Book Launch: No One Knows Their Destiny

In No One Knows Their Destiny, art historian Tonia Eckfeld draws on deeply personal history to tell the story of her father and uncle, Jewish refugees whose lives were shaped indeliby by their wartime experiences and internment - each to very different outcomes. The book will be published on 1 September 2024; pre-order your copy here.

Join Tonia, Paul Bartrop and Seumas Spark for a panel discussion at the launch, at Melbourne's Jewish Museum of Australia on 22 September 2024. Click here for more information or to book.

Further events in Sydney will follow later in the year.

Other Stories

Werner and Ilse Baer: A family on the Queen Mary

Werner and Ilse Baer: A family on the Queen Mary

Miriam Gould tells the story of her parents, Werner and Ilse Baer.
Phillip Benjamin and the Dunera boys

Phillip Benjamin and the Dunera boys

‘I didn’t really know that many of the people that I had met or had connections with were Dunera boys’, Phillip begins. ‘It only really emerged later.’
Hans John Lorraine, 19 March 1923 – 14 August 2012

Hans John Lorraine, 19 March 1923 – 14 August 2012

Hans Lorraine was not an internment artist. He started painting in the 1950s, creating a visual chronicle of peacetime Australian life. But he was a Dunera artist.
Klaus Friedeberger

Klaus Friedeberger

Klaus Friedeberger (1922-2019) was among the most talented, dynamic and thoughtful of Dunera artists. He was unusual among Dunera artists, and European artists generally, in seeing the mysteries and beauty of the Australian landscape.
Erwin Fabian

Erwin Fabian

Erwin Fabian died in Melbourne on 19 January 2020, aged 104. Erwin, one of Australia's pre-eminent artists, came to Australia on the Dunera, though he rarely said so. The Dunera boy label was not for him.
Interviewing Bern Brent

Interviewing Bern Brent

In May, 2019, two of our team travelled to Canberra to interview Bern Brent – in his words, ‘one of the last Dunera boys still vertical’.
Hannah & Emil - The story of Heinz and Fay Castles

Hannah & Emil - The story of Heinz and Fay Castles

'Am I a writer because this is the sort of thing spilling from the family closet? Or just ‘fortunate’ to be the recipient of others’ painful history?' asks Belinda Castles in an article in the Southerly Journal.
An enigmatic ‘vagabond’: the Dunera artist Kurt Winkler

An enigmatic ‘vagabond’: the Dunera artist Kurt Winkler

Kurt Hans Winkler was born in Germany on 26 February 1902, the fourth child of Protestant parents. His birthplace may have been Gransee, near Berlin, but this isn’t certain. His father, Carl Erhard Wilhelm Balduin Kurt Winkler, died about 1912...
The Voyage: the Testimony of Georg Chodziesner

The Voyage: the Testimony of Georg Chodziesner

Georg Chodziesner's record of the voyage of the Dunera, told coolly and dispassionately, is probably the most important and comprehensive account available to historians.
From Dunera to Parliament House: Peter Danby

From Dunera to Parliament House: Peter Danby

Aboard the first Kindertransport to depart Germany for Britain, Peter Danby (formerly Danziger) could not have known the unlikely journey ahead.
Finding Emil Wittenberg

Finding Emil Wittenberg

We knew we had our work cut out when we started our search for Emil Wittenberg, one of the most prolific of Dunera artists.
Searching for Jack Kaczynski

Searching for Jack Kaczynski

While some of the men who came to Australia on the Dunera chose later to speak about their experiences both before the war and on the ship itself – whether to the press, public, or simply to families and friends – there were many who remained silent.