The same request, eighty years later

Before he was deported from the Drancy internment camp and murdered in the Baltic States, my father, Aron Gridiger, wrote to my mother with one request. He did not ask her to mourn him. He did not ask her to run away. He asked her to live a normal life.

He was born in Poland and worked as a cinematographic engineer. He joined the French Resistance in Nice. One Tuesday morning in April 1944, the Gestapo arrested him three kilometres from our apartment while he was buying photographic paper. I was three months old. He never returned.

I was born in Vichy, France, under a false identity, baptised under a false name, dressed in girl’s clothing so that no one would suspect the baby in the pram was a circumcised Jewish boy. In 1948, I arrived in Australia on one of only four Joint Distribution Committee charter flights that brought Jewish refugees here. I was nearly five years old.

Australia gave me everything.

That is the most important fact of my life. My father’s wish for a normal life came true here.