Significance+to+New+Zealand+of+the+Holocaust

=Significance to New Zealand= http://www.holocaustcentre.org.nz/for-educators/teaching-resources/nz-holocaust-timeline http://www.holocaustcentre.org.nz/remember/refuge-in-nz

=New Zealand Holocaust Timeline = This timeline covers events that took place in New Zealand from 1933 to 1945, and after the Holocaust from 1946 - 2011.

1933

 * A report is submitted to the National Government by Major-General William Sinclair-Burgess, calling for a six year programme to strengthen the country’s land and air forces.

1935

 * Labour government, under Prime Minister Michael Savage, is elected.

1935-1939

 * Trade between New Zealand and the Third Reich increases over this time period. Between 1935 and 1938 exports of wool from New Zealand to Germany grow fivefold.

1936-38

 * Refugees seeking to flee Europe apply for entry into New Zealand. Approximately 727 refugee entry permits are granted.

1936

 * In response to the German re-militarisation of the Rhineland, the president of the Labour Party describes Hitler’s action as ‘a protest.’

1937

 * New Zealand signs a most-favoured-nation trade agreement with Germany. It does this despite British opposition to the agreement.
 * Walter Nash visits Berlin. In Parliament Mark Fagan, the leader of the Legislative Council, praises the welcome Nash was given in Germany.

1938

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">New Zealand attends the Evian Conference.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Prime Minister Savage telegrams Neville Chamberlain congratulating him on the outcome of the Munich Conference.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">After the events of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) Viscount Galway, Governor-General, states at a reception:
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">‘The events in Germany, particularly in the last few days, almost cause one to despair of peace.’
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">In October it is reported by the Speaker of the House of Representatives that New Zealand is willing to open its doors to Czechoslovakian refugees, after Prime Minister Joseph Savage states that aid will be give to the refugees.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1939

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">New Zealand newspapers denounce the German seizure of Czechoslovakia, one calling it ‘a great and terrible wrong.’
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Germany invades Poland in September. New Zealand declares war on Germany.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">In November Deputy Prime Minister Peter Fraser travels to London as New Zealand’s representative at a meeting of the dominions, to attempt to persuade Britain to open negotiations with Hitler in a ‘peace offensive.’ The move was one of futility given that a month earlier Chamberlain had firmly rejected the idea of negotiations with Hitler.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1943

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Prime Minister Peter Fraser publicly expresses sympathy over the plight of Jews in Nazi Europe and his interest in the development of Palestine as a Jewish state.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">A Pro-Palestine Committee is formed in New Zealand, made up of various public figures and others, including clergymen.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1944

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">First Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Commemorations are held throughout New Zealand’s Jewish Community.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1945

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Paddy Costello, a New Zealander stationed in Moscow, is the first Western reporter allowed in to the camps. He tours Auschwitz and Majdanek and published his report in March.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Returning New Zealand war veterans publicly launch a campaign demanding the expulsion of all enemy aliens, including Jewish refugees, who arrived in this country after 1939. The campaign causes alarm in the Jewish community.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1946

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Constitution of UNESCO, signed on 16 November 1945, came into force on 4 November 1946. New Zealand is the second country to sign.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">New Zealand is given representation on the UNO Social and Economic Council’s Special Committee on Refugees and Displaced Persons.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1947

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">New Zealand is the twelfth nation to join the International Refugee Organisation. Deputy Prime Minister Walter Nash signs the I.R.O. Constitution.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1948

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Nation of Israel is founded. New Zealand official stance towards its foundation is supportive.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1949

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">New Zealand signs, but does not ratify, the UN Genocide Convention. The Convention was introduced in 1948 as a response to the Holocaust.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1950

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">An incident is reported in which a young Polish woman jumped overboard on a refugee ship bound for New Zealand. This was because of ill treatment, possible anti-Semitism, by other passengers.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Representatives from New Zealand’s Jewish community travel to London in July to participate in a ten-day conference to consider proposals on closer liaison between the Jewish communities in Britain and the Dominions. The conference discussions include unified action against antisemitism, post-war rehabilitation, and the care of Jewish war orphans

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1951

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Yom HaShoah commemoration is inaugurated. New Zealand’s Jewish community recognises the commemoration and Yom HaShoah is commemorated every year thereafter.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1956

