Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the life of Peretz Kalman, a man I knew as the father of a great mate, someone whose life story encapsulates so much about a generation of Jewish Australians who have strengthened and enriched Australia in the decades following World War II. Following my contribution, the member for Melbourne Ports and the member for Sturt will also speak with the knowledge and blessing of the family.

Peretz’s life began in Lodz in Poland in 1936 and ended earlier this month in Melbourne after a short illness that robbed him of his sunset years. His life involved so much. It is a story of struggle, of sadness, of heartbreak and ultimately of success, happiness and much more. In her touching obituary in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Fay Burstin added tragedy, triumph and human resilience when she wrote of Peretz, the youngest known survivor of the dreaded Bergen-Belsen Nazi death camp. When he was three, Peretz’s father was arrested and taken away and was presumed killed by the Nazis. His mother took him and his brother to live with his father’s parents in Petrokov. In 1941, his grandfather and uncles were arrested for selling kosher meat at their butcher shop. Grandfather, mother and both boys were interned in a ghetto. In 1942 they hid for three weeks after its liquidation to avoid transportation to an extermination camp. They were discovered, arrested and sent from camp to camp, where they suffered and witnessed all that was typical of that horrific period of Nazi atrocity.

Peretz and his mother and brother were finally sent to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945 and, amazingly for that time when the Nazi death machine was in full flight, survived until the British liberation in April. After recovering, like so many others they came to Australia and a new life began. Peretz became an engineer, married Rachel and had three children—Rosalie, Harvey and Lisa. He was a keen sportsman, great at football and squash, and very much a pillar of the community.

I first met him 20 years ago when I became friends with his son Harvey. Four years ago he would have been overjoyed with life. He had succeeded professionally, established a family and become a grandfather. He would have thought that, with the life he had had, he had seen all of life’s surprises—but he had not. In 2002, he discovered that his father, presumed dead, had in fact survived the Holocaust and World War II and his father, thinking that his wife and children were dead, had moved to the Soviet Union, where he had remarried, raised a family and lived out his days in Vladivostok, dying in 1981, never knowing his first wife and two children had survived.

His life was unique in some ways but typical in others. Surviving in a death camp, hiding from the SS, the heartbreak of growing up and living his life thinking his father had been killed only to discover later that he had not at all is a perfect script for a Spielberg movie. But it was a typical story in many ways, in that there were so many stories of such heartbreak in that time, so many Jewish people who suffered so much and who came to our country with nothing to make a new life. Peretz was a fine example of a generation we are slowly saying goodbye to, but their legacy will live on. It will live on in our community and our country and in their families—in Peretz’s case, in his wife, Rachel; in his children, Harvey, Rosalie and Lisa; and in his eight grandchildren, whom he was able to see live a childhood so starkly different from his.

Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I join the member for Casey and the member for Sturt in their condolences to the Kalman family—to Harvey, Rachel, Rosalie and Lisa. I know many of these survivors, as many of them live in my electorate, and to lose the youngest survivor of Bergen-Belsen reminds me of the truth of what the member for Casey has said. Their memory will live on through their spectacularly successful lives in Australia. I thought it was remarkable, on reading Fay Burstin’s obituary in the Herald Sun, that Peretz had had such a successful sporting life. Imagine being a survivor of a concentration camp from the age of three to eight and then playing football for university high, playing B-grade amateurs for the Brunswick Amateurs and being the best and fairest in his first season. What a remarkable thing that says about Australia. I thank the member for Newcastle for letting me too express my condolences.