‘This is now a widespread blackness’

To the Royal Commission on Antisemitism, My name is Miriam Gould and I am 86 years old. I came to Australia as a 11 month old baby in 1940 and was interned, with my German-born parents, as an enemy alien at the camp in Tatura, regional Victoria.

My history?

My father, Werner Baer, was seized by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938 and was taken to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp outside Berlin. My mother was able to have him released, after his head was shaved and he had been beaten, on the promise that they would leave Germany. And so they did, winding up in Singapore, where I was born, to be later interned by the British government, fearful of a fifth column, on the Queen Mary and taken to Australia in 1940.

After the war, my parents, immediately seeking naturalisation and recognising Australia as a land of peace and opportunity, were able to make a wonderful life for themselves. My father’s great musical gifts were recognised and he would later be awarded an MBE and Queen’s Jubilee Medal for services to Australian music.

I would inherit my mother’s joy in literature and become a senior English teacher with pastoral care responsibilities, notably for over 20 years at Mt Scopus Memorial College, a Jewish day school in Melbourne. Our family would expand with the addition of children, their partners and grandchildren.