ANH: Two of my great passions are people and painting.
In this series, I get to enjoy both.
I meet extraordinary Australians, explore their stories...
I'm putting my hand up and saying I want to do something.
I want to be part of the solution.
See, I'm now crying now talking about crying.
What's happened to me?
..and paint their portraits.
It's theirs to keep,
so I hope they like it.
(GASPS) Oh! (LAUGHS)
Wow!
Oh, my God!
Holy mackerel. That looks me!
It's beautiful.
Mate, that's incredible.
You look gorgeous. That is absolutely amazing.
Welcome to Anh's Brush With Fame.
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki
is intrigued with life, the universe and everything.
He started his life in Australia in a migrant camp
taking an unusual career path through physics and medicine,
to become our most recognisable science broadcaster.
In a vacuum, glass is stronger than steel.
Dr Karl has spent over 30 years answering our questions.
But now I want to know about him.
What I'm looking for from Anh Do, which is a bit presumptuous of me,
is to find some insights into myself
that I didn't really understand in the first place,
because I'm fairly oblique to myself, I don't understand myself.
Dr Karl is a passionate and enthusiastic communicator.
He is incredibly smart and very generous with his knowledge.
With warmth and wit he has made science accessible.
I want to capture his natural curiosity
and his enthusiasm.
Dr Karl. Dr Anh Do. How are you?
(LAUGHS)
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
It's my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Take a seat. This is going to be a lot of fun. Yeah.
Jeez, you've had a fascinating life.
Like a Paddle Pop stick in the gutter of life on a rainy day,
to quote Norman Gunston.
(LAUGHS) I want to take you right back.
Yeah.
Both your parents spent time in concentration camps.
Yep. And then refugees.
Your mum was in Auschwitz.
Yeah, yeah.
But she denied that she was Jewish.
She told me she was a Lutheran.
She couldn't stand the pain of thinking about it.
Only when she started dementing did it come out.
Oh, she had dementia? Yeah.
She was becoming a bit disinhibited.
And now she was just opening the floodgates.
And so all these stories started coming out.
My mother was in Gdansk
and they got invaded by the Nazi army rolling in,
and so you got this girl in her teens, 20s, running
through the sewers underneath Gdansk
carrying food from here to there
as the steel grip fastened around Gdansk.
And it was just straight shoot people on sight.
Genocide, just enough to keep the rest in line.
And how did mum end up in a concentration camp?
It seems to be that in one of her smuggling rings she popped out
of the ground and just got caught by the Nazis and just got sent off.
What was life like in there?
There was very little food, wasn't there?
She told me that the German pla...
..the American planes would go overhead
and they would pray for the planes to bomb them and kill them.
And then the guards started behaving oddly.
There were strong hints that the guards had run out
of bullets because they weren't shooting people anymore.
And suddenly one day there were no guards.
When they woke up in the morning the guards were gone.
And then a few days later
some other people rolled in and they got liberated.
And then a few days later after that the Red Cross came in
and said things like "Do you want to go to Sweden?"
"Sure!"
Mmm.
Karl's dad's road to the concentration camp
was quite different.
As a young man,
he had earned his master's in law and travelled to Hollywood
where he found work as a screenwriter.
When war broke out, he returned to his homeland
and ultimately found himself in Nazi-occupied Poland.
He was involved with a person smuggling ring.
He was smuggling Jews out of Poland
not because he was Jewish - he was Catholic -
but it was just the right thing to do.
Ran into his girlfriend,
found that she was an official honorary German citizen,
even though she was Polish.
And she said, "You're backing the wrong side.
"The Nazis are going to win."
And he said "They're not going to win and they're wrong anyway,
"and they're evil."
"We have to stand up to them even if they're going to win."
And that didn't carry any weight with her.
The next morning she left uncommonly early
and within an hour the Gestapo turned up and dragged him away
and threw him into a concentration camp.
Karl's dad was sent to Sachsenhausen,
a brutal concentration camp for political prisoners.
As he gets off the train, there's a guard who is actually a prisoner
who's been allowed minor privileges, who's walking up and down the line
gently whipping people with a whip, putting him in line,
and under his breath he's muttering, "You are 20 and you have a trade."
And then everybody goes... wanted to tie him up to the desk.
"How old are you?"
My father said, "I'm 25 and I'm a carpenter."
He was 40 and he knew nothing about carpentry.
