Memoirs - the book
The
memoirs were originally written in 1994, after Eve Drobot visited my
father in Sydney and persuaded him to document his account of just
how he survived the war, a subject which, for some reason, was
never raised. Dictated to his wife Irena who typed them on a
clunky old typewriter in their Vaucluse apartment, with
handwritten notes and corrections they read just as he spoke - with a
familiar and comfortable Polish-English accent and Polish
phrases translated into delightful English.
In 1999 I took
on the task of transcribing them into electronic form. Some 90 plus
pages were scanned, put through optical character recognition
software, read and corrected. The result was a document
which can be read here. The next few years saw the advent of self
publishing web sites and Eve Drobot, together with her
husband Jack Kapica, both professional journalists, undertook the
task of turning the manuscript into a book.
The result is an
extraordinary tribute to my father's ingenuity and courage. I know
that he would have been extremely grateful for all the work that went
into the publication and probably considerably embarrassed at
creating such an interest in his story - after all his story is not
unique. Many holocaust survivors have had similar, and indeed
much worse experiences. Regrettably his story is the only one in the
Djament family to have been told in some degree of detail. His
twin brothers, who also lived through the war, would no doubt
have had equally fascinating tales of survival. Adam Rutkowski, June 2012 In 2018 my 13 year old granddaughter Georgia wrote a summary of the book as part of of her school project. I know that my father, and her great grandfather Julek would have been very proud of her. PS Copies of the book have been donated to various Jewish organisations and libraries. |  Book Cover Page |
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