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........

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