Jack, Jon and Sam Green remember their childhoods as happy and their father, Boris, as a vital part of that. But he was “not an open book at all”. This was surely the same experience as many children of Holocaust survivors. Boris and his brother Fima, who spent years as partisan fighters in eastern Europe, hunting Nazis in the Lithuanian forests, were the only members of their extended family still alive by the end of the second world war. When Fima found Boris again, he was living 200 miles away from their home town with a handful of other survivors, wanting to die with them rather than live with all his memories and terrible losses. Fima wouldn’t let him stay, or die. “That is what I achieved in my life,” he tells an interviewer compiling their stories for a Holocaust memorial museum. “I saved my brother. That is all. That is all.”
They emigrated to Australia in 1948, but instead of the real-life paradise they had been promised, they found themselves in a land that also offered succour to Nazis and collaborators who had – thanks to the uninterest of the international courts in prosecuting them for war crimes – easily escaped punishment.
