When Ian Ernst arrived in Australia in September 1939, aged just 10 months, he was among 90,000 Jews to flee Austria in the face of persecution by the Nazi regime.
Torn from their homeland, the Ernst family’s bond with the country was frayed, almost completely broken, but at a small ceremony in Canberra this week new threads began to pull the nation and the family back together.
Mr Ernst’s son Christopher, and his grandsons Callum and Ethan, were the first Canberra family to be granted Austrian citizenship as part of a decades-long process the country has undertaken for reconciliation with victims of the Nazi regime.
Ian Ernst’s story will be familiar to many whose families also had to flee to escape the Nazis. His mother Liselotte, who had grown up in Vienna, and his father Hermann, who was living in Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia, had seen the writing on the wall.
They were agnostic, but were “Jewish enough by Hitler’s definition”.
They made the decision to leave, travelling first to Zagreb in Croatia, then on to Switzerland, to England, and eventually to Australia.
The family’s Austrian background was a constant presence in their life in Australia, through music, art and memories, but Mr Ernst said his mother “didn’t want to dwell in the past at all”.
It’s a story that has been replicated for many victims of the Nazi regime, forced to leave their home countries to stay alive, bonds broken, or never quite the same.
Read the article by Sally Whyte in The Canberra Times.