning point, and she came to fully embrace Israel as a home for Jews. Later in 1967, my father, who had been badly wounded in WWII, co-founded Keren Mishpachot Hagiborim, an organisation supporting Israel’s disabled war veterans. He later became the president of KMH, and Ursula the president of the women’s division.

Ursula was involved in many voluntary activities for the Melbourne Jewish community and beyond. She served as a Polish and Russian translator at the Royal Children’s Hospital, organised the library in Melbourne’s Frances Barkman House (an orphanage for Jewish children including Holocaust survivors), and monitored local Slavic languages newspapers for anti-Semitism for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

Tormented by the unknown fate of her sister, Ursula became obsessed with finding out the exact details of where, when, and how Jareczka had died. In the early 1980s, she joined the fledgling group of people who established the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. Ursula organised its first exhibition and became the founding archivist. For 25 years, she collected and archived materials from Holocaust survivors who lived in Melbourne. Whenever new lists of names of those who had been exterminated came to light, she carefully scrutinised them in search of her sister’s name. Ursula never found out the exact circumstances of her sister’s death. For her years of dedicated, voluntary work for the MHM, Ursula was awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM), and the MHM archives were named the Ursula Flicker Archival Collection.

Many in the Melbourne Jewish community knew or worked beside the formidable Ursula Flicker. They have numerous stories to tell of her prickly personality and high expectations yet also speak of their love and respect for her. Her loyalty and dedication will be difficult to match.

While dementia robbed us of the Ursula Flicker many remember, other dimensions of her personality emerged while she lived out her final years at Emmy Monash Aged Care. The family’s love for her was enhanced, not diminished, by her cognitive decline. To her last days, she charmed, entertained and challenged all who interacted with her.

Helen Forgasz is Ursula Flicker’s daughter.