Daniela grew up in Sydney with her parents who were Holocaust survivors. Her parents decided not to tell her they had met in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia created by the Nazis for Jews, gypsies, communists and other ‘Untermenschen’ – people who were not of the superior Aryan race. Her mother Mimi was in the camp for four years. Her father Pavel entered for a few months before the Second World War ended. They were married at the time but not to each other. They met and fell in love. Daniela was born a ‘mamzer’, a bastard child, the year after they left the hellhole they were imprisoned in. In 1958, the year her father died, Daniela, aged 11, found out she was Jewish. When the Communists came to power in 1948 the family left that same year for Australia, the furthest they could go from Prague where Daniela was born.