A number of years ago, my father was interviewed for the Jewish Migrant Oral History Project. Thankfully, I have a copy of the interview, and I will be publishing excerpts from it in his memory.
Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Interviewer: You hear of things like the Free Loan Society and those things later on. But my sense is that there was this sort of global community that was helping the Jewish migrants…
Dad: Organised.
Interviewer: It was strong here in Perth?
Dad: Yes. When I say strong you could count them on the fingers of both hands. My parents insisted that they received nothing but kindness in that article in the Maccabean.
But for example, when my father opened up his clinic with my mother’s help because not only could she speak English but she had been registered as his assistant in Germany, my father became the Police Veterinary Honorary, the RSPCA, Veterinary Honorary… I’ll explain about the number of clients he had. Anyway at the RSPCA, there was a Jewish fellow named Hertz, and he was old, skinny and pretty irascible. He had a horse which was older and skinnier than him and he had a mikvah (Jewish ritual bath – ed.) in his backyard. The horse fell into the mikvah and resisted being removed by Hertz. He couldn’t have removed a fly if he tried. So the neighbors got the RSPCA and my father went out there and inspected it, examined the horse and realized why the horse was resisting – it had broken or damaged its leg. My father said, “It has to be put down.” So he made an enemy for life. Hertz then organized his family to put forward a petition to jail this Nazi war criminal, ex-soldier who was proud about his medals. And they went out of their way to be nasty for years, even when the war finished. That was one of the reasons my mother had trouble getting my grandmother in the quota.
