Customer Reviews

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• Tom Leimdorfer

  We are our memories
  Frank Vajda
  It is impossible not be both disturbed and inspired by Frank Vajda’s latest book. It is a remarkable collage of Holocaust experiences and perspectives. It is a feat of historical research interwoven with accounts of people who have entrusted their stories and journeys to the author. In between, there are key chapters of Frank’s life story, his thoughts and aspects of his personal experience from a childhood Holocaust survivor to his eminent medical career in Australia.
  Frank gives central place to the memory of Raoul Wallenberg who saved his life amongst that of countless others during the darkest horrors in the autumn of 1944 when no Jew was safe from the atrocities of the Hungarian Arrow Cross working with the German SS. By then, over four hundred thousand Jews had been deported to Auschwitz from the provinces and most murdered in the gas chambers. Frank gives accounts of heroic survival such as the story of Olga, a Jewess from Slovakia, who took great risks to use her position of responsibility amongst her fellow prisoners to save as many as she could, to improve their conditions and chances of survival. A contrasting chapter relates to a controversial eminent Jewish figure who saved a trainload of ‘influential’ Jewish families at the price of collaborating with Adolf Eichmann. Beyond the financial payment to the Nazis, he played a part in ensuring that the realities of concentration camps were kept from deportees and hence reducing the chances of resistance.
  The author does not shy away from making judgements about the role played by politicians and religious figures who stood by while Hitler’s ‘final solution’ was being executed by his henchmen. At the same time, he throws light on several ‘righteous gentiles’ who risked their own lives to save others. It is not an easy read for those of us who share the same history with some overlapping family losses. One needs to go back to individual chapters and stories, valuing each separately. It is a complex tapestry, a treasure trove of interrelated lives, an affirmation of the triumph of the human spirit and sacrifice in the midst of greatest evil.
  
  Tom Leimdorfer
  

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