By Garry Fabian
MELBOURNE, Australia — While the aim in life should be take each day as it comes, and generally always be forward looking, occasionally a significant date brings back a past event into sharp focus.
On the 20th November 2012, one such landmark comes sharply into focus for me.
Seventy years before, on the 20th November 1942, I, together with my parents and 997 others took a train journey, which lasted just under two hours. Perhaps in the normal course of events there is nothing special about such a trip.
But this particular train trip travelled from Prague to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, with the return trip not taking place until May 1945.
It was a bleak, grey day of early winter, with little knowledge what would await us at the destination of this relatively short journey. While it was just another stage of our journey through an uncertain future, which had commenced some four years earlier, in September 1938, when German troops marched into the Sudetenland, the border areas of the Czech Republic, and we fled to Prague, only to be followed by the Nazi machine when the rest of Czechoslovakia was occupied in March 1939, and the subsequent increasing persecution over the next three years, leading to the day of our transfer to the Ghetto.
While we were unclear what would confront us there, it was to be just another phase of the events that were to develop over the next few years. While my parents and I were fortunate by some strange twist of fate to survive there until liberation on the 5th May 1945, very few of the other 997 passengers on the train on that fateful day in November 1942 survived the deprivation and subsequent removal and murder in extermination camps of Eastern Europe.
So indeed for me, the 20th November 2012, marking the 70th Anniversary will have a special significance, a stark reminder of two very significant landmarks. One the arrival in a place of deprivation and despair, but more importantly the miracle of my survival and being granted an additional 70 years of survival and life, a gift that the very large majority of my fellow travellers on that fateful journey were not given.
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Fabian is Australia bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at garry.fabian@sdjewishworld.com