Nina Bassat - rodzina Wargoń

Hadassa Katz (Wargoń), Janina (Nina) Katz and Moshe Wargoń, Lwów 1941

In the last edition of Centre News, we began a series of articles highlighting the stories of some of our donors, in recognition for the outstanding support we have received as the Jewish Holocaust Centre (JHC) embarks on its major redevelopment. We continue in this edition with the stories of Nina Bassat and Rosie Lew and their families, focusing on their backgrounds and their reasons for choosing to support the Centre.
Born in Lwów, Poland in 1939, the daughter of Hadassa Wargoń and Izydor Katz, Nina is one of the few child survivors of the Lwów ghetto and counts every day of her life as a gift. Hadassa’s family were importers and exporters of grain; her father Moshe Wargoń was a city councillor in Jędrzejów, a member of Mizrachi and a staunch Zionist. Izydor studied in Lwów, where his family operated a glazing and picture framing business. Of the extended Katz family, there were no survivors other than Hadassa and Nina; of the Wargoń family, only a handful survived. Izydor Katz was killed on Petlura Day, 26 July 1941, his thirtieth birthday; the rest of the family were lost at Treblinka, at Auschwitz, at Belzec. The remnants of the family, Hadassa, her brother Sam Wargoń, her sister Sara Przysuska and her niece Masza Przysuska were reunited in a DP camp in Bad Wörishofen, Germany. Sara and Masza survived the Łódź Ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau and were liberated at Bergen-Belsen, but Sara tragically died in 1948.
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„Do not forget” and „Tell them what happened” is also part of the ethos of the Bassa-Gillis family, who would not be here if it were not for the survival of Hadassa Katz (later Teicher) and Nina Bassat.
The remaining four members of the family came to Australia in 1949, after several applications to go to Palestine were rejected.

 

The two photographs which encompass five generations of our family have one common link. In the first, Nina is the chold clutching her grandfather’s beard; in the second, she is the grandmother surrounded by her children and grandchildren. These two photographs encapsulate the miracle of survival and of regeneration, and they also mandate the responsibility and the priviledge of commemoration and of remembrance.
Nina Bassat AM is a lawyer who has served as President of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. She has contributed her time and expertise to many other organisations, both local and overseas, and has ben a Trustee of the Jewish Holocaust Centre Foundation since its establishment in 2008.

Źródło / source:

https://issuu.com/jhc_comms/docs/jhc7-virtual_book/s/11102423