In 1986, my parents decided to escape from Poland. They didn’t tell my sister and I we were leaving forever, because they didn’t want to risk us saying something at the border, but I remember when we left – I saw my aunty and my grandmother standing there, and felt...
(Part 2) We came to Sydney in 1983. We loved the city, but it was very difficult for us, as we only spoke a very little English, and we didn’t know anyone. We didn’t know what to do, how to find a house, anything. On our second day, we saw a man with an Arabic...
(Part 1 of 2) I was born in Palestine, in a village south of Haifa, and when I was still a baby, my father was kidnapped. At that time, he was considered a leader in the village. He had cattle, olive and almond orchards, an olive press, a wheat mill, and about 140...
(Part 2 of 2) After university, I became a high school teacher, but I stayed involved with the UCM, publishing a booklet, which was very tame by today’s standards, mostly it was poetry about freedom! But still because we had links to the Black Consciousness movement,...
(Part 1 of 2) As a child, I lived in an almost exclusively Afrikaans speaking community, and English speaking people were bullied terribly at school – we even had rocks thrown at us. One day, the teacher just laid into me with a ruler, saying I was ‘a damned...
