She was just a babe in arms when her half-Jewish family fled Germany in early 1939.
Sabine Erika’s grandfather, two aunts and an aunt’s husband were taken by the Nazis in 1942 and never seen again.
Ms Erika’s father, Max, with a PhD in chemistry, had secured a job offer from Davis Gelatine in Australia, so the family made the move.
They eventually settled in a house in Beecroft with no hot water, a fuel copper and a chip heater. They had no radio but there was a wind-up gramophone and lots of 78 records.
A Blackheath local for some decades, Ms Erika has written a memoir that evokes the changing times: From growing up in the bushland setting which was Beecroft in the 40s and 50s, to visiting radical and left-wing theatre with her mother, and then the turmoil of the 60s and 70s where exposure to the works of Germaine Greer, Adrienne Rich and Anne Summers led Ms Erika to the women’s movement.
Travelling: My family and me (published by Mountain Wildfire Press) takes Ms Erika from suburban housewife and mother to academic, teaching history, politics and women’s studies, and feminist activist.
Along the way, she somehow found time to be a theatre director, marriage celebrant, mother and grandmother.
And a constant traveller, from China in 1972, to the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common in England in the early 80s and to Eastern Europe not long after the Berlin Wall fell.
She also memorably returned to the country of her birth for a journey of reconciliation – at the invitation of the Hamburg Government to Jews who were forced to flee.
Travelling: My family and me is available from Gleebooks in Blackheath or Megalong Books in Leura.
