A Story of Hope: A Holocaust Story

By Alexander Rucki

Alexander Rucki is the child of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and his book is both a reminder of mans 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 wouldve been like to be sixteen and the sole survivor of a Nazi death camp. Its been done beforeDiary of Anne Frank and Schindlers List among the two most popularbut this tragedy is constantly revisited, and I suspect this story is now ripe for the retelling.
Alexanders mother not only survived Auschwitzher brother, sister; and parents did notbut she married, bore two sons, and moved to a new continent with a new language, far away from the hell of Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Mar 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781452527932

Alexander Rucki

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)).

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Copyright © 2015 Alexander Rucki.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-2792-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2793-2 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 03/04/2015

CONTENTS

Dedication

Special Tribute

Memoirs – Alexander Rucki

Prologue The Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors & Descendants

Foreword The Long Code of Silence

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Martyr

Source of Books

Epilogue

About Suzanne D. Rutland

About the Author

DEDICATION

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Zofia Rucki

(survivor of Auschwitz)

Mother of Alexander Rucki

In memory of my mother, my grandmother, grandfather and aunt, Lidia Zamenhof, youngest daughter of Doctor Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof (Doctor Hopeful founder of the Esperanto language) and to all victims who perished in the holocaust (1933-1945). May they live in our hearts and memory forever.

SPECIAL TRIBUTE

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Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof is the founder of the Esperanto Language - (meaning one who leaps with hope). He was born in Bialystok, Poland (Greater Lithuania) in 1859. He was the son of the then Czar’s Jewish censor for Hebrew and Yiddish. He was an Eye Doctor and he is credited with the ideas behind the language. He died on April 14th 1917 in Warsaw.

All three of Ludovig Zamenhof’s children were to suffer execution at the hands of the German Nazis for no crimes other than those of being Jews and Esperantists.

MEMOIRS – ALEXANDER RUCKI

I was born in Goettingen, Germany on 17th June 1946 in what I imagine was a cold, uninviting, devastated post-war Europe. My mother, a concentration camp survivor, and her husband, probably did not need much convincing to move to a new world/warmer clime of hope and opportunity, but mostly, safety.

My memories are of arriving in northern Melbourne, aged four-and-a-half, with my parents and growing up in Yarraville, at 20 Frederick Street, a boarding house. It was a circus! A madhouse with 15 plus languages spoken - broken English, the most common method of communication. Dad spoke only Russian, Mum, German and Polish and I a little Polish. I became the English speaker/interpreter in the family. Mum used her German and only went to Jewish people of whom there seemed to be a plentiful supply. There was Dr Wiltzer, a lawyer, Dr Lieder-Mrazck (Fiddler on the roof) whose wife had to go to the USA to become a G.P. (but who then could not work in Australia - her qualifications were not recognised.)

I