A Brisbane family has awarded Israel’s highest honour for risking their lives to save a Jewish baby during the Holocaust.
This simple black and white photo of woman and child embracing is a vision of enduring love, courageous resistance and profound humanity.
Dutch woman Klaasje van der Haar and her two-year-old Jewish charge, Joseph Gokkes, would have been killed if discovered by the German forces occupying the north-eastern Netherlands during World War II.
Instead Klaasje and husband Jacob van der Haar protected Joseph alongside their own children for more than three years in Hoogeveen, reuniting him with his grateful parents Gila and Benjamin Gokkes, who emerged from hiding when the region was liberated in April 1945.
More than seven decades later, Hervey Bay teacher Ingrid Bradford will tonight accept one of Israel’s highest honours, the Righteous Among the Nations award for saving Jews during the Holocaust, on her late grandparents’ behalf. Joseph’s daughter Inbal, watching the private ceremony via video-conference from Israel with her mother Shifra, will speak on her late father’s behalf.
“I don’t think I can explain how much it means to us as a family. We all tear up when we talk about it, and the realisation of what Oma and Opa did during that time, the risk they took,’’ says Bradford, 53.
Read the article by Leanne Edmistone in The Daily Telegraph and The Courier-Mail.