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Hungarian Uprising brings about an increase in anti-Semitism in the country. Refugees from Hungary arrive in New Zealand.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1958

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">F.L. Wood’s volume of Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War is published. In it Wood notes that New Zealand was more in favour of appeasement of Germany over warfare than many had initially believed.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1961

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Trial of Adolf Eichmann takes place in Israel. The New Zealand Jewish Chronicle publishes reports from an exclusive source at the trial.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1969

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">New Zealand Nazi Party founded. The Party lasted for a number of decades but no longer exists.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1976

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">First prosecution in New Zealand for distributing anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi material takes place.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1977

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">It is reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union are to begin resettlement in other nations. A small number are to settle in New Zealand. Many refugees fled the USSR because of an increase in anti-Semitism.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1978

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">New Zealand ratifies the UN Genocide Convention.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1981

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">International gathering of Holocaust survivors takes place in Israel. Some New Zealand Holocaust survivors contribute to or participate in the gathering.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1983

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Two former New Zealand soldiers and POWs at Theresienstadt, Gerald Fleming mills and Thomas Mottram, petition the government for recognition of their illegal incarceration and suffering, and requesting compensation for the injuries they still suffered due to their treatment.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Their petition includes a list of 25 known New Zealand soldiers who were incarcerated in concentration camps during the war and who as of the 1980s received some form of disability pension for injuries suffered due to their treatment.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1985

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Fortieth Anniversary Commemoration takes place in Wellington. The Prime Minister, other key figures, and members of the Jewish and wider communities take part. Holocaust exhibition takes place at Wellington City Library.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1987

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Raoul Wallenberg Memorial plaque is established in Auckland near the Symonds Street Cemetery. The plaque is unveiled in a ceremony covered by theNew Zealand Jewish Chronicle.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The documentary Shoah Screens at the New Zealand International Film Festival.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">Late 1980s

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Auckland Second Generation Group (for children of Holocaust survivors/refugees) is established. The group is the only of its kind in New Zealand.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1990

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Wellington Synagogue 1990; Display Opens. It is located at the Wellington Jewish Community Centre on Webb Street.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">New Zealand 1990 celebrations take place nationwide. As part of the celebrations Thomas Kenneally speaks at the Wellington Jewish Community Centre about his book Schindler’s Ark.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1991

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The controversy over Nazi collaborators and war criminals potentially residing in New Zealand hits its peak. Television news programme Frontline screens an item entitled Nazi Criminals in NZ?

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1993

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Holocaust Memorial is established at the Greys Avenue Synagogue in Auckland. An addition to the memorial is unveiled the next year.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1993-1995

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Women Holocaust Survivors Oral History Project takes place. Funding comes to the project because of 1993 being the Centenary of Women’s Suffrage.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1994

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Holocaust memorial is unveiled at Waikumete Cemetery, Auckland. In 1997 ashes from Auschwitz are interned at the memorial.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1995

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Holocaust Memorial is unveiled in the Jewish section of Makara Cemetery, Wellington. The unveiling ceremony is attended by members of the Jewish community.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Fiftieth Anniversary commemoration is held at the Israeli Embassy in Wellington.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1996

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Waitangi Tribunal publishes the Taranaki Report. The Report used the term ‘holocaust’ when describing the treatment of Taranaki Maori during the colonial period.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1996-1999

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Children of Theresienstadt travelling exhibition visits New Zealand. The exhibition comes with an educational booklet and travels around the country until 1999.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1997

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Holocaust Gallery at Auckland War Memorial Museum opens. The Museum provides school groups with an educational booklet regarding the Holocaust and the Gallery’s contents.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The first travelling Anne Frank exhibition comes to New Zealand and tours nationwide.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">1998

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The exhibition Precious Legacy: the Nazi Confiscation of Jewish Treasures is exhibited at Auckland Museum. The exhibit contained treasures from the Jewish Museum in Prague, which was saved from destruction in 1942 when the Nazis invaded the city and seized the items.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">2000

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Tariana Turia remarks to a Psychologists Conference regarding a Maori ‘holocaust.’ The resulting media and public argument revolves around the issue of freedom of speech in academia.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Joel Hayward’s Master of Arts thesis The Fate of the Jews in German Hands becomes available after being embargoed since 1993. The resulting scandal regarding the nature of the thesis and whether it is tantamount to Holocaust denial lasts until 2003.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">A scandal erupts at Waikato University when it emerges that a mature student, Hans Joachim Kupka, planning a PhD about the German language in New Zealand, was discovered to be a frequent poster on far-right websites of anti-Semitic Holocaust denying comments.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">2003

