Meeting Point Tatura 2025
Dunera Association changes its name
New on dunera.de 28 December 2024
New on dunera.de 29 November 2024
“Dunera Mass” again in Sydney
More than just biographical
Premiere in Sydney: Biopic about Dunera Boy Walter Kaufmann
dunera.de invited to symposium
Exile in art: Dunera stories
100 years of the Berlin S-Bahn
Dunera anniversary 2024 in Sydney and Hay
Music and art by Dunera-internees
New on dunera.de 24 June 2024
Networking meeting for descendants
“The Passenger” back on stage
New on dunera.de 27 May 2024:
Biopic about Walter Kaufmann
New on dunera.de 5 May 2024
New on dunera.de 25 April 2024
Webinar: Dunera and the Wiener Library
New on dunera.de 19 April 2024
Welcome to dunera.de
“Sergeant Snow White” back on stage
Dunera News 117 published
Change of leadership
Dunera Interest Group founded
Audio installation “The Passenger”
Two new articles appear today:
Memories of a journey and a life
Dunera Boy Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Chodziesner left behind his diary about the journey to Australia on HMT Dunera. dunera.de is pleased to publish the original German version in full – as far as we know for the first time. An English translation, also produced by Chodziesner, can be found at Stories from the Dunera and Queen Mary.
George’s memories are a welcome and very personal addition to the summarized reports of the internees, which were written in the Hay Camps Camp 7 and Camp 8 for British and Australian authorities. In 2020, George’s great-grandson Joshua had read the diary. He turned the events surrounding the torpedoing of the deportation ship into a four-page comic, reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”. We are delighted that the Chodziesner family has allowed this publication. Thanks also to Elisa Ronzoni from the Jewish Museum of Australia, who provided us with the original.
Georg Chodziesner, photographed between 1930 and 1935. Photo: Chodziesner family archive.
We are combining the publication of the diary with a biography of George Chodziesner and his family. He was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1900, trained as an engineer and worked for the electrical engineering company Lorenz AG, which patented some of his work. After fleeing, internment, deportation and army service in Australia, he successfully established himself Down Under as an engineer and later as a patent attorney. He died in Sydney in 1981.
George’s father and two of his uncles were well-known lawyers in Berlin. His older sister Gertrud was a well-known poet. She chose the pseudonym Gertrud Kolmar after the origin of the family name in the Polish town of Chodziesen, which was renamed Kolmar in 1878. She was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. His father was also a victim of the Nazis, while two sisters were able to escape anti-Semitic persecution.
