He lives 15,000 kilometres away in the United States, but David Nelson was so moved by the tragic story of a young Jewish man’s 1946 death in Melbourne that he organised a gravestone for him.
In soft rain on Sunday at Fawkner cemetery, in Melbourne’s north, 11 people attended the consecration of the monument to Kurt Kriszhaber, which is engraved with the Star of David.
Teacher and lay cantor Michael Cohen recited psalms, then said in English and sang in Hebrew the Memorial Prayer, asking God to grant Mr Kriszhaber “proper repose under the sheltering wings of your presence”.
Mr Nelson, who watched by live stream from Florida, has spent three years pursuing the recognition Mr Kriszhaber did not receive upon his death.
In 2018 Mr Nelson – an education assistant at the Holocaust Museum and Cohen Education Centre in the city of Naples, Florida – read a 1941 letter in his museum’s collection that Mr Kriszhaber wrote from an internment camp at Tatura, near Shepparton in central Victoria.
In the letter, addressed to New York woman Sally Faktor, a frantic Mr Kriszhaber, aged 20, asks Ms Faktor – believed to be a relative or friend – if she knows what has become of his relatives in his native Vienna, Austria.
Mr Nelson, a former journalist, “started digging around on the internet” and found Mr Kriszhaber’s father was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Read the article by Carolyn Webb in the Brisbane Times.