Israeli-Australian businessman Eitan Neishlos has agreed to be the lead donor to conserve some of the most precious items of WWII: the 8000 shoes of murdered children, left behind by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Mr Neishlos said the decision to give seed money for the campaign to save the deteriorating shoes, recently launched by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation and International March of the Living, was an easy one for he immediately thought of his grandmother Tamara, a Holocaust survivor.
Mr Neishlos’s foundation, set up from his fin-tech business activities, is focused on keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust to fight anti-Semitism.
He told The Australian: “These are the children’s shoes left behind by the Nazis, because they didn’t have time (as the war was nearing its end) to ship these things over to Germany … And so 8000 shoes remained, even though more than 230,000 children were murdered at Auschwitz.”
When Mr Neishlos went to Auschwitz recently with two of the camp survivors, Arie Pinsker and Bogdan Barnikowski, to launch the shoe restoration project Soul to Sole, he had with him the brown box in which his grandmother Tamara Kantorovich had stored an elegantly written memoir of how she survived.
He had only discovered its contents when, as Deputy and Director of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies he asked his mother for more detail of his family connection to prepare for a speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Read the article by Jacquelin Magnay, Europe correspondent in The Australian.