One of the things that Marika Pogany would often say to her friend of nearly 40 years, Matthew Mullamphy, was: “Matty, no one’s perfect.”
But she was, Mullamphy says, about as close as people come.
“She was very calm and cool and lovely. Just a terrific person,” he says. “Her beauty always struck me – that beautiful, big, radiant smile.”
Pogany, 82, was among those killed on Sunday at a Hanukah event at Bondi beach, when two gunmen allegedly murdered 15 people in Australia’s worst terrorist attack.
Pogany, a mother and grandmother, was a regular volunteer and had hand-delivered 15,000 meals to Jewish seniors via a kosher meals-on-wheels program.
She was a dear friend to the former president of her homeland of Slovakia, Zuzana Čaputová, and was in attendance at Čaputová’s inauguration in 2019. She was also a keen bridge player, spending every Tuesday afternoon at the Harbourview Bridge Club in Bellevue Hill, which is where she came to know Mullamphy, who owns the club.
“When I first moved to Sydney she was already on the bridge scene,” he says. Pogany was a “good” bridge player.
“I mean, maybe she wasn’t going to play for Australia, but she was always a fine player, and understood the game and loved the game.”
She also had a lot going on in her life.
“She was always so vivacious and she was so beautiful … She was always doing things, always travelling,” he says.
Mullamphy says he hadn’t seen Pogany for a few weeks. When she didn’t show up to the club’s Christmas party on Monday, one of Pogany’s friends approached him and asked if he’d heard from her.
The friend showed Mullamphy a photograph showing Pogany sitting in the front row of a bank of chairs at the Annual Chanukah Festival.
“I tried calling her, and the moment I called, it went straight to voicemail … so obviously every man and his dog was trying to call her, then I called her other very close friend, and she’d heard nothing, and they normally speak daily,” he said.
About half an hour later the friend called back and confirmed the worst – Pogany was one of the dead.
Since then, the tributes have flowed in, including from the Centre of Activity Sydney (COA), a group supporting Jewish seniors in the city, where she had volunteered for nearly 30 years.
Pogany was “not just a long-serving volunteer” but “a source of warmth for thousands of people”, the COA wrote in a statement.
As well as delivering food through the meals-on-wheels program, for which she won the “Mensch Award” from the Jewish Communal Appeal charity in 2019, Pogany helped with events, cooking, packing parcels and visiting people in their homes or in hospital. She would go into people’s homes and change lightbulbs, if that’s the assistance they needed, said the group.
She did it all “with her quiet smile and her steady kindness … without fanfare and without ever wanting attention”, said the group.
“Most of all, Marika showed us how people should be cared for … She never let anyone feel alone.”
Pogany had lived in Australia for decades, but returned to Slovakia each year, said Čaputová, the former president of Slovakia and a close family friend of Pogany’s.
“Sydney was a refuge for her, far from the evils of fascism and communism. After 1989, she returned to Slovakia every year, and was present at all the important events of my life, including the presidential inauguration,” Čaputová wrote in an emotional tribute on Instagram.
Pogany had faced many hardships in her life.
“I could write a book about her fate and the fate of her family. She told me about it for hours when I took her on her first visit to Auschwitz,” wrote Čaputová. “Apart from her mother and uncle, who returned from Auschwitz, all the other members of this important Rožňavska family did not survive the Holocaust.”
Tragically, Bondi beach, the place that had become her refuge, became a site of terrible violence that claimed her life on Sunday.
“She died on her favourite Bondi beach,” wrote Čaputová. “Marika will be greatly missed.”
