We are Here: Talking with Australia’s Oldest Holocaust Survivors
Fiona Harari
Scribe, $29.99
While many Jews will know these stories in their bones, and while some people might find themselves turning away because they feel the Holocaust in Germany has dominated thinking on trauma and genocide, Fiona Harari’s We Are Here: Talking with Australia’s Oldest Holocaust Survivors is a welcome addition to the body of knowledge about one of history’s greatest crimes.
We are Here by Fiona Harari.
Harari, a Walkley award-winning journalist, has done 18 first-person interviews with survivors in their 90s and 100s. That three have died since she started gives her work an obvious urgency. But it’s more than that. Not only are these stories of the horrors of the concentration and labour camps, but they are an assertion, a shout of triumph, We Are Here, we made it when you didn’t expect us to and some of us have even had good lives.
Among them are that of Annetta Able and her identical twin, Stephanie Heller, who were transfused with the blood of Polish male twins they’d never met, as part of camp physician Josef Mengele’s plan to pair them with these men to see if identical twins could produce identical twins. The plan, involving gynaecological procedures, was stymied by the advance of the Allied troops, but the sisters experienced two more camps before liberation, emerging to find the rest of their family had been killed.
Read the review in the Sydney Morning Herald.