“It’s 1944. My mother is only nine years old. There’s loud banging on the door, shouting.
“It’s a round up. Terrified, she is. Even at nine, she knows, she’s about to be taken.”
“At age nine, my mother’s childhood was over.”
At a service to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, Canberra’s Jewish community came together to remember, to reflect and to resolve that the memory of the Holocaust and its terrors will never be extinguished.
Through tears, and wearing the yellow star her mother was forced to wear by the Nazi regime, Dr Blumenthal Elix paid tribute to her mother and her late father Thomas Blumenthal, also a Holocaust survivor.
Mrs Blumenthal’s story of surviving the Holocaust had never been told publicly before, but she was able to watch on as her daughter found the words to tell the true horror.
The cattle truck that transferred her and other Jews to the concentration camp. The single bucket for a toilet. Being told by her own mother to always stick with her sister, and find a new place to hide each day.
Read the article by Sally Whyte in The Canberra Times.