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Welcome Kathy Valer-Gordon. Kathy doesn't like just being called a holocaust survivor
because apparently that minimises , she's been through in many ways. She's survived
the holocaust, she's survived the communist regime in Hungary, so if anyone knows what
it feels like and looks like to live in a place that is not a democracy, Kathy certainly
does. And I'm sure that all of you will find that she's an inspiration in herself, just
Thank you. Good morning everybody. Thank you for coming.
And thank you for M.A.D.E for inviting me. To be very honest I don't really know why
I was invited because I'm just an ordinary person and, as you can hear from my accent,
I wasn't born here. I'm one of what you used to call New Australian but I don't know if
that's a good description because I've been here longer than most of you.
Like 56 years. If I'm to voice a personal opinion after the introduction, on democracy,
I suppose you need to know a bit about where I come from, what my background is. Maybe
let me start with saying that it's a series of miracles that I'm actually here today talking
to you. I lost count how many times I was shot at,
overcame illness, life threatening illnesses, but I'm here and survived it all so it is
a series of miracles. Unfortunately, I was born at the wrong place
and the wrong time. I was born in Budapest, Hungary about three weeks after the Nazi occupation
of neighbouring Austria. It was a very, very bad time for a little Jewish girl to be born.
Our family was very small, secular, middle class. We just comfortable. Our family consisted
of a sister, four years... Is that better? I might stand back that way.
Ah, four years older than me, mum and dad. That was all. Before the war, my mother didn't
have to work. The Nazi occupation came to the country of my birth very late in the war.
It happened only two months before D-Day, which was the beginning of the end of World
War II. From that day onwards our lives have changed. Previously never, war was raging
all over Europe but in Hungary life was relatively normal, if I can put it that way. Except for
the fact that my father was called up from time to time to do forced labour. And life
was relatively normal until March '44 and then the changes daily. Every day there were
more changes and restrictions. I'm not going to go into all the details of that, just let
me tell you that at that time I was six years old and we were confined to, at first, Jewish
houses, and then there was curfew. I was the only one in the whole family and all the others
who had to live with us, who didn't have the markings of the yellow star which was compulsory
over the age of six. So before I went to school, I had to do all of the family shopping. Yes,
I had to grow up very fast but children do. Don't ever underestimate children, it's amazing
what they can do and if you think I was a special child, no I wasn't. I was just a very
ordinary child just somehow one realises that they different circumstances.
We were taken to the ghetto. The ghetto was an enclosure, the last point where, before
the cattle trains arrived to take us to Auschwitz which was the worst of the concentration camps.
And the reason I'm here today because some friends of our family risked their lives and
saved us from the ghetto. And I'm very, very pleased, I still keep in contact with the
family even to this day. The children, of course, the parents are gone by now.
After we were rescued from the ghetto, we went into hiding in the outskirts of Budapest.
So that's a part of the holocaust part of my life. It was really just a very short period,
very intense and it really had an effect on my life but I've lived most of my life in
Australia so, yes I survived that and yes, there were great lessons to be learned from
that period of time. Post war era was difficult for us. I mentioned
that we were just an ordinary middle class family. My father was a self made man and
after the war the communist regime came into power and they very, very difficult times.
See my father was killed by a local Nazi during the tail end of the war and my mother had
to find work to support her two growing daughters and she didn't earn enough. So many times
we went hungry, there was shortage of funds for things like clothing and shoes, and even
mum had to have things for herself because as soon as we were taken to the ghetto our
neighbours broke into our apartment and stole everything they could lay their hands on,
they never expected us to be back. So after the war, even Mum didn't have things, clothes
and things. They were very, very difficult times.
But we had an additional difficulty in the communist regime because what they did was
they had a file on each individual, and I don't just mean on the workplace but even
in school. And we had a black mark to our name. Why? Because we were not of working
class or peasant origin. The fact that my father worked hard to become a self-made man
before the war and the fact that he was killed was totally ignored by the communists and
it left us with a black mark to our name. That bad period of time was a long time. It
lasted ten years for us. And after ten years it wasn't just us, but many of us who suffered
during that period of time and there was an uprising, an uprising in 1956, after which
200,000 people crossed the border illegally into neighbouring Austria in one month. Just
try to think of that -- 200,000 people out of 8million total population. They were not
happy with the regime obviously, that many escaped.
Our family also escaped. My sister went first and crossed the border in one day. My mother
followed and I was the last one. I can't got into the details of why that happened here
now but unfortunately, at my first attempt I was caught. I was caught at the border and
I was taken to security police headquarters and I was interrogated for three days, after
which I was let go. I think the reason they let me go was probably that there were too
many of us who were caught and they just didn't know what to do with us for the time being
but life was, of course, very dangerous after that.
