A mother’s survival, a son’s oath: a judge’s story of gratitude

When Gregory Sirtes took the oath as a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales on Friday, he presented the moment not as a personal triumph, but as the continuation of a family story that began in the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp.

“In 1944, my mother, then a 16-year-old Hungarian Jewish girl, was placed into rolling stock without her family and transported to Dachau concentration camp,” Sirtes told the court during his swearing-in ceremony.

Her father had already been murdered by the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s fascist movement. Her older brother was sent to Mauthausen. More than 80 aunts, uncles and cousins were murdered in the gas chambers at Birkenau.

“Her apparent crime”, Sirtes said, “was that sixteen years earlier, she had been born to Jewish parents.”

After Dachau, his mother was transferred to Ravensbrück, the all-women’s concentration camp north of Berlin, where she was enslaved as a labourer. She survived only because members of the French Resistance pulled her from a death march in late April 1945.

Sirtes told the court that what followed would once have been impossible to imagine:

“The notion that she would survive, meet and later marry my father, escape communist Hungary in the dead of night, be granted a migrant visa to emigrate to this country, have children, achieve financial independence and have one of those children take judicial office would have been beyond imagination.”

Yet that, he said, was precisely what Australia made possible.

“They came to Australia penniless and unable to speak English because it was as far away from Europe as they could get,” he said.

Australia offered safety, but also something more enduring.

“It afforded them economic opportunity underpinned by a democracy made possible by a fiercely independent judiciary,” Sirtes said. “No one needs to tell my family what happens when judicial independence is eroded.”

For his mother, the country also offered the chance to live openly as a Jew.

“Her faith remained unshaken,” he said. “She came to this country so she could practise her faith as a Jewish woman without fear of harassment, persecution or violence.”

“She passed away in 2019 and was thankfully spared any of that,” he explained, referring to the rise in antisemitism that culminated in the terrorist shooting at Bondi Junction in December 2025.

Sirtes described his parents as part of a broader post-war generation that rebuilt their lives through work, education and commitment to their adopted country.

“They formed part of a generation of migrants, Jewish and otherwise, who helped transform this country in the 1950s and 1960s,” he said. “They expected no less from my sister and me, and we did our best to fulfil their expectations and emulate their work ethic.”

In an interview with JWire after his appointment, Sirtes said history shaped his decision to accept judicial office far more than professional ambition.

“My family owes everything to this country,” he said. “A very large part of my motivation for taking the appointment was the gratitude my family feels towards this country for the opportunity it gave us to resettle here after the Holocaust.”

“To be able to give back to the community, to take this appointment and serve in this way, is an enormously small repayment,” he said.

He also acknowledged the passing of a generation whose experiences are no longer living memory.

“I am by no means the first child of a Holocaust survivor to be appointed to judicial office in Australia,” he told the court, “but I may well be the last.”

As he begins his work on the Supreme Court bench, Sirtes has made clear that his presence there is inseparable from his mother’s survival and from Australia’s post-war promise to those who arrived with nothing but hope.

“By taking this appointment,” he said, “it is the tiniest repayment of an unending debt of gratitude that my family owes this country.”