Avid readers of my column in STUN — I’m sure there are legions of you — might recall I’m a Sydney gal by birth but now call Amsterdam home. Amsterdam is also home to the Homomonument, the world’s first queer monument, elegantly covering a city square. It’s currently seeking European Heritage status, a milestone for a queer memorial.
Which brings me back to Sydney. I’ve always been intrigued by the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial in Green Park, across from the Jewish Museum.
I’m pretty sure no Aussies were interned in concentration camps because of their homosexuality – so why this monument?
With a little fancy Google detective work, I found a fascinating video on Kitty Fischer, the Jewish woman behind it who moved to Sydney after the war.
It’s about a gay man, wearing the compulsory pink triangle — also featured in the Sydney memorial’s design — who befriended 8-year-old Kitty and her sister in Auschwitz and brought them jacket potatoes daily.
“One day, he came running, very upset and said, ’Kitty, I don’t think I will see you again because they are clearing out the camps but I give you good advice. Tomorrow, some executives from a big weaving plant are coming and they need fifty weavers’.” So I said, ‘I can’t weave.’ He said, ‘You will tell them you are a weaver’. I said, ‘They will shoot me’. He said, ‘They will shoot you if you stay here. Please get out of here because I can’t help you anymore’.”
“So, the next day someone came to me. ‘Young girl, what can you do?’ I said, ‘I’m a weaver.’ He said, ‘You are a little bit too young to be a weaver and where did you weave?’ I said, ‘My parents had a weaving plant in Czechoslovakia in Sudetenland.’ He said, ‘It’s very famous. Tell me, is this your sister?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ (Then) they picked up my number and I got on the list and that’s how I got out of Auschwitz.”
Some 56 years later in 2001, Kitty helped establish Sydney’s monument to honor the kindness of this unknown gay man.
Watch ‘Kitty Fischer on Gay Male Rescuer in Auschwitz’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6kZc-YhGxg&t=48s
