- Category:
- Advocate
Honours and awards
Medal of the Order of Australia for service to chess and bridge and to the community particularly through the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre.
About
Richard Rozen OAM was 6 years old when he hid with his parents in a cupboard for 13 months before eventually being forced to move to the Lubin Ghetto in Nazi Occupied Poland. Destined for the Treblinka Extermination Camp, the Rozencwajg family was smuggled to safety in a Polish village where Richard spent several months disguised as a girl.
After liberation, Richard and his mother found themselves shuffled between a sanatorium in Poland, a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany and over four years in a French orphanage. Richard arrived in Australia in 1951 with his mother and went on to study electrical engineering at RMIT University, then the Working Men’s College.
His harrowing wartime experiences have been highlighted in Jane Mark’s The Hidden Children, Dr Paul Valent’s Child Survivors and the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage’s Book of Life. They have been twice adapted for the stage in 2005’s The Feather Body and 2010’s Malcom White stage play My Name is Richard Rozen.
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