Luckily on the my second attempt, having spent many, many hours walking in a very, very cold
European winter in knee-high snow, I managed to cross the border into Austria, just literally
minutes before the border police arrived, so another lucky escape.
In Austria, the refugee camps awaited us. I mean, they poor Austrians, I feel for them,
I mean can you imagine the city being 200,000 people in a month, you can imagine they had
to house us somewhere and originally they housed us in schools and then later on in
army barracks. Often we had to sleep 20, 25 to a school room on straw sacks on the floor.
Men, women, children all together. It was not easy. Not easy. We had to wait for five
months in those camps until the Australian government extended their quota and allowed
us, gave us permission to come to Australia, my mother and I, as political refugees.
And on arrival, there was another camp waiting for us, Bonegilla. Do any of you know where
Bonegilla is? Near Albury-Wodonga. Series of army barracks again. To the best of my
knowledge, my mother and I were the only two Jews at the time at Bonegilla, which was a
dangerous place. Actually the Jewish Welfare Society knew how dangerous it was and they
took everybody, all the Jewish people off the ships on arrival and somehow or other
they forgot about us. I don't know how, to this day, but we were taken to Bonegilla and
the only, it was a very dangerous place. There were knifings, they were separated by countries,
each series of barracks, and there were knifings most nights because people were frustrated.
They came to a new country, they were just not happy and took it out on each other.
We were lucky because somebody warned us in advance on arrival and my mother was very
clever to realise straight away what it was all about and we stayed on the Italian, with
the Italians, in the Italian barracks. After one month of Bonegilla, I decided to
put all the bad experiences behind me and I had enough of all of that. Let's start a
new life and I hopped on a train and went to Melbourne. I had two telephone numbers,
no English, I couldn't speak a word of English, and would you believe I didn't even know how
to use a public phone? It was far too complicated. But luckily people helped me and I managed
to get across to one of the phone numbers and that's how I arrived in Melbourne. Starting
a new life. Well that was easier said than done. Yes, work was aplenty, mostly manual
labour and I was very, very lucky that through series of things, again that I don't go into
the details of, but I managed to land a job in public service soon after my arrival as
a tracer. This word is not even known today, I'm sure, I don't think any of you would know
the word. Effectively it's a technical copy typist, that's equivalent to that. And I was
well qualified for that because before I left the old country I studied mechanical engineering
and technical drawings are the same all over the world, so it didn't take me long. I couldn't
speak, I couldn't converse with people, but I understood the technical drawings, they
were no problem to understand. And we stayed in Melbourne for a couple of
years and then we moved to Sydney and within a few days of my arrival to Sydney I was lucky
again -- by then I could speak a little bit of English, enough to apply for a job. I managed
to get a much better job in the private sector and I stayed on in engineering which was not
quite the norm for my generation in Australia. It was ah, not a profession too many women
opted for and understandably because the few who did stay on in the profession, they went
into academia or the public sector because that was a much easier life. Not me, I looked
for a challenge and I remained in the private sector. I spent over 40 years consulting engineering.
A few years after I arrived I got married and my husband came from Bucharest, a new
arrival, he was a doctor of, he had a doctorate in law but he had ah, he had to do all his
studies over again because he was, qualifications were not accepted here. So the emphasis became
on my husband's career instead of mine and at 44 years of age, when he was at just about
the peak of his career, he suddenly died and that's when I started to become a career person
and I started to travel with work and my travels have taken me to Queensland, down here to
Victoria, to New Zealand, and even to mainland China. The long career.
So what does democracy mean to me after all this? I experienced the extreme ends of the
scale. The Nazis took away my childhood. The communists took away my youth and it was only
when I was a young adult that I came to the appreciation of democracy, what it means.
But there are duties there as well for each individual of trying to do the best they can.
I'm very, very grateful that I was allowed to come and settle here and after all the
difficulties of my previous life, I was allowed to contribute to this country. And even before
my retirement I decided that I have to do some volunteer work to give something back
to my adopted country and was organisation, which was a small organisation, volunteer
organisation called Courage to Care and I joined them. So I changed professions effectively
because they are, it's an educational program for students so we educate the future generation
in anti-bullying, anti-discrimination, we travel to regional centres and even to Brisbane
and Canberra, all different places, and it's very rewarding and I hope that in my small
way I can give something back to my adopted country because I feel that it's my duty in
a democracy. I thank you.