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The book Mixed Blessings: New Zealand Children of Holocaust Survivors Remember was published. It is a compilation of reminiscences from people whose parents were either refugees from Europe or survived the Holocaust, and also includes family recipes from each contributor.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">2004

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Desecration of Jewish Graves in Wellington. The desecration is seemingly brought about by the arrest of alleged Mossad agents for trying to obtain New Zealand passports.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">David Irving, the well-known British Holocaust denier, is banned from entering New Zealand.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">2005

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">John Tamihere, then-Labour MP, is recorded in an interview making comments regarding how he was ‘sick’ of hearing about the Holocaust.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">2007

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Wellington Holocaust Education and Research Centre opens. It is an outgrowth of the original Holocaust gallery and the opening ceremony is attended by many, including Governor General Anand Santayanand.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">2008

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Roel van Leuween’s Master’s thesis regarding an obscure far right group removed from Waikato University’s shelves because the main person of focus in the thesis, well known far right figure Kerry Bolton, laid an official complaint with the University.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Concert commemorating the seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht(the Night of Broken Glass) takes place in Wellington.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">2010

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The exhibition Anne Frank: a History for Today opens. It travels throughout the country until 2012.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #294457; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;">2011

 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Wellington Holocaust Research and Education Centre becomes the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand.

[|Home] > Remember > Refuge in New Zealand

[|Annie and Max Deckston]
Annie and Max Deckston were born in Russia and arrived in New Zealand in 1900. They farmed in the Hutt Valley for some years, then moved to Wellington where they made a considerable fortune in real estate and from their business as pawnbrokers. The were childless, but used their wealth to bring 20 children to New Zealand from orphanages on Bialystok, Poland. They set up a home for them in a large house in Berhampore, which became an island of orthodox Jewish observance in the city. [|Read more...]

By Ann Beaglehole, 2007 (updated 2013)
This essay[1] looks at the response of the New Zealand government to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi dominated Europe in the years before World War II and to survivors of the Holocaust in the years immediately following the end of the war. In the 1930s and 1940s New Zealand preferred British settlers and placed strict controls on the immigration of racial minorities such as Jews and Chinese people.[2] The small number of Jewish refugees who gained refuge in New Zealand before and after the war encountered prejudice and suspicion of cultural differences. Given attitudes to non-British immigration at this time, it is in a way remarkable that New Zealand accepted any Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors at all. In the 1930s and 1940s, non-Maori New Zealand society was extremely homogenous and most New Zealanders were ignorant about and isolated from the rest of the world (except Britain) in a way difficult to imagine today. They were very proud of their British heritage and took for granted that the most desirable immigrants to New Zealand would be British, or as much like the British as possible. This changed gradually as New Zealanders gained experience of other countries during the war and through their encounter with successive waves of immigrants arriving in the country. [|Read Ann Beaglehole's essay]

By Ann Beaglehole
An account of Jewish refugees interned on Somes Island during the Second World War with Germans, and other enemy aliens with Nazi sympathies. It describes the security concerns about aliens in general, the classification of refugees and the experience of Jewish refugees is the internment camp. [|Read more...]

September 2008
During my research into the Registration of doctors in New Zealand for a paper presented to the Wellington Medical Historical Society in 2003, the sequence of events for doctors applying to come to New Zealand as a result of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews became clear. I had a particular interest because my parents Dr. Georg Lemchen and Dr. Ruth Lemchen (geb.Mai) had arrived in New Zealand with 2 small children in 1935, leaving behind the Nazi regime which would not allow them to practice medicine, and all the rest of their families. In 1933 in Germany, Hitler began the first discrimination against Jews. This included denying Jewish doctors the right to health insurance practice. This meant they had no access to the hospitals (except for Jewish ones), and they were unable to study medicine. Those who COULD began to leave Germany. Some went to Edinburgh where a special one year course had been set up. 500 left Germany in the first year. Dr. Alfred Sternberg was one of those. According to an interview with him in Wellington, New Zealand the Dominion newspaper on December 24 1934 reports that 100 went to Great Britain, 200 to Palestine, and the rest to France, Italy and Switzerland. Some applied to come to New Zealand. The first one, in 1934, came in under the 1924 Act (the NZ details will be spelled out a little later), and was asked to sit the final examination in Dunedin, as were all foreign graduates who came to NZ. Then came several with the added Edinburgh degree which was accepted in New Zealand. Dr. Sternberg was one of those. He registered in New Zealand in 1935. [|Read more...]

