Gift of Time

When the global pandemic hit Melbourne in March 2020, Frances Prince resolved to spend her afternoons in lockdown reading to David, her 95-year-old father. The books they explored together revived David’s memories of his own Holocaust experience and his life as a Polish Jewish university student in postwar Munich. As the days passed, what began as a reading project to fill the time, turned into an unexpected and rewarding journey of discovery.

David Prince was born in the Polish city of Lodz in 1925. He had completed just one year of high school when World War II erupted, ending his school education and forcing him into years of imprisonment in the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the labour camp Friedland.

After the war David remained in Germany. In 1946, he passed challenging entrance examinations to enrol in the pharmacy faculty at the prestigious Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. There he developed lifelong connections with other Holocaust survivors including dentistry student Ella Salzberg, who would soon become his wife.

 Soon after he graduated, David and Ella immigrated to Melbourne, Australia where their children Issy and Frances were born.

After many years of bureaucratic obstacles and further study at the Victorian College of Pharmacy, David finally qualified to practice in Australia and he went on to enjoy a long and fulfilling career as a pharmacist.