Haber launches memoir book

It took Associate Professor Richard Haber almost two years to write his memoirs, with urging and encouragement from his close friend and fellow Holocaust survivor Egon Sonnenschein, and support from Sydney Jewish Museum Community Stories publishing unit manager Jacqui Wasilewsky, but the result is an important book called Still Here.

Haber, 88, revealed at the book’s launch last month that it was only relatively recently that he felt he had “the right, and the duty, to look back”.

The book explores his childhood in the Krakow ghetto, where he narrowly avoided death before briefly escaping with his parents, only to be recaptured and placed in a forced march to Auschwitz, where they again managed to escape, and were hidden for nine months by a Polish couple.

He added he included his gratitude to them in the book, describing them as “people who did that without any special reasons, other than they are human beings”.

The book is available through the museum.