Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has paid tribute to Holocaust survivor and peace campaigner Eddie Jaku, who passed away this week aged 101.
“He devoted his life to educating others about the dangers of intolerance, and the importance of love and hope,” Mr Frydenberg said.
Eddie Jaku was born to a Jewish family in 1920, in the German city of Leipzig.
He was incarcerated in the Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps during the Second World War, where he narrowly escaped from a ‘death march’ and was eventually found and rescued by Allied soldiers in 1945.
He came to Australia in 1950, where he started a family and was a founding member of the Sydney Jewish Museum.
“He was determined that the next generation be a force for good, and they understood the lessons to be learnt from the terrible past – the darkest moment in humanity, the Holocaust,” Mr Frydenberg said.
“He encapsulates it well when he says: ‘if we don’t learn from the past, then we have no future’.”
