Richard Rozen dies

Richard Rozen, who has died in Melbourne, survived the Holocaust as a hidden child in Poland, built a quiet, successful life in Australia as a chess and bridge champion, and then, decades later, discovered that one of the men he had faced across a chessboard was among the most senior Nazi war criminals ever to find refuge in this country.

Richard was born Richard Rozencwajg in Radom, Poland, in 1935, the son of Pinkus Rozencwajg, a doctor, and his wife Rose.

He was four when Germany invaded Poland.

By six, he was hiding with his parents in a cupboard, where he stayed for thirteen months.

When the family’s money ran out, they were forced into the Lublin ghetto and put on a path to Treblinka.

They were smuggled out instead – his father’s medical skills bought the family’s passage to a Polish village, where Richard, disguised as a girl to protect him, lived out the war under an assumed identity.

He later rejoined his father in the forest with a Polish partisan unit, where at eight years old he served as what he called the “feather boy,” tickling supposedly dead German soldiers under the use with a feather to see f they were just playing dead.

His father was taken by the Germans in 1944 and never seen again; Richard was eight and a half.

After liberation, Richard and his mother were shunted between a sanatorium in Otwock, a stint in Lodz, a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart and years in a French orphanage before finally reaching Melbourne in 1951, to live with an uncle who had survived the war in Russia.

He studied electrical engineering at RMIT, then known as the Working Men’s Colleg, and it was there that he founded a chess club, later going on to found the St Kilda Chess Club, which remains active today.

Chess and bridge became the defining pursuits of Richard’s adult life, and, as those close to him understood it, an echo of the memory games he had played with his father to survive the war.

He became a naturalised Australian citizen in 1956, ran a knitting factory and later a wholesale confectionery business, and represented Australia at the World Bridge Championships in France in 1982.

In 1997 he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for his services to chess and bridge and to the community, including his work with the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.

His wartime story was documented in Jane Marks’ book The Hidden Children, in Dr Paul Valent’s Child Survivors, and in the collection of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

It was through chess that Richard’s story took its most chilling turn.

Unknowingly, he played six games across the St Kilda and Victorian chess circuit against Karlis Ozols – a Latvian-born SS officer accused of playing a leading role in the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Minsk and elsewhere, who lived freely in Melbourne for decades as a respected member of the local chess community.

Richard lost five of the six games and drew the sixth.

When the truth about Ozols emerged publicly in the 1980s, Richard became one of the most persistent voices demanding accountability, helping to spearhead a campaign of letters and submissions to successive prime ministers and immigration ministers pushing for the extradition of Ozols and his fellow SS veteran Konrads Kalejs.

Those efforts went unanswered by government, but Richard’s correspondence is preserved in the archives of the Melbourne Holocaust Museum as part of the historical record of Australia’s failure to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.

That record found a wider audience last year, when journalist and filmmaker Dan Goldber, tipped off by his co-producer Danny Ben-Moshe, travelled to Melbourne to film Richard’s testimony for the SBS documentary The Hunt for the Last Nazis.

Goldberg has recalled that when he learned of Richard’s history with Ozols, “it was chilling” – so chilling, he says, that it became a central motif of the film.

Richard’s own chess clock, restored by the production to his great joy, became the opening shot and a visual through-line, signalling, in Goldberg’s words, “the passage of time, which in the end largely explains why hundreds and probably several thousand Nazis lived and died here as free men.”

In one of the film’s most striking scenes, Richard is taken to Ozols’ grave, where he admits he wanted to spit on it, before adding, with characteristic dry wit, that he was “too civilised for that.”

By the time the documentary premiered at The Classic cinema in April, Richard was already in hospital, but he was determined to attend and did so, surrounded by family in a packed house, watching his own testimony on screen.

According to his wife Rysia, taking part in the film was one of the highlights of his life, and meant the world to him.

Goldberg himself says he feels “humbled and honoured” that Richard trusted him with his story, and grateful that the film will remain “as a record for future generations.”