Nina Stone 2
Author: Nina Stone
Publisher: Makor Jewish Community Library
Place of publication: Caulfield South, VIC.
Year of Publication: 2015
Location of Book: Lamm Jewish Library, Melbourne Holocaust Museum, State Library of Victoria and National Library of Australia.
Cities/towns/camps: Poland: Nowy Sacz, Turka nad Stryjem; Hungary: Dunamocs, Dunaszentbenedek, Ricse forced labour camp, Budapest; Romania: Bucharest; Czechoslovakia: Prague; Australia: Melbourne.
Note: those cities/towns/camps underlined are those which are most central to the narrative
Genre: Memoir
Key events/experiences: survival in hiding; false papers; Hungarian labour camp; child survivor.
Born to Survive is the remarkable account of child survivor Nina Stone, who, after enduring a harrowing escape from Nazi-occupied Poland to Hungary, survived the war in a Hungarian labour camp and various Catholic institutions before joining her family in Budapest, where they survived the bombing of the city before liberation by the Soviet army.
Born to Survive is a brief 88-page memoir. The front matter presents a two-page foreword by Australian psychotherapist and child survivor Dr Paul Valent and a two-page introduction by the author. Pages 1-8 describes the author’s childhood and family tree with pages 9-19 recounting the Russian invasion of eastern Poland in June 1940 and the family’s subsequent flight to Hungary. Pages 20-44 detail the family’s arrest and internment in a Hungarian labour camp and Nina’s time in hiding in various Catholic institutions before enduring allied bombing in-hiding with her mother in the final months of the war. Pages 45-56 recount the family’s time in Bucharest and Prague after the war and their eventual emigration to Australia in 1948. Pages 57-88 detail Nina’s life in Australia – her marriage, family and involvement in the Child Survivor’s Group founded by Dr Paul Valent.
Nina Stone was born in December 1935 in Nowy Sacz, southern Poland, the only child of Lola Reicher and Eugene Schindler. She was raised in a wealthy home in Turka nad Stryjem, a village in the Carpathian mountains. When the Soviet army invaded eastern Poland in June 1940, the family was stripped of their home and possessions. They briefly sought refuge in Lvov before returning to Turka. Shortly thereafter, the German army invaded, and Nina and her parents were forced to live in poverty with her uncle Artur in a small two-bedroom apartment, often hiding in the cellar. After her uncle Izio was sent on a transport to the camps, the family attempted to escape across the Hungarian border on foot – 35 kilometres away. (Years later, Nina was informed by a man from her village that he had witnessed Izio being sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz). On route to Hungary, the family was set upon and beaten by Ukrainian youths who turned them over to the police. Thankfully, they were able to escape arrest and organise two guides to take them across the border through the forest. During the journey, one of the guides tried to kidnap six-year-old Nina and had to be bribed to return her.
In Hungary, the family was able to find housing in the village of Dunamocs, where they lived under false papers as Polish Catholics. After a few peaceful months, they moved to the village of Dunaszentbenedek where they were arrested by the Hungarian authorities and sent on a transport to Poland. Miraculously, however, the train was forced to turn back to Budapest thanks to the intervention of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. They were then sent to a labour camp in Ricse where Nina remained for over a year before being sent to a Catholic orphanage in Budapest. Then aged eight, she remained in hiding in the orphanage for a few months before moving to a villa in Guggerhegy with twelve other Jewish children where she remained for six months. Sometime in 1944, Nina’s mother was released from Ricse for unknown reasons and Nina returned to Budapest to live with her mother under false papers. However, Nina was soon sent to a convent in Esztergom with the help of a sympathetic Catholic cardinal. After a short time there, Nina returned to Budapest where she endured the bombing of the city with her mother whilst hiding in a bunker.
In May 1945, when Nina was nine-years-old, Budapest was liberated by the Russian army. She reunited with her father, and the family then travelled to Bucharest, Romania. In the spring of 1947, they moved to Prague with the help of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee where they were able to obtain permits to travel to Australia. They arrived in Melbourne in May 1948. Although the early years in Melbourne were fraught with difficulties, Nina eventually married in 1956 to husband Fred, and the couple had three children. In 1990, Nina joined the Child Survivors Group in Melbourne. Through her involvement with the group, Nina was instrumental in publishing an anthology of writings by child survivors entitled Silent No More.
Born to Survive is the visceral account of the trauma and terror experienced by a child survivor and the consequences of those experiences over her lifetime. Due to the author’s youth at the time of her experiences, she is not able to recall dates, names and other narrative details. Born to Survive presents the episodic memory of a child, describing her emotional and psychological responses to traumatic events, and the coping mechanisms she employed to endure them. It is therefore not a detailed chronology but a window into the perspective of a child survivor. The author also quotes extensively from her mother’s unpublished memoir and interweaves various poems and songs into the account. She first published her story in 1999, as part of the anthology Silent No More which she also edited (see entry). Her full account was written and published as part of the Makor Jewish Community Library’s “Write Your Story Program” under the editorial assistance of Adele Hulse.