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Ivan Singer was born in 1922 in a small Hungarian village in the north of Banat, Yugoslavia.
His father, Dr Joshka Singer, was posted there sometime after World War I by the government to look after the health of the villagers.
Ilonka Schwarz, his mother, was from Vrsac, a small town in the south of Banat. His parents moved to Vrsac in 1930 and stayed there until 1941, when the Nazis forcibly transferred them to Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia.Of his family, Ivan is the sole survivor of the Holocaust.
From Belgrade he escaped to Split via Albania where he was imprisoned by the Italian authorities and transferred to a concentration camp in Italy.
Liberated by the British, he was trained by the US Special Balkan Service and, in 1944, parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of an American effort to assist the Partisan guerrilla fighters.
Towards the end of the war, Ivan was transferred to the Soviet Union, where he was trained as a fighter pilot.Disillusionment with Communism in Yugoslavia after the war, brought Ivan and his young family to Australia in 1967.
In 1969, he became a citizen of his newly adopted and much loved country. Since that time, he has watched his family grow and prosper. Nowadays, both he and his wife live in Sydney in active retirement.Ivan has a master's degree in environmental pollution control and a degree in mechanical engineering.