The rise of violence in Egypt following the creation of Israel seven decades ago forced Warrnambool's Yolanda Bennoun to flee to Australia with her Jewish husband.
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This week marked the anniversary of her arrival in Melbourne after enduring a horrendous month at sea, leaving behind the country in which she was born 95 years ago.
Yolanda's grandfather had immigrated with his wife and six children to Egypt in the late 1800s to escape the rise of the mafia in Sicily.
Her father, who was 12 when he arrived in Egypt, later married a Lebanese woman and they had seven children. "That was usual in Egypt. There were so many nationalities," she said.
Life in Egypt was idyllic for Yolanda, filled with family and friends and school trips to the pyramids.
"It was beautiful. It was a wonderful country. The people were wonderful people. It's just the political situation that spoiled it," she said. "Things got really bad, especially for Jews. Jews were the excuse. They just wanted the Europeans out."
When Yolanda married Maurice in 1946, it was a small affair. "His family wanted a Jewish girl, my family wanted a Christian boy, so we just went off and got married," she said.
Despite this, she said Maurice became her parents' favourite son-in-law, and the couple ended up living with Maurice's parents in a Cairo apartment overlooking the King's palace.
The rising tensions in the region surrounding the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 which lead to the Arab Israeli War made things dangerous for Yolanda and her family in Egypt.
Mobs would attack anyone who looked like a foreigner. "There were many cases of Greek bakers attacked and thrown to die in their ovens," Yolanda wrote in her memoirs she wrote in back in 2000.
In late 1948, the police arrived at their apartment at 2am and accused the men of using torches to signal to Israeli planes.
Maurice, his brother and father were taken to jail and later a concentration camp. The women were forced out of the apartment, and the carriers ordered not to touch any furniture belonging to Jews.
"So many families just walked out of their apartments," Yolanda said. "We were lucky, I wasn't Jewish, so I rang my father and he came with a carrier and took the furniture to his place."
When Yolanda called her parents to tell them what had happened, it was her mother that first answered. "She nearly fainted because during the war my two brothers were in a concentration camp, being Italians," she said.
Her brothers, Adolf and Joe, spent four years living in small tents in the scorching Sahara Desert four hours drive from Cairo. "They were arrested for no reason," she said.
One morning at roll call, the Egyptian soldiers guarding them opened fire, killing some of the prisoners, she said.
That's when the British were brought in to protect the prisoners and they ended up becoming friends.
Yolanda said her life in Egypt sheltered her from much of the horrors of WWII. "We had a few alarms and a couple of bombs, but not near. We didn't see much of the war," she said.
Despite being in a concentration camp for the three months, her husband was able to pay the soldiers to let him call Yolanda numerous times.
Yolanda, meanwhile, did all she could to get the men released. "Wherever I went I was met with horrible, horrible people," she said.
One of the directors at the newspaper advertising company where she worked was the son of the Egyptian Prime Minister. He had given her a business card which opened official doors for her.
She'd booked two cabins on a large ship headed for Australia, having already obtained a landing permit from Australians she'd met during the war, in the hope they'd soon be released.
But then she heard the Prime Minister had been assassinated. "The situation was very scary," she said.
Luckily the Prime Minister had signed the papers for the men's release on the day that he was killed.
Freed from the concentration camp, Yolanda and Maurice along with his parents and brother and sister-in-law sailed from Australia onboard what turned out to be a small ship and the cabins she'd booked didn't exist.
They were forced to sleep in hammocks in the ship's hull for the 28-day journey to Australia. "The sewerage broke down. It was terrible trip. You can just imagine," she said.
One of the passengers, who had a phobia of sharks, died halfway through the trip. "He died and they had to throw him in the sea. That was very scary to all of us. The fact that we were so close and he didn't make it," she said.
Yolanda and her family arrived in Melbourne aboard the Misr on January 28, 1949. They had no passport but their official papers - a Laisser Passer - stated in large letters "Not to be permitted to return to Egypt".
They did eventually return many years later, using their Australian passports.
Hoping to show their children the country that they knew and loved, they were shocked to find it was not the place they'd left behind.
The pyramids, which were once surrounded by desert, were now surrounded by houses. "Even the cemetery has got people living there. My father had built a vault for the family and there are people living where my mother is buried."
The unrest of 1948 scattered Yolanda and her six siblings all across the world. "There were not two in one country," she said.
In Australia, Yolanda and Maurice secured work and lived in a guest house in Port Melbourne - that was until they found out she was pregnant and were forced to leave.
Yolanda was three months along when she developed appendicitis and had to have surgery.
In the hospital bed next to her was a 14-year-old girl who told her about her Nana who had a room she used to rent out.
As a kind gesture, Yolanda lent the girl her dressing gown when she left hospital, and when the girl returned it, it came with a letter which invited her to meet Nana.
"I went to see 'Nana' in Box Hill. An old country woman, wonderful woman and I said: 'I'm pregnant'. And she said 'my dear girl I've had six'. Our luck changed with Nana, the beginning of the good times."
Maurice, who was working as a chef at the Queen Victoria hospital, spotted a newspaper ad seeking someone to open a canteen at Fletcher Jones in Warrnambool.
He was given the job, and in 1955 they moved to the south-west with their three children - Mary and twin sons Robert and Phillip.
While working at Fletcher Jones, Maurice started catering for weddings and that's when he decided to go out on his own and open a reception venue in Botanic Road (now home to a church).
Maurice passed away about 17 years ago. "He died of a broken heart. He did not accept the fact that he had to bury his son. He never accepted it. He had stroke after stroke and one stroke did him away," Yolanda said.
Their son Phillip had died 25 years ago of a brain infection while working for Oxfam in China and four years ago she lost her daughter to lung cancer. "So I've had my share of that. Still, I always think there is somebody worse off than me," she said. "That's the only way it keeps me going. She was a beautiful child, absolutely beautiful."
Her son Robert still works for Oxfam in Thailand.
