Being born to parents who survived the Holocaust is, for author Lily Brett, the single most defining characteristic of her life.
"The past hovered over us. We were kids who had parents with numbers tattooed on their arms," she told Jane Hutcheon on One Plus One.
Her mother and father were confined for several years in the Lodz ghetto in Poland, before being sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
On arrival they were separated. Brett's mother was eventually sent to Stutthof, another death camp, while her father was forced to make a death march across Europe.
And while they escaped with their lives, there would be little respite from the unthinkable suffering they had endured.
"We were living with parents who'd had such massive loss and were grieving and it was a grief that would never end."
Lily Brett started asking serious questions when she was around 30 years old and was horrified at her mother's stories.
Lily Brett's parents were a very rare statistic — two Jewish people who were married to each other before the war, who each survived.
After six years of imprisonment and the loss of their entire extended families, it took them six months to find each other again.
"It was my mother looking for my father. My father had fluid on the brain and was very sick, the Red Cross were posting lists of the dead and the living and my mother was just going from place to place.
"She really wanted to die, she contemplated suicide, every single person she was related to in the universe was dead. She knew that but she didn't know if my father was."
Brett's mother finally went to Feldafing, a displaced persons camp outside Munich.
"It was split second timing. And my father was there. I was born about ten months later I think," she laughed.
Growing up different
The family moved to Melbourne in 1948. As a child growing up in a Jewish community in Carlton, Melbourne, Brett knew she was different.
She remembers a photograph of her kindergarten class, the bright sunshine of Australia at odds with the melancholy on their faces.
Her mother, Rose, a would-be paediatrician and father, Max, both worked behind sewing machines in factories, but still, her father saw Australia as "paradise".
Work and finding happiness
In the 1960s, Brett began to write for the Go-Set rock magazine, travelling to London and New York to interview stars such as Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
She had no journalism training, but her style of questioning prompted her subjects to open up.
"To this day I'm hopeless at a cocktail party, I start a very intense conversation," she said.
"I thought my job was to find out who they were, it didn't even occur to me to ask them about their music.
"There was something quite wonderful about being naive. They were mostly quite surprised at the questions I asked because I asked the things that were really central to my life.
"I wanted to know if they got on well with their mothers and what did they think about religion.
"My only thought was I wanted to write a better story than anybody else, I still do."
Brett, who is married to the painter David Rankin, moved from Melbourne to New York in 1989 where she finally felt a sense of belonging.
She has now published seven novels, eight volumes of poetry and four collections of essays.
"I have felt very lucky for a very long time, I'm married to somebody I love madly, my kids mostly like me and I have beautiful grandchildren.
"I'm very lucky to have lived a life where I was able to do what I love doing most and that's writing."
For the full interview with Jane Hutcheon, watch One Plus One at 10:00am on Friday on ABC TV and 5:30pm on Saturday on ABC News 24.
