Born into a well-off Jewish family in Vienna in 1915, George trained as a lawyer like his father. However, he never completed his degree being expelled from university in 1938. That year, the race laws introduced after the annexation of Austria and Nazi Germany meant Jews were increasingly excluded from many aspects of daily life. He and his older sister Gertrude sought to escape Europe. Sponsored by the Society of Friends (Quakers), they successfully obtained visas and arrived in Adelaide in 1939. During the war years, George qualified in accountancy and enlisted in the Australian army, joining one of the Works Companies made up of ‘aliens’ or non-British citizens. In 1946, George was appointed clerk for the district council of Snowtown in South Australia’s mid-north. He played central roles in the development of this remote community, 145 km north of Adelaide. After ten years, George returned to Adelaide where he spent the rest of his life. He took on council auditing work and was later company secretary of Poseidon NL, famous for causing the most spectacular stock market bubble in Australia’s history. Neither he nor his sister married. The Holocaust claimed their parents and several members of their extended family.
Georg (later George) Carl Klimont was born into a Jewish family on 24 July 1915 in Vienna, Austria. One of just two children, his older sister Gertrude was eight years his senior. The family lived comfortably in Vienna’s first district, at Elisabethstraße 8, centrally located, close to leafy parks, the opera house and the Academy of Fine Arts.
George’s father Dr Julius Carl Klimont was a lawyer. George followed in his footsteps and enrolled as a student in Vienna’s law school. However, he was expelled in the spring term of his fourth year in 1938 because he was Jewish. This followed the Anschluss or the annexation of Nazi Germany and Austria on 11-13 March that year. It resulted in the introduction of racial laws including the Numerus clausus (closed number), legislating limitations on the admission of Jewish students. Similar laws imposed on Jewish public servants meant his father also lost his job.
George and his sister Gertrude, a trained nurse, sought visas to escape overseas. They found support for their application to Australia via the Society of Friends (Quakers) and in particular University of Adelaide’s maths professor John Wilton, a practicing Quaker. They stayed in the university town of Cambridge in the UK prior to sailing from London to Australia.
George and Gertrude arrived at Port Adelaide on the passenger ship the Esperance Bay on 11 April 1939. George is described as an electrician on the passenger list. Perhaps he felt that a tradesperson would be more welcome Down Under than an unqualified law student. The brother and sister may have initially stayed with Professor Wilton at his home in Eden Hills but George soon found lodgings in a boarding house at 27 Buxton Street in North Adelaide. Gertrude found work and accommodation at the Hospital for the Incurables in Fullarton that was in dire need of nursing staff at the time. Later, she boarded at the YWCA at 410 Carrington Street that offered accommodation to business girls. 1938-39 saw many Jewish refugees seeking a safe haven in Adelaide and several individuals and organisations tried to help them.
On a chilly Sunday in April 1940, George attended a youth gathering at Holiday House in Stirling in the Adelaide Hills. Built in 1890, the house and stables had been used by the YWCA for house parties and youth camps since 1920. The exuberant 17-year-old Carys Harding Browne, one of Adelaide’s young literary set and who had recently left Wilderness School in Medindie, was also there and recorded their first meeting in her diary.
‘Had lunch and begged to be introduced to a refugee called Georg Klimont. Everyone too shy. Later I was fiddling with the fire when he came and helped. We talked above the singing and playing and then went for a walk mile after mile after mile over lost roads, misty rain, sun on rain, swampy vegetable gardens, summits, cottages. George (pronounced Shorshe) is very naive and Austrian. I taught him to cooee, to suck eucalyptus leaves, to speak Australian. Oh! Lots of things. He lives in a boarding house in Buxton Street, North Adelaide. I must ask him to tea. He told me fairy tales in Austrian, laughed a good deal and I found he was one of the refugees of my Wilderness teacher, Miss Hassell, and he adjudicated a debate at our school.“
[Carys: Diary of a young girl, Adelaide 1940-42 edited by Ann Barson, ETT Imprint, 2018. p12]
From this account, George appeared to have been taken under the wing of Kathleen Hassell, English and Latin teacher at Wilderness School, secretary of the South Australian branch of the Australian Federation of University Women Graduates, and very involved with its refugee committee at the time. She was a former University of Adelaide graduate and had travelled extensively in Europe in 1938, so was aware of the plight of European Jews.
