A dusty old suitcase that lay undiscovered for decades in a backyard shed in Australia, has revealed an astonishing story of friendship, courage and resistance to the Nazi regime and its extermination camps, where millions of Jews were systematically murdered during the Second World War. 

Letters inside the suitcase relate to an Australian family with a generational commitment to peace, whose friendship with another family in Germany, the Schindlers, produced a network bonded by a powerful sense of humanity, to save peoples' lives. 

On the eve of the International Day in Commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust Julia Dean from our UN Country Team in Australia, spoke to Dr Frances Newell, whose mother and grandfather were part of this network who together with the Schindlers, helped Jews, political dissidents and other persecuted groups, escape the horrors of the Nazi regime.