In Their Own Words

This book comprises the wartime recollections of my parents, Maria (née Keil) and Leon Sokulsky, who lived under Nazi rule during the Second World War. Their accounts as I was growing up always fascinated me and fostered my love for history. For that reason, I decided to interview my parents so that we could keep for posterity a record of their experiences. The interviews occurred in 1998 at our family home in Elermore Vale, a suburb of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia. I recorded them separately on two C90 cassette tapes. Mum and Dad passed away in 2011 and 2014, respectively, but it was not until late 2018 when rummaging through my old cassette collection that I came across the recordings that had lain there in a box for nearly thirty years. It was then that I decided, for the first time since the interviews, to listen to them. As I sat there with headphones on at my home in Muswellbrook, in northern New South Wales, I found myself transported into the past – not just to 1998 but back to the 1920s. It was an eerie and emotional experience to hear my parents speak again. I knew then that I needed to write down what they had said.