Remembering Jack Meister, Sydney Jewish Museum’s last Auschwitz survivor speaker

Jack Meister OAM passed away last week aged 97. For 30 years, until just two weeks ago, Jack was a much-loved weekly speaker at the Sydney Jewish Museum.

The last Auschwitz survivor among the museum’s survivor volunteers, Jack’s sensitive and inspiring testimony had a profound effect on the thousands of people who heard his story in the same spot every Thursday.

Jack was born in Kielce, Poland, in 1928 and enjoyed a simple, traditional Jewish life until the Nazis came when he was just 11. In March 1941, his family was sent to the Kielce ghetto, where, because he was strong and fit, he was made to do all manner of dirty, degrading and menial jobs. One day in 1943, he returned from forced labour to find the ghetto liquidated and his family gone. He never saw or heard of them again. Transported first to Radom work camp and then to Auschwitz, he was tattooed with the number B488 and transferred to the Buna concentration camp, part of the Auschwitz complex.

At the end of 1944, he began the infamous long march to Buchenwald, much of it carrying the packs of German soldiers, and watched many of his fellow prisoners collapse along the way.

On liberation in April 1945, an American soldier gave him chocolate plus a change of clothes, and took his photo. The soldier returned the next day with a print, which Jack kept for the rest of his life.

Alone and destitute, Jack spent two years in Switzerland, in his words “learning again how to eat, how to live, and how to trade”. In 1949 he emigrated to Australia.

For Jack, as for so many Holocaust survivor refugees who made new lives in Sydney, the building where the Sydney Jewish Museum now stands was an important place.
The Maccabean Hall, or “the Macc” as it was known, was a Jewish community centre central to rehabilitating and integrating refugees in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

It hosted countless functions and family events, and Jack went dancing there every Sunday night. It was there he met his future wife, Nita, and they later married in that same space. Their wedding photos are held in the museum’s collection.

Jack proudly made Shabbat dinner for his family every week. He participated in the March of the Living in 2019.

He enjoyed a close relationship with the museum’s staff and volunteers, and his passing is a huge loss for the community as well as for all visitors who had the chance to meet him and hear his story. He is survived by a daughter Leanna and husband, Zviko; grandchildren, Mark and David; and great-grandchildren, Iris, Isaac and Leon.