Andrew Steiner OAM is a South Australian treasure. His portrait by Alex Frayne hangs in the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Steiner, a Holocaust survivor, founded the Adelaide Holocaust Museum and Andrew Steiner Education Centre. This year, at the age of 92, he was honored with the prestigious international Eva Fahidi Award for peace.
Andrew was born in 1933 into an affluent Jewish family in Budapest. After the occupation of Hungary by Nazi Germany in 1944, he spent most of his childhood in hiding, along with his sister and parents. In Andrew's immediate family, 12 of his relatives were murdered, including his aunt, her husband, and his two cousins. His family arrived in South Australia during 1948.
Today, Andrew speaks of peace and tolerance as he observes the rise of antisemitism and intolerance around the world. It was through his artwork that Andrew managed to come to terms with his own experience as a Holocaust survivor. “Each of us must deal with that trauma, that experience in our own personal way. Nobody can ever understand what that person has gone through, what that person is carrying as part of their being,” he says.
Andrew emphasizes the importance of compassion: “Compassion has no limitation. Compassion is treating everybody the way you yourself wish to be treated. Compassion is not doing anything to anybody that you would not wish to have happen to yourself – that's compassion. And that breaches and overcomes all the differences because, fundamentally, we're so similar.”
Alex Frayne, the photo-artist behind the portrait, is based in Adelaide. His recent immersive photographic essay of America, titled Manifest Destiny, debuted at the 2026 Adelaide Festival of Arts at ILA Light Square.
