Melbourne

Melbourne is the Australian city where Lale Sokolov and Gita Furman finally build the peaceful, prosperous life they promised each other inside Auschwitz, becoming the setting for their postwar rebirth as a family. After fleeing Europe with fraudulent passports and landing in Sydney on July 29, 1949, the couple is persuaded by fellow passengers to settle in Melbourne, where Lale re-enters the textile trade, Gita becomes a dress designer, and their long-desired son Gary is born in 1961. The city represents the hard-won ordinary happiness that the Holocaust could not destroy, the place where the tattooist and the girl he numbered at Birkenau become simply a husband, a wife, and parents.

A New Home Chosen on the Voyage

Melbourne enters the Sokolovs' story almost by accident, through a friendship formed on the ship that carried them away from Europe. With no work available for non-French citizens in Paris, Lale and Gita had decided to leave France altogether, wanting to go as far away from Europe as possible. They bought fraudulent passports and set sail for Sydney, where they landed on July 29, 1949. On the voyage over, they befriended a couple who told them about their family in Melbourne, with whom they intended to live. That was enough to persuade Lale and Gita to settle in Melbourne, too. The decision, made on the strength of a stranger's account of relatives, turned a distant destination into a permanent home and set the course of the rest of their lives.

Building a Business and a Life

Once in Melbourne, Lale returned to the trade he knew best. He entered the textile trade again, buying a small warehouse and setting about sourcing fabrics locally and abroad to sell on. The business grew beyond his sole efforts when Gita decided she wanted to be part of it as well. She enrolled in a dress-design course and subsequently started designing women's clothing, which added another dimension to their enterprise. Together they built a successful commercial life, one that drew on both their skills and gave them a shared project in peacetime, a stark contrast to the years when survival itself had been their only occupation.

The Birth of Gary and a Full Life

Their greatest desire was to have a child, but it simply would not happen for them. Eventually, they gave up hope. Then, to their great surprise and delight, Gita got pregnant. Their son, Gary, was born in 1961, when Gita was thirty-six and Lale was forty-four. The late arrival of the child they had stopped expecting crowned their new life in Melbourne. Their lives were full, with a child, friends, a successful business, and holidays on the Gold Coast, all supported by a love that no hardship had been able to break. The ordinary pleasures of family holidays and friendship, once unimaginable from inside the camp, became the texture of their days.

The Painting That Traveled With Them

The painting of the Romany woman that Gita brought with them from Slovakia still hangs in Gary's house. This single object ties the Melbourne home to the European past, a quiet reminder carried across continents of where they came from and what they survived. Its presence in the next generation's household shows how the Sokolovs' story, and the memory of the world they lost, was passed down to the son born in their new city. Melbourne, for all its distance from the horrors of the war, became the place where that memory was kept and where the family line continued.