Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I want to speak about the extraordinary life of a dear family friend of ours, Sonia Kempler, a woman of valour, who recently passed in Melbourne. At age 9, she and her brother, who the family referred to Uncle Max and who was then aged 2½, smuggled themselves through a ruse into Belgium, where she met her future husband, 12-year-old Harry, who was later the father of her three children, who are lifelong friends of mine: Rosalie, Leon and Geoff.

In May 1940, Sonia took a one-hour train ride from Stuyvenberg to La Panne and alighted in the south of France, alone and hungry in the village of Malfaite. She went into the forest, collected chestnuts and sold them. When the chestnuts were out of season, she opened a business in mushrooms. This is a nine-year-old girl looking after her 2½-year-old brother as refugees in Nazi occupied France and Belgium. She managed to survive the war and reunite with her beloved husband, Harry, with whom she had many happy postwar years in Australia.

As Leon and Geoff noted in their moving eulogies, she wrote a wonderful book—which I recommend people read—called The Wheels of Memory. She says in the subtitle of the book that she grew up with a war on her shoulders. She ended her life with 27 descendants all around her bed. She was an absolute icon of the Australian Jewish community in Melbourne. In 2000 Sonia Kempler attended the service organisation B'nai B'rith's conference in Jerusalem and proposed to the international organisation that on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz there be six candles lit in every home to remember the six million that were murdered.

Sonia Kempler was a person who loved Australia, deeply loved this country, appreciated everything that happened to her. She loved her husband, who she lost too early. She wrote this about Harry:

True love lies beyond the grave,

My strength comes from the love you gave.

Although we have been torn apart,

You will always dwell deep in my heart.

My thoughts are with you every day,

You did not die, you went away.

She found total love in the devotion of her children and her family. To Geoff, Rosalie and Leon, commiserations from all who knew that great women.

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