You are helping aching hearts find sanctuary

Sanctuary Family Retreat is a five-day family camp held each year after Christmas for newly arrived refugees in VIC. It is run as a partnership between SU Australia and Embrace Sanctuary Australia. John Altmann and his wife Cathy are members of the volunteer team.

Recently, John generously opened up to us about his family’s story, and his very personal connection to Sanctuary Family Retreat.

My father was born in 1919 in Leipzig, Germany, and grew up on the first floor of a large and elegant apartment building. Now on the street in the pavement in front of the building are four commemorative brass plaques recording the fate of his family.

These plaques are part of one of the largest memorial projects in the world and everywhere you travel in Europe if you look down on the pavement you will see them outside the places where people, who were dispossessed by the Nazis, lived. They are called Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones”!

My father’s parents, Joseph and Fanny Altmann (born in 1876 and 1882) were deported to Poland by the Nazis in 1938 and murdered in Poland at a date unknown, but most likely in the Lemberg ghetto in late 1942 as part of Hitler’s final solution to the ‘Jewish problem’.

My father, Joachim Altmann, fled from deportation to Poland in 1939 to London. He then left Europe by ship to Melbourne as a refugee.

Like many people who lived through the horror of Nazism, my father would almost never talk about his life before he came to Melbourne. The trauma and the grief – the guilt of survivors – was wrapped up tight in a box and put away on the highest shelf.

Like all of us, I have spent a lot of my adult life working out how I have been shaped by my father’s experience.

One of the positive reactions I have to my father’s experience is the joy of being involved with Embrace Sanctuary Australia and its work in partnership with SU Australia to run a family camp for recently arrived refugees from all around the world.

Cathy and I are part of the team that runs Sanctuary Family Retreat each year after Christmas for five days and part of the motivation for us comes from understanding something about the grief and trauma of having to flee to Melbourne as a refugee.

Chris, former Field and Development Manager in VIC, was part of the team that pioneered the first Sanctuary Retreat. He shares his reflections on how it all began.

SU in Victoria was considering how a new camp environment could be innovated that welcomed asylum-seekers and refugees. The timing coincided with the establishment of a new organisation named ‘Embrace Sanctuary Australia’, led by long-time community worker and refugee advocate, Naomi Chua.

We combined Naomi’s experience and networks amongst Melbourne’s culturally-diverse asylum-seeker and refugee communities, with SU’s volunteer management and training (not to mention the sublime Camp Coolamatong) to establish Sanctuary Family Retreat.

The inaugural retreat ran in the summer of 2023-24 with 80 participants, volunteers and community connectors who helped everyone to bridge cultural, religious and language divides. By the following year, the retreat grew to over 100 people as word of how beautiful this community of welcome, safety, connection and hope spread.

As John says, those coming to this camp bring trauma and grief, but they also carry hope for a safer life for their families.

Deuteronomy 10:18 says that God ‘defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing’.

SU Australia is committed to coming alongside and meeting all people with warmth and welcome, forging connections that transcend the barriers of culture and language. Thank you for supporting ministries like Sanctuary Family Retreat to bring God’s love and hope to children, young people and families who now call Australia home.