Identity Matters: Andrew and Renata Kaldor - from refugees to philathropists

Andrew and Renata Kaldor were featured in the following piece for 'DNA Nation' a three-part documentary that premieres on SBS on Sunday 22 May at 8.30pm, and afterwards on SBS On Demand.

"Put yourself in that person's shoes. You've got to understand what that person is going through, before you say anything critical about them."

It was a fundamental moral principle on which Andrew and Renata Kaldor were both raised.

Andrew was one when he and his family fled war-torn Hungary to the Austrian border, with the help of people smugglers and forged documents. Upon reaching the border, they were confronted by a three-man Austrian patrol.

“You may as well kill us – we’re not going back,” Andrew’s father said. They were so desperate for freedom they were willing to die for it.

The patrol mentioned they were walking past a village on the way back to their base, and the family could follow them there. The Kaldors managed to obtain visas and ended up in Australia in 1948.

Renata was 18 months old when her family escaped to Vienna in 1949, following the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. Her Jewish father was a prisoner in Auschwitz only a few years earlier.

"I remember one of the things my father said to me [about] when he was in the concentration camp…He said to me, 'People knew what was going on here, but nobody spoke up for us.'

“When Tampa came…I had those words in my head, and I thought very strongly that we have to speak up, because what was happening was something that happened before, and if good people stay silent, bad things happen.”

The controversial Tampa affair in 2001 caused outrage when the Howard Government refused the MV Tampa, a Norwegian freighter, to enter Australian waters to bring 438 rescued refugees to shore. It eventually led to the Kaldors establishing the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.

Read the full article here.