Two babies, two disguises

Mark spent his early years as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl in the Bedzin and Srodula ghettos, where deportations to Birkenau were a constant threat.

His mother dressed him as a girl so that he could move unnoticed in a world that hunted Jewish children. He survived the ghetto, the deportations and the chaos of escape and was finally liberated near Auschwitz.

My story took place in Vichy, France. I was born with forged papers, baptised under a false name and raised as a girl so that no one would suspect the baby in the pram was a circumcised Jewish boy.

My father was active in the Resistance. He was arrested by the Gestapo in Nice in April 1944, imprisoned in the Hotel Excelsior, sent to Drancy, and then deported on Convoi 73 to the Baltic states. He never came back.

Mothers who refused to surrender

Our mothers had a lot in common. Both were highly educated, spoke several languages and were deeply connected to European culture.

Both gave up their jobs, their homes and the futures they had planned.

My mother was a dentist trained in France but originally from Poland. She had already faced years of displacement and antisemitism.

Mark’s mother, a young woman in pre-war Poland, faced the brutality of the ghettos and the constant threat of deportation.

Both women listened closely to news from the Resistance. Both knew that having the right papers could mean life or death. Both had to make decisions on their own when their husbands were arrested, disappeared or could no longer protect them.

Both faced the same impossible choice: save the child you have, knowing that every forged document, every walk with a pram and every knock on the door could be the last.

From Europe’s ruins to Bondi

Against all odds, our journeys led us to meet in Australia. Mark arrived in 1949 as a child survivor.

I came in 1948 on one of only four Joint Distribution Committee charter flights that brought Jewish refugees here. I was nearly five years old, still dressed as a girl, when I was carried off the plane.

We learned English in public schools and often felt like outsiders. We watched our mothers struggle with unrecognised qualifications, little money and the quiet humiliation of starting over from nothing.

My mother sewed in a small flat in Bondi. Mark’s parents ran a small jewellery shop and rebuilt their lives in a country that knew little about what they had been through.

Australia, even with its flaws, gave us something Europe had taken away: the chance for a normal life. This was the future my father imagined when he wrote from Drancy, urging my mother to look after “the little one” and believe they would be together again.

Science, medicine and memory

Our adult lives also took similar paths. Mark became a surgeon and researcher, then a professor of archaeology specialising in the evolution of diseases and human survival through the study of ancient DNA.

I became a lawyer, building a practice in Sydney and contributing to the community, culture and charity.

Both of us turned to evidence to make sense of chaos.

Mark studied pathology and history. I spent years in archives in France and Poland, piecing together my father’s fate and my own hidden origins. I started these discoveries when I realised at 22 that my mother’s name was missing from my birth certificate.

Eventually, both of us came to the Sydney Jewish Museum as witnesses. We speak to school groups, stand beside photographs and say the same simple, difficult words: This happened to me. This happened to my family.

There is another, newly emerging, darker similarity between our lives.

We are both seeing antisemitism rise again in the country that gave us refuge. Mark saw hate encampments appear on his university campus. He quietly stopped entering “Sydney Jewish Museum” as his Uber destination, choosing a nearby address instead. This was a small but telling return to survivor instinct.

I have noticed the atmosphere change too: Jewish students are anxious, Jewish academics are forming self-protection groups and families are questioning if it is safe to identify openly as Jews in public spaces.

For two men whose childhoods were shaped by hiding, that question is painfully familiar. It is why we keep speaking. It is why we ask schools to bring their students to hear us, because it is necessary for our multicultural society to survive.

When we tell students we survived by being disguised as girls, they realise survival was not just one story but thousands of stories of courage and fear.

All of these stories are fragile and all are now reaching their final chapter.

Mark is 85; I am 82. Many of our peers can no longer speak. Many have already passed away.

When we are gone, there will be no more living witnesses in Australia who remember Bedzin, Srodula, Nice, Drancy or Convoi 73.

What will remain are the choices today’s students make about the kind of country they want to live in: one where hatred is normal, or one where antisemitism is seen as a deadly form of racism that threatens the fabric of a multicultural society.

We had the great, undeserved privilege of growing old in Australia. Now, all we ask is that young Australians listen, learn and carry our stories forward so that no child in the future ever has to be disguised to stay alive.

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