But he was a big, strong bloke,
so he went into the short line of people who could be useful
and who did not get executed straightaway.
So this guy saved your father? Yeah. Yeah.
My father's job was picking up dead Jews who had been gassed to death
and then taking them to the elevator
and then dumping the bodies over the edge.
As you can imagine, this is depressing work,
knowing that the moment you get sick, or even if you don't,
you're going to be one of those people who get gassed.
Everybody dies. Nobody comes out alive.
How did dad get out?
The army, the liberating army...
I think it would have been the Russian army, was coming in close.
He could see that what they were doing
was executing everybody who had been involved with the genocide.
And that meant him as well - he was going to be on the cue.
My father, like all prisoners, had a tattoo on him.
At the same time, a Russian prisoner died of appendicitis.
And the Russians were just soldiers.
They weren't being all executed.
They were just allowed to starve to death happily.
And so he used to play chess with the camp doctor
and he had a tin of sardines,
and he used that tin of sardines as the bribe
to fake his death.
My father's tattoo - 95808 -
they managed to get the tattoo on the body.
Obviously it was my father.
And my father, the living man, went and stayed
in the Russian soldier part of the concentration camp
where he said that they were so short of food
that when they were killing each other to eat each other for food,
they couldn't get any flesh off the bones,
and so they were eating each other's brains
because that was the only part of the body that had food.
And because he had been given a job of shifting dead bodies around,
he was being fed more, he was stronger,
and so they didn't touch him.
And so he was able to survive.
My goodness. That's how close it was.
And that's how it happened.
So a human life is worth a tin of sardines sometimes.
And next thing he knows, he's on his way to Sweden,
where he met my mother.
So your mom and dad met in the refugee camp?
In the refugee camp.
And then had me.
Then they got a little bit worried about being in Sweden because Russia
was getting aggressive during the Cold War
and making grumbling noises at Finland
and, hey, Finland's right next to Sweden -
nothing for a good army to roll through.
And so they decided to emigrate
or set up for the whole family go to America.
While we're on the docks waiting, I began to express the full blown
fever that comes sometimes with a vaccination.
This was a smallpox vaccination.
They were worried, they stayed behind, the ship sailed away.
They're still sitting on the dock with their cardboard suitcases
with everything they have in the world,
like refugees have,
and then the next ship comes along, it's going to Australia.
OK, I'm going to Australia.
The immigration boom following World War II saw new migrants sent
to Bonegilla in north-east Victoria for processing.
Upon their release, the Kruszelnickis ended up in Wollongong, NSW.
Your parents had been through so much.
How did that affect their parenting?
Life by example, by the way they lived.
Being gentle and kind.
One day I was about eight or something.
I was just sitting there squashing ants and my father just came
and stood over me and he said nothing.
And suddenly this big tear went clunk and he said,
"You shouldn't kill anything
"unless it's trying to kill you or you're going to eat it.
"You're not going to eat those ants, are you?"
I said no. He said, "Well, you shouldn't kill them."
And that lesson stayed with me. I can't bear to see cruelty.
They didn't really...
..give me sit-down, "Listen to this, son," type lessons.
Like, my father was a lawyer for the Polish community and he did
all sorts of stuff for all sorts of people for nothing.
When we'd walk down the street,
many of the men and women would stand aside,
the men would take off their hats
as he went past.
So your father was helping these people as a lawyer but he wasn't
actually earning money as a lawyer.
No. He was earning money working on the waterboard.
Firstly as a labourer.
And then finally he worked his way up to being the personnel,
the hiring, firing type person,
because he could speak a bunch of languages.
And on one day he ran into a guy who was his brutal guard
at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
The guy walked in and my father recognised him because he had
been incredibly brutal.
And he said, "Hi. Welcome." Blah blah blah.
"Going for a job?" "Yes."
"Speak German?" "Yes."
Go through the whole thing.
And then at the end of the time,
my father said, "Oh, by the way,
"your real name is such and such and you were my guard at Sachsenhausen."
And the guy just went white.
And then just sat down.
And he thought "I'm busted," and he said "What's going to happen?"
He said "Nothing. This is a secret between you and me.
"I'll never tell anybody. You've got the job."
And he said "Why are you giving me the job?"
and he said, "It's not for you. It's for your children."
What was school like for you?
Primary school had well-meaning Catholic nuns who weren't the best
teachers but who were good-hearted.
My parents told me that over and over
when I came back and complained about how mean they were.