George met Carys on other social occasions. Her diary gives glimpses of his cultured past. They enjoyed attending the theatre and cinema in Adelaide and he tells her stories of going to the opera in Vienna. She often noted his thick Austrian accent that was difficult to understand but George appeared intent on improving himself. He studied commercial courses at the School of Mines and Industries, and Latin at the university. He was on the South Australian team that took part in an Intervarsity debating competition in Canberra. In 1942, he successfully completed his final accounting exams to be accepted into the South Australian branch of the Federal Institute of Accountants.
In May 1942, he enlisted in the AIF (Australian Imperial Force) at the Torrens Depot in the city and was first assigned to the 10th Works Company, one of 11 Employment companies made up of ‘alien’ or non-British citizens, out of 39 providing large workforce dedicated to essential labouring tasks. Throughout his short army career, he was transferred to various Works companies within Australia, ending up at Strathpine in Queensland. According to his military records, he had been working as a clerk when he joined up, had flat feet and wore glasses but was clearly efficient, as he rose through the ranks to corporal and then sergeant. In 1943 while residing at Warradale camp, he applied for naturalization having been in Australia for the requisite four years.
After the war was over and he had been demobbed, George set about becoming a ‘big fish in a small pond.’ He was appointed district clerk at Snowtown, a small remote town 145 km north of Adelaide but then a major railhead in the wheatbelt. He was also registrar of dogs, inspector of weights and measures, curator of cemeteries, secretary and the inspector of the local board of health for the district, and coroner. The same year, he was appointed Snowtown’s assistant returning officer in the federal elections. He also represented Snowtown at the annual meeting of the Northern Firefighting Association. George played central roles in many major developments and events: the town’s new bank, hospital and recruiting office, its Jubilee celebrations, street carnival and RSL War Graves appeal. He was a member of both the debating and local sheepdog trial societies. Later George took on auditing work for other local councils. During the 1960s and 1970s, he was company secretary of Poseidon NL, the mineral exploration company that had located a promising nickel deposit in Western Australia that set off from Adelaide the most spectacular boom stock in Australia’s history. This stock market bubble in which the price of Australian mining shares soared in late 1969, then crashed in early 1970 became known as the Poseidon bubble.
A quiet achiever, George never married, nor did his sister Gertrude. George died on 26 June 1987, aged 71. Gertrude died on 20 August 1995 aged 88. They were reunited and are together remembered in the rose garden of Enfield Memorial Park. Sadly, we have only located one photo of George that of his official picture in his military records and have only developed his story from desktop research.
George’s regional South Australian sojourn was perhaps a far cry from the busy metropolis and cultured life he had left behind in Vienna. But perhaps it filled the aching void left by the loss of his close family in the Shoah. His father did not survive, nor his mother Anna who was murdered at Auschwitz, as was her sister and George’s aunt, Clara. His paternal uncle and aunt Isador and Alice Klimont perished at the killing site of Maly Trostianets in Belarus, another uncle and aunt died at Theresienstadt, and their daughter at Auschwitz. Saddest of all was the fate of his father’s sister, Emilie Khuner. Hospitalized in Vienna, she was transported in August 1940 with other patients to Hartheim Castle near Linz in Austria. This was one of the killing facilities, part of the Nazi ‘involuntary euthanasia’ program known as Aktion T4 in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically murdered with poison gas. Georgee’s 76-year-old aunt Emilie was one of over 18,000 people who perished in Hartheim’s gas chamber over a period of 16 months between 1940 and 1941.