Focusing on family connections between Australia and Europe, the paper offers a novel perspective on Australians’ responses to the Holocaust. Around 9,000 Jewish refugees arrived in Australia before the war, but almost all of them left behind in Europe close relatives. After their arrival, these recent immigrants established networks that facilitated the spread of information about the progressing persecution in Nazi Europe. They also attempted to use family connections to bring their relatives to Australia, or support them, for example, by sending remittances or relief food parcels to the Nazi ghettos in occupied Poland and elsewhere.
Dr Jan Láníček is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European and Jewish History at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is currently completing a study of post-Holocaust judicial retribution in Czechoslovakia and research’s Jewish migration to Australia before World War 2. In 2021 he is the Australian Religious History Fellow at the State Library of NSW.