But it was tricky.
I enjoyed school simply because I was really good
at being obedient and was a perfect child and did whatever they told me.
The other side was that I got bullied
at school because I was a wog.
So I was very much on the outer.
I first came across this in like a three month window
of really heavy rain.
Only one person in the street was wealthy enough to have a car
and so that person gave all the other kids
who were Anglo Catholic a lift to school
but me, who was wog Catholic,
they wouldn't give me a lift.
So they'd wave past they went to school each day,
and I mentioned this to my parents
and they said, "You get to walk
"and you see a different part of the world."
Dr Karl has an incredible story and is a completely unique voice.
It's going to be challenging to capture that passion
and enthusiasm in a painting.
On top of that I want to get Karl's optimism in here.
You suffer from a condition commonly known as face blindness.
It's prosopagnosia and I've had it all my life,
and I basically see people's faces
like bricks in a wall - there's not a lot of difference.
Say if I saw you again next week, would you recognise me?
I've gone to a lot of trouble and I take notes.
I look for some obvious characteristic there
and I go for that, or walk.
Walks are good. For how people walk.
So you'll recognise a walk easier than a person's face?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There was one occasion - I'm in at the airport.
And then somebody says, "Hi, Karl."
And I've never seen him before.
I said, "Yeah, hi. My name is Karl. What's your name?"
And they said, "My name is...
"I'm your neighbour. I live two doors up from you."
And as they are saying it, gradually their face comes into focus.
How long have you known them for? Years.
OK, so I'm fascinated and a little bit worried,
because I'm going to show you a painting of you...
Oh, God, has it got a face on it? Yes.
Oh, God! OK, it's my face. OK, I got that right.
Right, OK. I got that.
(LAUGHS)
So obviously you know your own face really well?
Yeah-ish. Yeah.
But I'm painting it, so it's not a photo.
Yeah, that's right.
So it's going to be a bit different to a photo.
No. Yes. I'm cool.
You did pretty well at school.
I wasn't first but I did pretty OK.
Ended up at uni?
Well, I went to university when I was 16.
You know, I had no idea what to study,
so I did maths and physics at school.
So I did maths and physics at university, and didn't study,
And spent all my time trying to drink coffee
and go to the coffee lounge in Wollongong,
which had instant coffee,
and for food they'd have cheese on toast.
Oh, man, was I cool? Was I sophisticated?
Even grew a beard and everything.
I've seen a photo of you in your 20s. You look so cool.
That's the trouble - I didn't realise it.
So you didn't realise you were this pretty good-looking dude?
No, I had no idea.
I was desperately trying to have sex and failing.
Like his father, Karl has had many occupations.
After graduating, he was a steelworks physicist
and, throughout the '70s, he became a filmmaker,
trained as a mechanic
and even spent time as a roadie for Slim Dusty.
You've also been a taxi driver.
Well, I love taxi driving. Some people hate it.
But I love it, because it got me out of my shyness.
When people would come into the taxi,
I didn't have to make eye contact,
because I had both hands on the wheel,
staring at the road ahead of me,
and I'd hear them in the back seat and I'd say something like,
"You guys seem to be talking with each other
"but disagreeing on such a fundamental level
"that I am kind of thinking
"that you really shouldn't be together at all."
Because I said it in such a reasonable tone,
they would never hit me and go, "I haven't been game to say that
"but you are right, I really don't..."
So I would say outrageous things to the passengers.
Were there some not so great things about taxi driving as well?
There were some very not great things about taxi driving.
One day I'd had a really good job from the city out to Campbelltown,
and there was an empty block,
and as I'm driving past I hear this, "Taxi!"
And there's a bunch of people
and suddenly one person breaks away from the group of people
and comes running as fast as she - it turns out - towards the car.
She gets into the front seat and there's somebody chasing her.
And that person then tries to open her door
and manages to open the door
and she's saying, "Go, go, go, go, go, go!"
And I started driving off,
and he managed to hook his hands around the back of the B-pillar,
and then the door, as I take off, jams shut on his fingers.
He starts screaming. She is screaming, "Go, go, go, go, go!"
He is screaming from pain and I've got no idea what to do.
So I come to a halt.
Immediately, his mates come up, open the door and beat me unconscious.
And I wake up and I've got a bit of smashed up here and there
and a broken rib,
but, as it turns out, they drag the girl out,
they rape her, broke her leg and dump her in the ditch somewhere.
