A Late Journey

The 1992 discovery of 160 letters that the author’s mother and father had exchanged in Nazi Germany served as the catalyst for a long journey of remembering what it was like growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Research into the letters not only revealed the history of immense suffering of the author’s parents, but also uncovered a host of previously well-kept family secrets.

The 1992 discovery of 160 letters that the author’s mother and father had exchanged in Nazi Germany served as the catalyst for a long journey of remembering what it was like growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Research into the letters not only revealed the history of immense suffering of the author’s parents, but also uncovered a host of previously well-kept family secrets. A Late Journey tells the story of the damaging effect of unacknowledged and unexplained suffering on a highly sensitive child who, from her earliest years, senses past pain and dysfunction but has no words to express it until very late in her life. Beginning in childhood, the author remembers significant incidents in her life that somehow have the needs of her parents' past suffering in them. Her failure to make solid relationships in her youth, her seeming inability to find a life partner, her fear of having children, she claims, all have their roots in her unconscious wish to somehow make amends for the persecution of her beloved father. During the decade in which she wrote her memoir, the author also discovered a side of her mother that she never knew, enabling her to care for her after she became a dementia sufferer.

Dagmar Strauss was born in Shanghai to German Jewish refugees in 1944. After WWII, her family immigrated to Australia, where Dagmar grew up. She attended a Catholic convent for her primary education followed by a state high school to Matriculation level. At the University of Melbourne for a BA, she majored in English Literature and Philosophy. She took a further degree in Education at Latrobe University some years later. She spent her working life in radio and television, first for BBC Television in London as a researcher, and in Melbourne at the ABC as a producer/presenter for 21 years. While at the ABC, the Corporation published her first book, Facing Writers, a series of ten interviews with Australia's leading authors, poets and playwrights. In 1992, she moved her life to Israel to marry her Israeli fiancé. She has written articles for The Age and The Australian. In 2003, she began work on her memoir, A Late Journey. She has been living in Jerusalem with her husband for 21 years.