We Are Here - Fiona Harari

These are the last adult witnesses — in their own words.

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he quickly began to realise his dream of a racially superior nation free of ‘inferior’ groups. His goal included the eradication of European Jewry, a plan that would ultimately claim six million lives. By 1945, almost two in three European Jews were dead. So were millions of other victims of Nazism.

For those who survived, liberation came with the enormous weight of guilt and memory as they began the second part of their lives, often in faraway places such as Australia, which would become home to one of the world’s highest per capita communities of Holocaust survivors.

Now the last of those adult survivors have reached an age once considered unattainable. They outlasted Nazism, and today, in their tenth and eleventh decades, have outlived most of their contemporaries. Eighteen of these Australians, originally from all over Europe, tell what it is like to have endured those years, and how they lived long after them.

‘Fiona Harari’s We Are Here: Talking with Australia’s Oldest Holocaust Survivors is a welcome addition to the body of knowledge about one of history’s greatest crimes … Not only are these stories of the horrors of the concentration and labour camps, but they are an assertion, a shout of triumph, We Are Here, we made it when you didn’t expect us to and some of us have even had good lives.’

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Scribe Publishing 2018, paperback