Did the police get them?
Well, I went to the police, and they said...
"Did you get the numberplate of the car?"
I said "I don't know."
I gave him the numberplate but it was wrong.
And so nothing happened.
When the guy had his fingers in, you had no option but to stop
so that otherwise you would've dragged him along
and maybe killed him.
In retrospect...
(SIGHS)
I should have dragged him along the road slowly
so his fingers didn't get ripped off
and pulled into the petrol station
and then opened the door.
So it's hard to pick the path that causes the least damage.
You started in radio in 1981.
How did you get your start?
I started in radio because NASA rejected me as an astronaut.
(LAUGHS)
I wrote a letter to NASA
because the American space shuttle was about to go up,
saying "Dear NASA officer,
"I have degrees in physics and mathematics.
"I have a degree in engineering.
"Soon I'll have degrees in medicine and surgery.
"I would love to be a mission specialist.
"How do I go about applying?"
And they sent me back a letter which I still have,
saying that "We don't employ anybody who's not American
"and secondly, we're all full. See you later."
I heard that Double J was doing a special on the launch
of the American space shuttle.
And so I rang them up and said,
"Look, I know about the American space shuttle.
"I've been following it for a while. I wanted to go on it."
And they said, "Come on down and talk to us."
And so we're there and they're about to go through the launch
and they're going through everything and then suddenly the fuel cell dies
and everybody looks at each other, "What's a fuel cell?"
The launch is cancelled because the fuel cell died.
And luckily I knew what a fuel cell was.
I was able to explain what a fuel cell was.
They have the actual launch that goes off.
Everybody is very happy and we're out in the back room
having a cup of tea
and one of the guys says "I need this hippy tea to clean my kidneys."
Being a bit of a pedantic sort of person,
I said, "Well, actually, forgive me but you're wrong.
"The tea doesn't clean your kidneys, rather your kidneys filter
"about a quarter of a tonne of blood every day.
"And they pull out one and a half kilograms of salt every day
"and they put it all back into your body
"at vast metabolic cost,
"except for 80/1,000 of a gram of salt which goes in your urine.
"And the reason that happened is because God made a mistake
"and we're fish gone wrong."
And he looked at me and he said,
"We need you for a show called Great Moments In Science."
And that's how my radio career started.
Karl began a part-time career in the media while he continued
with his medical studies.
And it was here that a new chapter in his life started.
You met your wife Mary at medical school.
Oh, it was amazing.
I'm 32 years old.
And...
..the New South Wales Government has brought together
125 of the smartest, most beautiful...
..18-year-olds
in the state.
And Mary just shone like a jewel.
You and Mary have three kids.
We have three kids - one of each sex.
(LAUGHS) Just kidding.
Take me back to the first... the birth of your first child.
Oh, I was so irrational.
I'd just been reading about how there was this problem
with keeping people too clean.
So every single visitor who came to see him on the first 24 hours
of his life had to get their little finger and stick it in his mouth.
He, with a strong sucking reflex, would go,
suck, suck, suck, suck, suck.
I'm thinking, "Germs. He's good. Getting good germs."
I did this for about a day before. I thought,
"Did they wash their hands before they went to the toilet?"
Then I'd read that kids
don't have a reflex to shiver to keep warm.
And I forgot the fact that they keep warm by growing fat,
so I ran the whole house in the middle of winter
at 35 degrees Centigrade.
And just walking around in underwear.
So I was being totally irrational during the first months of his life.
Were you emotional when you first held him?
I was like a ball of jelly blubber with each of my children.
My daughters, lovely Alice and lovely Lola, and little Karl.
So I've actually driven my son from Sydney to Wollongong and back
again to try to put him to sleep.
And with Lola I actually ended up getting the full security forces
busting me out at the Olympic Park.
I was driving around for hours and then I'm doing one more lap
of Olympic Park and then everything up to an armoured vehicle comes
charging at me and blocks me in the middle
of the road and out come
all these guys in security gear and automatic rifles
aimed at me.
They said, "Get out of the car!"
I said, "Don't wake the baby." "Get out of the car! Hands up!"
I said, "Don't wake up the baby. Shh!"
'Cause I'm without sleep as a parent.
And then one of them goes and says,
"Oh, you've got a baby there."
And he turns, "He's got a baby."
And I said, "Yeah, I've got a baby. Don't wake the baby."
