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The Age
05-05-2025
- General
- The Age
Survivor of five camps built good life in Australia
OTTO KOHN March 21, 1928-April 11, 2025 The remarkable Otto Kohn, a survivor of the Holocaust, was born in Prague in 1928 and grew up in a comfortable, loving home. When barely a teenager in 1942, he was transported with his family to the Terezin concentration camp. Soon after this, he was separated from his mother Zdenka and sister Olga in Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Together with his father Arnold, he endured another four concentration camps – Landsberg, Kaufering, Landshut and Dachau. (Mark Baker, son of survivors, historian and eloquent recorder of the impact of the Holocaust on Australian Jewry, once wrote: 'The ruptures of our times can never be wholly mended, they must be a gash that we wear openly on our hearts.') Otto's life was ruptured by the Holocaust, and he carried this throughout his life. The Melbourne Holocaust Museum had a feature story on him in a 2016 periodical. I was struck not only by the story of his wondrous survival, but also by a poignant photo of the Kohn family seated at a festive table. It pictures a beaming Otto surrounded by his parents, grandparents and extended family. Here is a handsome, well-dressed child looking into the camera and future with so much confidence and happiness. One's heart is torn with the dreadful knowledge of what lay ahead for the family and a young boy brimful of promise. The truth of a life is always more complex and subtle than we allow or present it. Such was the long and variegated life of Otto Kohn. He always had a strong awareness of the darkness, but he also never let go of the assuredness and vitality of the young boy in the photo. His friend Hannah Piterman – they first met when he recorded his testimony with her for the Holocaust Museum – reflected on this. She recalled him as a man of enormous talent and resilience, mindful of the darkness that haunted us all, but imbued with a radiant inner light. He shared the terrors of his concentration camps experience including physical and sexual abuse, the infamous selections of Dr Josef Mengele, the horrors and the humiliation. Someone who knew well the light at the heart of Otto's blackness was his adopted god-daughter Deborah Glass. Her family embraced him from his arrival in Melbourne as a penniless, orphaned refugee in 1950, and he in turn embraced them as he rebuilt his life, establishing in time a highly successful business, O K Timbers.
Sydney Morning Herald
05-05-2025
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
Survivor of five camps built good life in Australia
OTTO KOHN March 21, 1928-April 11, 2025 The remarkable Otto Kohn, a survivor of the Holocaust, was born in Prague in 1928 and grew up in a comfortable, loving home. When barely a teenager in 1942, he was transported with his family to the Terezin concentration camp. Soon after this, he was separated from his mother Zdenka and sister Olga in Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Together with his father Arnold, he endured another four concentration camps – Landsberg, Kaufering, Landshut and Dachau. (Mark Baker, son of survivors, historian and eloquent recorder of the impact of the Holocaust on Australian Jewry, once wrote: 'The ruptures of our times can never be wholly mended, they must be a gash that we wear openly on our hearts.') Otto's life was ruptured by the Holocaust, and he carried this throughout his life. The Melbourne Holocaust Museum had a feature story on him in a 2016 periodical. I was struck not only by the story of his wondrous survival, but also by a poignant photo of the Kohn family seated at a festive table. It pictures a beaming Otto surrounded by his parents, grandparents and extended family. Here is a handsome, well-dressed child looking into the camera and future with so much confidence and happiness. One's heart is torn with the dreadful knowledge of what lay ahead for the family and a young boy brimful of promise. The truth of a life is always more complex and subtle than we allow or present it. Such was the long and variegated life of Otto Kohn. He always had a strong awareness of the darkness, but he also never let go of the assuredness and vitality of the young boy in the photo. His friend Hannah Piterman – they first met when he recorded his testimony with her for the Holocaust Museum – reflected on this. She recalled him as a man of enormous talent and resilience, mindful of the darkness that haunted us all, but imbued with a radiant inner light. He shared the terrors of his concentration camps experience including physical and sexual abuse, the infamous selections of Dr Josef Mengele, the horrors and the humiliation. Someone who knew well the light at the heart of Otto's blackness was his adopted god-daughter Deborah Glass. Her family embraced him from his arrival in Melbourne as a penniless, orphaned refugee in 1950, and he in turn embraced them as he rebuilt his life, establishing in time a highly successful business, O K Timbers.
