For the small handful of Holocaust survivors living in Tasmania, the mark of trauma can never be erased.
As a result of the calamity wrought by the Third Reich, these survivors have extraordinary stories to tell.
Felix Goldschmied, an 81-year-old retired orthodontist from Launceston, was just a small child when his Jewish father was put in a labour camp after Germany occupied what was then known as Czechoslovakia.
A tanner with a leather factory in the city of Brno, Dr Goldschmied’s father had a reputation for being a master craftsman.
“The factory was huge,” Dr Goldschmied said. “It [had] little trains running through it.”
“I know that because in 1941, he would take me to the factory occasionally.”
The Nazis eventually took control of Walter Goldschmied’s factory and asked him to work for them, which he refused to do.
So he was sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in the north-west of the Czech Republic, where he was made to break rocks.
The young Dr Goldschmied’s mother was well-educated and spoke fluent German, which she subsequently exploited to bluff her way out of trouble, protect her family and aid the underground resistance movement being waged against the Third Reich.
Dr Goldschmied recalled a time when he accompanied his mother on a train to Prague, near Theresienstadt.
“She carried these suitcases,” he said of his mother. “I didn’t know what was in [them].”
Read the article by Rob Inglis in The Examiner.