A Story of Hope
A Holocaust Story
by
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It has taken some time for me to be able to write this story. A survivor can take many years to piece together the references and links to establish a credible witness to events which have occurred in the past. As this book is being published there are still people in the world who deny what happened to my people. I hope in some way this book will help them understand further the impact of the Second World War on the lives of my family members. I was born in Goettingen, Germany in June 1946. It is only recently that I have researched this story as I was only four years of age when I came to Melbourne. I have lived in this city since then and I am very fond of it. My interest in Esperanto began from learning it at school and I developed an enjoyment of it. I went to an independent school for my primary school education. I attended a government school both in the Essendon (Victoria) area. I was a vice-form-captain at school. These schools taught me the love of books and I developed a great interest in movies, but I did not like examinations. I worked in the Victorian Education Department and studied with the independent Universal Academy in Morwell Victoria. My mother first told me about the Holocaust when I turned 16 years of age. My reaction at that time was one of interest, but I did not particularly care back then, as I had no memory of it. Australia seemed so far away and there were many other interests surrounding me then. My mother loved reading and she was a bookworm; however she also raised two boys in Essendon. She missed Krakow, Poland very much and it was only after she died in a nursing home in 2000 that I began to think of her life and her history. Australia has helped resettle many Jewish survivors and as they gathered more courage they told their stories. I hope you can relate to the two stories I have tried to link in this “Story of Hope”. One is that of my mother’s story and the other belongs to the work of “Doctor Hopeful” Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof.
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About the Book
Alexander Rucki is the child of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and his book is both a reminder of man’s breathtaking inhumanity to man and the absolute miracle of survival. These long-term effects are seen in hindsight over sixty years later. One can only begin to imagine what it would’ve been like to be sixteen and the sole survivor of a Nazi death camp. It’s been done before—Diary of Anne Frank and Schindler’s List among the two most popular—but this tragedy is constantly revisited, and I suspect this story is now ripe for the retelling. Alexander’s mother not only survived Auschwitz—her brother, sister; and parents did not—but she married, bore two sons, and moved to a new continent with a new language, far away from the hell of Europe.
About the Author
Alexander Rucki was born in Goettingen, Germany in 1946. He was raised and educated in Australia and worked for many years for the Victorian Education Department and was associated with the Independent Universal Academy, first as a student and later as a tutor in history. Alexander is the author of the Fascinating (Australian) Family Life Collection. (Vantage Press in New York (2000)) and Walhalla Gold (Little Red Apple Publishing (2007)).