The Boy at the Window and the War on Cancer

In March 1944, the day after German troops occupied Budapest, a man walked to the railway station to buy tickets that might carry his family to safety. He never came back. His 13-year-old son waited at the window of their home for a father who would not return, and went on waiting, in a sense, for 47 years, until a chance meeting on the other side of the world finally revealed that Hugo Lowy had been beaten to death at Auschwitz for refusing to give up his prayer shawl. The boy at the window survived the war by hiding, by luck and by nerve. His mother carried what was left of the family through the horrors that followed, and he never forgot it.

That boy was Frank Lowy. The next eight decades are usually told as a business story, and it is a spectacular one. Caught by the British while trying to reach Mandatory Palestine, interned in Cyprus, he joined the Haganah and the Golani Brigade and fought in the Galilee and Gaza for a state barely a day old when it was invaded. In 1952 he sailed to Australia with almost nothing, opened a delicatessen in the western suburbs of Sydney with a fellow refugee named John Saunders, and in 1959 built a shopping centre at Blacktown that he called Westfield. Over the following half century the name spread across three continents, and when the French group Unibail-Rodamco bought the company in 2018 the deal was worth tens of billions. A man who had arrived with a suitcase left behind one of the largest property empires on earth.

But the malls were never going to be the whole of his legacy, and he knew it. The larger part is what the fortune was turned into. Across one 10-year stretch the Lowy family gave away more than 350 million dollars over 10 years, which placed them among the most generous philanthropists Australia has produced. And of everything that money built, the piece that matters most stands on the campus of the University of New South Wales.

In 2007 Lowy and his family gave 10 million dollars towards a new cancer research centre, the largest single private donation the university had ever received. It opened in 2010 as the Lowy Cancer Research Centre, a building costing more than a 100 million dollars that became one of the largest dedicated cancer research facilities in the southern hemisphere and the first in Australia to bring childhood and adult cancer research under one roof. Some four hundred scientists work there now, hunting the disease in children and adults alike and turning laboratory discoveries into treatments at the bedside.

He credited his whole philosophy of giving to his mother, the woman who had carried her children through the Holocaust. The symmetry is hard to miss. The boy who lost his father to one kind of murder spent his fortune building a place devoted to defeating another kind of killing, the sort that takes children quietly, in wards, far from any headline.

There is a second part to this story, and it belongs to the country he defended as a teenager. For its size, Israel has become one of the most remarkable contributors to the global fight against cancer anywhere on earth. At the Technion in Haifa, Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for working out how living cells mark their own proteins for destruction, a discovery that seemed abstract until it produced Velcade, a drug still given as a frontline treatment for myeloma across much of the world. At the Weizmann Institute, Zelig Eshhar spent decades teaching the body’s own immune cells to recognise and kill tumours, the breakthrough now known as CAR T cell therapy, which has pulled patients with blood cancers back from the edge when nothing else could. Eshhar died last year. His real prize, he once said, was the lives he saved.

A nation of barely 10 million people, born in war and seldom out of it, has turned its ingenuity to keeping strangers everywhere alive. It is the same instinct, in a different language, as the one that built the centre at Kensington.

The acts that say the most about Lowy cost the least. In 2013, to honour the father he lost, he paid to restore one of the railway wagons that had carried Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, and had it placed at the camp as a permanent memorial. In 2017 Queen Elizabeth knighted him. In November 2024 Israel gave him its Presidential Medal of Honour. He had earned that one long before, at 17, with a rifle in the Galilee.

In 2019 he made his home for good in the country he had once defended. When relatives of his were murdered at Kibbutz Be’eri on 7 October 2023, he was in New York, and caught the next flight back. The circle that had opened at a Budapest railway station in 1944 closed somewhere over the Mediterranean.

Here, then, is the measure of the man, stripped of the figures. A stateless teenager whom the century had marked for deletion lived to build a fortune, and then spent it teaching strangers’ bodies to fight the thing that kills them. His monument is not only the shopping centres that changed how a continent lives. It is also a laboratory in Sydney, the children who walk out of it alive, and a small country far away that has turned the memory of death into the saving of life.

That is his gift to the world: not just the malls, but the lives.