And then the baby starts crying. I says, "Look what you did."
And then they all peel off and leave me alone.
I said, "OK, I won't do suspicious laps around Olympic Park
"in terrorist times."
You were a doctor for five years.
I was a medical doctor as a junior doctor in the floating hospital
system and then went into the kid's hospital as a junior doctor.
And it was the best job in my whole life.
But I was there when after two decades of zero deaths
from whooping cough,
somebody died from whooping cough because somebody on a TV show
was putting it over and over again
that there's two sides to the vaccination story,
and I was there when the baby died.
And that's sort of... that was one of the strong factors that made me
shift from the best job I ever had in my whole life,
which was being a kid's doctor,
into going into media to say "Get vaccinated."
'Cause I could do more good and save more lives in the media
than I could one on one in the kid's hospital.
But first, robots -
machines that do jobs that are normally done by humans...
As a full-time broadcaster,
Dr Karl has made science fun for generations...
OK, next question from the audience.
..having entertained and educated us
on radio and TV for the past 30 years.
Dr Karl, it seems you have a real zest for learning and just for life.
Why are we here?
To try to make the world a better place.
And then you die.
Life is this ride
and if you're not living it at the time, you're missing out.
When I was working at the steelworks the majority of people were living
that same year of life over and over,
so that by the time they were 50,
they'd had one year of experience 30 times.
They hadn't had 30 years of life.
And that made me think "I want to live every single minute as it
"comes floating past, because once it's gone, you can't get it again."
Did you get any of that from your parents as well?
With my parents,
the fact that they had survived so much
and how they modelled their lives,
they taught me to live each moment and enjoy it for the fun of it.
It's been so fascinating talking to you, Dr Karl.
I'm nearly finished. Oh!
Ah. Oh my God.
So you're not going to trick me by putting up somebody else's face?
(LAUGHS) Imagine if I did that...
If they've got a beard, I know it's not me.
If they don't have glasses, I know it's not me.
Are you probably just going to lie?
No, no.
I'm totally fine with you just telling me what you think, OK?
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah?
So I need another 10-15 minutes to finish off.
Right. So to take a break.
And then come back and I'll spin it round and show you the Dr Karl.
Thank you, Dr Anh. (LAUGHS)
You see different parts of a human's face and you associate that
with different emotions.
The narrowing of the eyes, the opening of the smile.
Maybe some of what I did will pop out on the paper.
I have no idea.
Dr Karl has a wonderful enthusiasm for life.
His almost superhuman ability
to distil big ideas into small, digestible chunks
has seen him bring science to a broad and diverse audience.
He's so vibrant and there is an inner happiness
that he possesses.
I can't wait to see what he thinks. Let's bring him in.
Alright, Dr Karl, come on back in.
OK. Wow.
If I had more time, I'd refine it a bit more.
Yeah.
As it is, sometimes an unfinished painting
has an aliveness sort of quality, you know?
And it's got a lot of life about it,
so I just wanted to capture your zest for life.
OK. Wow. You're putting pressure on me here, man.
Close your eyes. Don't open them till I tell you.
Alright, Dr Karl. Go for it.
Oh, my God, I'm happy. Look at that happy person.
Oh, my God, he's happy. Oh.
You know, I worry about it not being happy.
That actually looks like a happy me.
I feel so happy.
You are happy. Look at me, happy.
You are happy. And these are apples. OK, right.
Do you see the likeness at all?
Man, it's astonishing. That is really me.
I'm not worried either. Look, the forehead's not worried.
I'm just happy to be here.
Have you got somewhere at home for it?
Oh, yeah, mate. My trophy room is already set out.
Yeah, no worries about that.
It's been so much fun to have you... to have you on the show,
and thank you for sharing so much today.
Thank you very much, Dr Karl.
Great, thank you.
It's strange to see yourself in a portrait especially
when you don't expect what you're going to get.
But nevertheless when you get it, you realise that it's right.
The personally autographed Rolling Stone's portrait
is moving over to the side.
Wow. What an incredible life.
Dr Karl is on an endless quest for knowledge.
And he's bringing all of us along with him for the ride.
Next time,
Sigrid Thornton, one of Australia's most famous faces.
She's strong, feisty and fun.
He was a great father.
Yeah, a really delicious, delightful father.
And I've got to capture all of that on the canvas.
(GASPS) Oh! (LAUGHS)
It's great!
Captions by Red Bee Media
Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation