Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to pay tribute to a remarkable Australian migrant and Holocaust survivor. Margot Pampel nee Reinhardt was born in Jena in Germany in 1922. Although they were not religious, their family had been forced to flee, firstly, Russia and then Poland due to anti-Semitic threats and pogroms. But, as the Nazi regime took hold in Germany, their new home was to become their worst nightmare. She was expelled from school, and their family lost their home because they were Jewish. Margot's mother was sent to Auschwitz where she died but Margot was able to hide and eventually flee Nazi Germany before making her way back to West Germany where she met her husband Horst.

In 1954 they sailed to Australia landing in Station Pier in Port Melbourne in my electorate with their firstborn son Michael. Settling in working-class Fitzroy, they gave birth to a daughter Felicity and scraped and saved to have a comfortable middle-class life in the welcoming multicultural city of Melbourne.

Margot documented her experience as a Holocaust survivor and postwar migrant with the help of Makor at the Lamm library of Australia in my electorate and released a book. As Chance Would Have It.From Jenato Melbourne, copies of which now sit in the State Library of Victoria and the Yad Vashem Holocaust centre in Jerusalem.

She made it back to Germany several times, even telling her story at her old school in Jena at the age of 94. She passed away in June at aged 98, survived by her two children; five grandchildren, including my good friend Sebastian Zwalf; and seven great grandchildren. May her memory be a blessing.