Aussie hero honoured
AN East St Kilda grandfather paused on Yom Hashoah to reflect on memories of his father and mother, whose heroism in rescuing other Jews in the Holocaust was honoured at a ceremony in Israel this week.
Willy Eckstein recalled the selfless deeds of his father Yona Eckstein, dubbed the Guardian Angel of Bratislava, and his mother Michal, who sheltered, fed and nursed Jews hiding from the Nazis in Slovakia.
When World War II broke out, Yona had been a wrestler with Hakoah in the Slovakian city and his sporting credentials gave him ties to local officials, which he used to gain leniency for his clandestine rescue activities, some also carried out with his brother Samo.
Eckstein’s actions touched thousands over some 30 months during 1942-44. He distributed food to Jewish prisoners and hidden Jews, and information vital for their survival. He hosted Polish orphans, arranging their escape to pre-state Israel. He protected Jews who fled to Slovakia from Auschwitz. He helped Polish Jews reach the relative safety of Hungary and he hid Jews in bunkers, including one he dug under his basement.
In 1943 he was imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo but refused to give information on the whereabouts of four Polish Jews. Michal was also ordered to reveal their names but refused, even under torture. The Ecksteins survived, as did the four whose names they withheld.
After the war, Yona began arranging for Jewish refugees to emigrate to Israel, but the new communist regime in Czechoslovakia did not approve and issued an arrest warrant. He tried to make it to Israel, but was thwarted by the War of Independence, so the Ecksteins, with their son Willy, settled in Australia.
Willy remembers his father, the proprietor of a kosher poultry shop in St Kilda, was revered in Melbourne by a small circle of Jews he had aided. Yona died in 1971.
But hearing of his parents’ heroism did not make a huge impression on him until he met two of the survivors. A chance encounter with a woman on a flight to London moved him deeply. “When she discovered I was Eckstein’s son, she rose from her seat and hugged me, saying ‘Without him I’d be dead’.”
The Melbourne jeweller also visited a jewellery wholesaler in Los Angeles, who had been gruff, but when it turned out he was Eckstein’s son, the man became emotional. “He said ‘Take whatever you want, take the whole store, and don’t pay me, because your father fed me and nursed me back to life after the war’.”
On April 28, Yom Hashoah, Willy’s sister Gerta in Israel attended the 12th annual commemoration of Jews who showed exemplary heroism during the Holocaust. The ceremony, organised by B’nai B’rith and Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, was held at the Martyrs’ Forest near Jerusalem. Some 200 border patrol cadets formed an honour guard and 200 high-school students joined Jewish rescuers and survivors.
Since the establishment of the Jewish Rescuers Citation in 2011, 70 awards have been presented to rescuers who operated in France, Germany, Holland and Hungary.
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