= Holocaust survivors =

Each Holocaust survivor has a unique and individual story. Each survived against all odds, through a combination of luck, determination, and resilience. Every one of these stories is a testimony not only of those who were left alive, but also of those who were killed. Some survived because they were fortunate to be admitted to New Zealand before the war and could escape the atrocities, others survived concentration camps, labour camps, ghettos, yet others were saved by gentiles at great risks to their own lives. The survivors came from Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and all corners of Europe. The losses of homes, families, a whole world, a culture, are all integral parts of these stories, but they also tell of regeneration, starting a new life in a new country, adjustment, accommodation, assimilation. These survivors all ended up in New Zealand one way or another and made their contribution to life in this country. Stories also include accounts by New Zealanders who witnessed the Holocaust and stories of gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews. In Jewish tradition the command to remember, //Zachor// is absolute, but this memory must be accompanied by action of moral and ethical intent. These stories provide a human perspective to the experience of victims. They make the unimaginable tangible. It is up to the reader to draw moral conclusions about a historical event that almost defies understanding.

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[|Hanka Pressburg]
Hanka Pressburg (1920-2011) was born in Czechoslovakia. She survived nearly four years in Nazi concentration camps, but her newly-wedded husband, Fricek Weil, her brother and parents were murdered. She was liberated from Bergen-Belsen by the British at the end of the war. She returned to Prague, and in 1947, married George Pressburg and moved to New Zealand to start a new life. [|Read more...]

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[|Clare Galambos-Winter]
Clare Galambos (1923 – 2014) was a young violin student in Budapest at the Fodor music academy in March 1944. Jailed a few days after the German occupation, she was later transported from the Szombathely ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After five weeks she and her aunt were among the thousand Hungarian women selected for slave labour at a munitions factory. They returned to Hungary after the war, and in 1948 they both left Hungary for New Zealand, where Clare joined the then fledgling National Orchestra and played on with the NZSO for 32 years. [|Read more...]

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[|Vera Egermayer]
Vera Egermayer (1940 - ) was born in Prague. When Auschwitz was liberated, Egermayer was in a children's home in Prague, because her parents had been interned. Though the war was turning against Germany, systems to round up and exterminate Jews still operated. She was four years old when she was transported by train to Terezin, without her parents. Egermayer's parents survived the war and the family immigrated to Wellington in 1949. As a child survivor of the Holocaust, she has given talks around the world. She was the New Zealand consul in Prague for 18 years. [|Read more...]

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[|Bob Narev]
Bob Narev (1935 - ) and his parents were arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, in August 1942, when he was seven years old. Bob’s father died in Theresienstadt; he and his mother, Gertrud, remained there for two-and-a-half hungry years until February 1945, after which they were sent to Switzerland. The rest of their immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Bob and Gertrud immigrated to New Zealand in 1947. He went on to study law and complete a degree. Bob is a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit and serves on a number of Holocaust charitable trusts. He and his wife Freda, also a survivor, are actively involved in Holocaust education. [|Read more...]

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[|Eugene Hirst]
Eugene Hirst, known to his friends as Gene, was born in Budapest. He was the youngest of four children of Edward Hirschberger and Franciska (neé Stahler). Before the Second World War he lived in Czechoslovakia working as a dental technician in the University Hospital Clinic in Prague. [|Read more...]

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[|Max Rosenfeld]
Max Rosenfeld (1905-1989), born in Czechoslovakia, was a registered architect and, in later years, a member of the N.Z. Institute of Architects. In 1939, he and his wife and young child managed to procure exit papers and a New Zealand visa, and they left Europe just before the war broke out. They settled in Auckland, and he later published several books, among them A Mere Twenty Years, The Story of the Czech Republic and The New Zealand House, which ran into 13 editions. [|Read more...]

