GEORGE GINZBURG

George's family risked everything in 1921 to escape the communist regime in the Soviet Union and forged a safer and better life in Berlin. As a child, George experienced the Berlin of the 1930s, attending the 1936 Olympic Games and witnessing the horrors of the terrifying 'Kristall Night' in 1938.

Evacuated with the Kinder Transport from Germany to Belguim, he later fled the invading German army across the Spanish border but had to turn back. When he tried desperately to enter Switzerland via France, he was betrayed by Swiss guards. Arrested as a spy, Geroge waited in a Gestapo prison undergoing interrogation and torture before enduring the agonising transportation by rail across Europe. What followed was the tale of one of the longest surviving Jewish slave labourers in Auschwitz. As inmate number 64147, George Ginzburg survived for nearly three years.

During the infamous Death March evacuation from Auschwitz in January 1945, George managed to escape into the Bavarian forest, struggling for survival until the advancing American forces stumbled upon him. He enlisted into the Third US Army Intelligence CIC and served as an official scout and interpreter throughout occupied West Gerrmany.

Miraculously, at war's end, George was reunited with his mother after seven years of separation and so began his journey to Australia to begin a new and safer life with a young wife and his mother.

Today, in his 80s, George is an active volunteer guide at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia, where he spreads a message of tolerance and anti-racism to students and other visitors of all denominations and faiths.

– Brendan Cohen, Editor