(1922 – 2007)

Eric Abraham Silbert was born in Fremantle and attended Christian Brothers College (CBC) Fremantle then Aquinas College. He served in the 622 Squadron, RAAF, 3 Group, Bomber Command and 7 Squadron, Pathfinder Force and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Honoured with an AM, he was an appointed member of the UWA Senate (1975-1986), a Deputy Lord Mayor of the City of Perth, a Rotarian and was active with many organisations, particularly in the Jewish community.

An interview was recorded in 2003 for the Australians at War Archive. These comments are drawn from the transcript:

After a trip to Singapore with the YAL aged seventeen, I worked for Mum and Dad in the store. We were very conscious of the problems Jewish people were having, we knew that people were going somewhere and not going to come back. Rabbi Freedman, who was a chaplain in the First World War, called the young men aged eighteen to thirty to a meeting, saying, “It looks as though war is going to break out.” This is 1938. “We think the Jewish boys should join the various CMF [Citizens’ Military Force], engineers and artillery”, and a high percentage of them did. So when war broke out ... it wasn’t a matter of if you were going to join up, it was a matter of what you were going to join. I used to come home and say, “Kevin’s joined the air force. Peter’s joined the air force,” which was not a very subtle way of saying that I want to join the air force. I take my hat off to the parents of the day and to my parents in particular, because they had to sign on the dotted line before you were twenty-one.

Photograph and information from Australians at War Film Archive (UNSW), Archive Number 943 2003

I was in the first course that went into Clontarf and you had to pass every subject to go onto the next level .... air engines, air frames, physics, maths, sound and of course, drill and all of those military things. To get into aircrew was the most difficult of all of the services.

When I went in, fourteen guys stood up when we walked in the door, and three of us came out at the other end. We joined the British Empire Air Scheme ... we were RAAF and Canadian air force but it all grew out of the Empire Air Training School affectionately known as EATS.