Raya Goldtwig walks into the kitchen of her Melbourne home, a red floral skirt billowing around her.
Having recently celebrated her 90th birthday, the petite Holocaust survivor is also welcoming the launch of her memoir, The World Belongs To The Children.
“There were a lot of tears while writing the book because I didn’t allow myself tears when I was a child. I knew that if I cried, I might not survive,” she tells Woman’s Day.
FLIGHT FOR SURVIVAL
In August 1939, Raya’s carefree Warsaw childhood came to a horrifying end when the Nazis invaded her home town.
Raya’s parents, who were shopkeepers, bundled up the three-year-old and her brother and fled for their lives, walking for days with hundreds of others to reach Soviet territory.
It was the beginning of a decade-long flight for survival across wartime Europe, moving from place to place, in and out of refugee camps.
Raya’s extended family, who stayed in Warsaw, died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
“While we might forget where we put the keys five minutes ago, the childhood memories, the big, traumatic things, stay locked in your mind like it was yesterday,” she says.
“You can get on with life, but it will never leave you.”
In January 1950, Raya and her family arrived in Melbourne, grateful for the hand of friendship Australia offered, determined to rebuild their broken lives.
“I thought Melbourne was so beautiful,” she recalls.
“We’d been from country to country, I’d left so many friends behind, and I was so tired from travelling. It was a lot for a child.”
APPEAL FOR PEACE
The family settled into life here. Raya, who speaks six languages, married Albert and studied linguistics at Monash University.
She became a mother to Helene and Mark and pursued a career in teaching.
Today, she has seven grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren who inspired her to finally tell her story.
“They often asked me about my life and suggested I should write my memories down,” she says.
In 1993, she began recording her life as a series of short stories, writing at a leisurely pace, purely for her family.
But, at a University for the Third Age meeting, she was invited to read one of her stories aloud.
Renowned Jewish author Dr Serge Liberman OAM was in the audience and asked if he could publish one of her stories.
With his encouragement, Raya kept writing, but mostly kept the work to herself, until the invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent October 7, 2023, attack on Israel prompted her to speak up.
“I could see what was happening in the world,” she says.
“Jewish people have experienced terrible things over the years. My book is an appeal for peace, to save the children of the world from horror.”
LEARNED LESSONS
One of the most moving stories Raya shares in the book is of her best friend Mala, who is featured on the book’s cover.
Mala was a young orphan who came to live with Raya’s family in Russia.
The friends were inseparable, but Raya has not heard from Mala since she was sent to an orphanage.
Raya hopes that in sharing their picture on the book’s cover, someone may recognise her and reach out.
“I pray that Mala found a happy normal life. She was a symbol of all those forgotten children whose lives have been destroyed by war,” says Raya.
“It is an incredible shame on us, that we have seen a repeat of this. We thought that people had learned lessons from history, but they haven’t. That something so awful happened in our own country, in Bondi, is shameful.”
Raya hopes her book will remind people to fight for peace, for the sake of the next generation.
“As a child, I had no choice in the fact I was born just before the world collapsed into madness and war.
“I had no choice in my childhood being spent in the shadow of death. No child deserves such a fate, regardless of where that child was born, and what faith or politics their parents followed.
“As a child my father said to me, people in this world may look different, we all have different faces, we might have different colour skin or hair or eyes, but we are all on the same side on the inside. We all need love.”
The World Belongs To The Children (Simon & Schuster, $36.99)
