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.

I am now 82 years old. For the past three years, I have spoken to schoolchildren at the Sydney Jewish Museum. I have seen young Australians realise, sometimes for the first time, that the Holocaust is not just a distant part of European history but a real experience standing in front of them. I care deeply about this work.

But I am afraid.

I am afraid for my eight-year-old granddaughter who visits Bondi, the same suburb where my mother once started over in a small flat. Now, my granddaughter cries when she goes to Bondi Beach. She notices security guards at her school and synagogue. She sees her parents checking the news and social media for antisemitic incidents, stopping to decide what is safe.

She also notices the smaller things her parents never intended her to see. The way conversations fall silent when she walks into a room, the way a phone is turned faced-down the moment a troubling headline appears. At eight years old, she is learning, as I once did, that being Jewish means always being careful.

My fellow survivor Mark Spigelman told how he changed his Uber destination so it would not say “Sydney Jewish Museum”. This is a survivor’s instinct, the urge to hide.

I did not come to Australia so my granddaughter would have to learn that instinct.

That is why the appointment of Jillian Segal as Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism gave me something I did not expect: relief. Not political relief, but personal relief. It is the relief of being believed, of having someone in authority say clearly that what we are going through is real and will be addressed.

Segal has spent her career demanding accountability from institutions that preferred to look the other way. She speaks plainly and does not let others dismiss her as exaggerating.

Now we have the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. This is the strongest commitment to Jewish safety I have seen from any Australian government in my lifetime. I have already made a formal statement, and I believe you should as well.

Let me be clear about what the Commission is and is not. It is not a court, and you do not need a lawyer. It does not ask for legal evidence. Instead, it asks a simpler and more important question: What have you experienced, and what needs to change?

Every Australian can make a submission. This includes the parent whose child came home from school upset, the student who felt unsafe at university, and the family who changed their plans, routes, or Uber destinations.

It is also for the grandparent, like me, who thinks about the difference between the world their parents escaped and the world their grandchildren now face.

If the Royal Commission hears from hundreds of Jewish Australians from different cities, generations, and backgrounds, its recommendations cannot be dismissed as just the concerns of a small group.

If only a few of us speak up, the findings will be easier to ignore. The outcome depends on whether people like you and me choose to share our stories.

I am not asking you to relive painful memories. I am asking you to describe your life as it is now: the security measures you expect at synagogue, the talk you had with your child before school camp, or the moment you hesitated to identify yourself as Jewish in public. You can submit your story online without any legal expertise or send a written submission by mail.

When thousands of people share these moments, they become evidence. Evidence shapes policy, and policy shapes the country my granddaughter will grow up in.

My father asked my mother to live a normal life. He wrote those words from a transit camp, knowing what was coming, and tried to give her and their baby a future based on hope, not fear.

Eighty years later, I am asking for the same thing. Not for myself, but for my granddaughter and for every Jewish family in this country who deserves to live openly in their own home.

Roland Gridiger OAM is a lawyer, Holocaust survivor, and a survivor speaker at the Sydney Jewish Museum.

Visit the Royal Commission website: asc.royalcommission.gov.au

Visit Share Your Story: shareyourstory.org.au