Tributes for museum volunteer

Holocaust survivor Eva Brown – a longtime Sydney Jewish Museum volunteer, passed away last week, aged 87.

Brown was six months old when her parents fled Germany in early 1939, just months after the deadly pogroms and burning of shules that occurred on Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass – throughout that country, Austria, and the Sudetenland.

They ended up safely in British North Borneo, where her father practised as a doctor, and her mother as a nurse, but became prisoners of war when Japanese forces invaded.

After liberation, Brown was billeted with a family in Sydney, where she attended St Catherine’s primary school as a boarder. Several years later, the family moved to Gladesville, where Brown attended Riverside Girls’ High School, and was elected as school captain in her final year there.

She married Harold Brown and they had three children, David, Michael and Lisa.

After training as a nurse, following in the footsteps of her mother, Brown worked at Royal North Shore Hospital, and at Greenwich Hospital, devoting some 50 years of service to nursing.

Upon retiring, Brown joined the Sydney Jewish Museum’s volunteer team in 2001 and worked in its shop and administration area until 2020, only stopping due to health concerns.

She is deeply missed by the museum’s staff, volunteers, her family and all who knew her, and her legacy of testimony and educating future generations about the lessons of the Holocaust and the importance of being upstanders against all forms of prejudice will live on.

Among the more than 50 comments of tribute posted on the museum’s website was this from William Laing: “I was lucky to meet the delightful Eva several times – I’m deeply moved at this news, may her memory be a blessing.”