Adrian Factor

Adrian Factor was born in Plauen, Germany in 1924 to Jewish parents who had come from Poland. He migrated to Australia with them and his siblings, arriving in February 1940. He and his father were arrested after Kristallnacht, and his father held in Buchenwald for six weeks, but being stateless, he told me, meant that he and his father were able to evade longer-term incarceration by the German authorities.

He said that being stateless “saved our lives and we were grateful, but it didn’t save us from being expelled from Germany. When my father came out of the concentration camp of Buchenwald, we were given two weeks to leave, irrespective of what hindrance there were. We were simply told to be on a train at a particular date.”