“NEVER again” – that was the message holocaust survivor Peter Baruch wanted to ensure lived on through the opening of the Queensland Holocaust Museum beneath Penola Place in St Stephen’s Cathedral precinct today.
Mr Baruch was only one and a half years old when Nazi Germany invaded his home-country Poland in 1939.
His parents decided to leave Poland while the rest of his wider family stayed.
“We survived; they all perished, every one of them,” he said.
His family fled to Lithuania, where they met Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara – now remembered for his heroics helping Jewish people flee Nazi-occupied Europe.
Mr Baruch’s family travelled on the Trans-Siberian Railway through Russia to Vladivostok and shipped to Japan.
After six months, the family were forced to leave Japan as well.
Mr Baruch’s father acquired visas to “a place we’d never heard of called New Zealand”.
“The journey took two years,” he said.
“Two years of deprivation, two years of worry for my parents.”
Mr Baruch has five children and seven grandchildren, saying he found a “very good life here”.
Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge said it was an honour to join with the Jewish community in an inter-religious partnership that promotes remembrance and understanding.
“The partnership sends a strong signal that we are all sisters and brothers in a world which desperately needs to build bridges not walls, to choose peace not violence,” he said.
Read the article by Joe Higgins in The Catholic Leader.