Survivor of five camps built good life in Australia

OTTO KOHN March 21, 1928-April 11, 2025

The remarkable Otto Kohn, a survivor of the Holocaust, was born in Prague in 1928 and grew up in a comfortable, loving home. When barely a teenager in 1942, he was transported with his family to the Terezin concentration camp.

Soon after this, he was separated from his mother Zdenka and sister Olga in Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Together with his father Arnold, he endured another four concentration camps – Landsberg, Kaufering, Landshut and Dachau.

(Mark Baker, son of survivors, historian and eloquent recorder of the impact of the Holocaust on Australian Jewry, once wrote: “The ruptures of our times can never be wholly mended, they must be a gash that we wear openly on our hearts.”)

Otto’s life was ruptured by the Holocaust, and he carried this throughout his life. The Melbourne Holocaust Museum had a feature story on him in a 2016 periodical.

I was struck not only by the story of his wondrous survival, but also by a poignant photo of the Kohn family seated at a festive table. It pictures a beaming Otto surrounded by his parents, grandparents and extended family. Here is a handsome, well-dressed child looking into the camera and future with so much confidence and happiness. One’s heart is torn with the dreadful knowledge of what lay ahead for the family and a young boy brimful of promise.

The truth of a life is always more complex and subtle than we allow or present it. Such was the long and variegated life of Otto Kohn.

He always had a strong awareness of the darkness, but he also never let go of the assuredness and vitality of the young boy in the photo. His friend Hannah Piterman – they first met when he recorded his testimony with her for the Holocaust Museum – reflected on this. She recalled him as a man of enormous talent and resilience, mindful of the darkness that haunted us all, but imbued with a radiant inner light. He shared the terrors of his concentration camps experience including physical and sexual abuse, the infamous selections of Dr Josef Mengele, the horrors and the humiliation.

Holocaust survivor Otto Kohn.

Someone who knew well the light at the heart of Otto’s blackness was his adopted god-daughter Deborah Glass. Her family embraced him from his arrival in Melbourne as a penniless, orphaned refugee in 1950, and he in turn embraced them as he rebuilt his life, establishing in time a highly successful business, O K Timbers.

She eulogised Otto, saying: “So what kind of man was Otto, really? I cannot even begin to imagine how his traumatic early years impacted him – but starting with nothing but his excellent brain he built a successful timber business.

“He also became a debonair man about town, part of a 1950s Melbourne brat pack who knew all the best pick-up joints in St Kilda. He was handsome and charming – to men and women of all ages, in later years proud of looking at least 20 years younger than his age.”

The Holocaust continues to disrupt generationally, and it made Otto’s family life very complicated in Australia. Otto had more luck in business than he did in love and his two failed marriages. It was especially challenging for his daughter and two grandchildren, but as he reached the conclusion of his long life, it rounded off with love between them.

Stoic philosopher Seneca noted: “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” When Otto was at one of his lowest points, he bravely chose to live. I refer to the death of his father three months before the Americans liberated Dachau in May 1945.

Otto had survived five camps of hell with his father, who always tried to protect him, sharing his own pitiful food with his son. Otto told Hannah that when he woke to find his father dead beside him, he had to decide – to stay there with his dad and surrender to the tuberculosis racking his own body or get up and somehow carry on. Fortunately, for all those who would be touched by his friendship, goodness and generosity, he chose life, affirming that you can transform sorrow into success and trauma into triumph.

In his will, Otto appended this statement:

“As the sole member of my family to survive the Holocaust, I arrived in Australia in 1950 penniless. Australia gave me the opportunity to make something of my life for which I have always remained grateful and completely loyal to Australia. I have always conducted my life based on integrity, principles and loyalty. During my life, I have met a lot of people … on the basis that I believe, and trust they do too, that friendship is something that cannot be put into monetary value. Therefore, I would like to express to all my friends – thanks for the friendship extended to me.”

We thank you, Otto, for reminding us of the power of hope, the relentlessness of resilience, the significance of appreciation to Australia for all that it has given to the Jewish community, notwithstanding the ignorant and pusillanimous antisemites today. We thank you for teaching us that in remembrance rests redemption, in friendship strength and future.

Otto is survived by daughter Daniele Griffiths and two grandchildren Benjamin and Bethany.

Rabbi Ralph Genende OAM is interfaith and community liaison for Australia-Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.