Edith Sheldon shares her story with Juliet Rieden.
When I look back at my life, I can barely believe how lucky I was to survive the horrors of the Holocaust and to have reached the age of 93. Even after the war, things were not easy, but luck came my way again when I was offered a chance of a new life in distant Australia. I was also lucky to have met and married Walter, my soulmate for 60 years. And I am lucky to have two sons and four grandsons I can be proud of. I teach them to appreciate what they have and most of all to not do harm to others.
I was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1927. My father, Otto Drucker, and my mother, Ida Auerbach, had met before World War I. They fell in love instantly and became devoted sweethearts. On October 28, 1918, Czechoslovakia was proclaimed a republic. It was an exciting, enlightened time. The old Habsburg Empire was gone, modern ideas filled the schools and universities; intellectual optimism took off.
When I was two years old, my father died of a middle-ear infection. I have no memory of him, though I did feel his loss deeply because of the impact it had on my mother. She was overcome by grief; she wore her widow’s weeds – black clothes and a heavy black veil – way beyond the customary year of mourning. She visited my father’s grave every week, wailing and crying. I went with her and then eventually stopped her from going. Even though I was a small child, I knew that this was damaging her. She never remarried, or even had a male friend.
Read the article by Edith Sheldon in The Sydney Morning Herald.