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[|The German Unger Story]
In 1937 my father, his brother, their parents and their maternal grandparents escaped from Nazi Germany, just as the ports were closing to civilian travel. This is not their story as they had a family that survived to remember them. This is the story of the other Ungers, the family that it has taken us 70 years to piece together most of the information on their fate. [|Read more...]

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[|Sol Filler]
Sol Filler, (1929-1999) was born in Poland. He survived harrowing persecution in his home town, and three years in Auschwitz-Birkenau labour camp, then spent another four years in a displaced persons camp in Germany post-war. Seventy-four members of his family were killed under the Nazi regime. After the war he moved to Sydney, where he met his future wife Ruth, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany whosefamily arrived in New Zealand in June, 1938, on board the SS Remuera. [|Read more...]

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[|Karl Wolfskehl]
Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948) was a German Jewish poet, author and intellectual. He was in his 70th year when he arrived in New Zealand, a war refugee forced to start a new life at a time when most people can retire comfortably. Wolfskehl found it difficult to acclimatise to the relatively less developed cultural and intel­lectual environment in Auckland and yet he continued to write and to write in German, eventually producing some of his best work here.Upon his death in June 1948 he had arranged for his grave inscription to read “exul poeta” to signify his Jewish, Roman, and German roots. [|Read more...]

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[|Marie Blaschke]
Marie Vandewart Blaschke (1911-2006 ) was born to a music-loving Jewish family in Berlin, and she became an accomplished cellist at a young age. When the Nazis rose to power, she, like all Jewish musicians, was only allowed to perform in Jewish orchestras. She became engaged to the social worker Alfons Blaschke who, although not Jewish, was persecuted by the Nazis because of his political beliefs as a pacifist. The couple was lucky to find a farmer in Hawkes Bay who was prepared to sponsor them. Marie arrived in New Zealand in and in 1941 she received news via the Red Cross of the death of her parents in the Holocaust. She and her husband settled in Auckland in 1977, where she took up a post as a cello teacher at the university. [|Read more...]

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[|Frank Monk]
The summer of 1944 was a time of storm. At the time the shattered and demoralised German armies were retreating on all fronts, two grisly performances of Verdi’s Requiem Mass were performed at the concentration camp for Jews in Terezin, near Prague. The artists, the choir, the orchestra and the conductor were Jews from Central Europe performing before an audience of inmates of the camp. [|Read more...]

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[|Hans Johnson]
It was Friday 10 November 1938 when I made my way to the London hotel to join fellow Jews to travel by sea to Canada, overland and then to New Zealand and Australia.Posters of the afternoon papers shouted, ‘Synagogues burning’ and ‘Pogrom in progress’. Thus started my emigration to New Zealand. It had begun in Berlin about Pesach (Passover) when my entry permit to New Zealand had arrived. Full of joy, my parents and I set out to book a passage in perhaps a couple of months’ time, but after going from shipping office to shipping office, it was plain that November would be the earliest booking with Canadian Pacific Railways. [|Read more...]

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[|John Parfitt]
John Parfitt of Newlands, Wellington - is an Auschwitz survivor. He was not Jewish, gypsy or homosexual. He was a regular New Zealand soldier and, at the time, an escaped POW. [|Read more...]

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[|Egon Schoenberger]
Egon Schoenberger's diary reveals the extraordinary story of how he escaped World War II and the Nazis. [|Read more...] <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #141414; display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> __**READING AND QUESTIONS FROM Promised New Zealand: Fleeing Nazi Persecution, by Klier Fryer.**__ <span style="background-color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">__Evidence of the Significance of the rise of Hitler to New Zealand and New Zealanders.__ __Evidence of the Significance of the Holocaust to New Zealand and New Zealanders.__

<span style="background-color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">__This information has come from__ Klier, Fryer, Promised New Zealand: Fleeing Nazi Persecution, Otago University Press, 2009, Dunedin.


 * Anything in [ ] is written by me (Mary van Rossen) either to explain something or make the language easier to read.

Where you see that I have put in … that means that I have left out information in my typing that does not add to understanding the topics above. ||

1930 “In the autumn of 1930, a young New Zealander enrols at the Institute for Foreigners and shortly afterwards in a teacher training course at Berlin’s Humboldt University. His name is Reuel Anson Lochore. New Zealanders are infrequent visitors to Germany in the early part of the 20th century…

Lochore does not find it too hard to leave New Zealand in 1930: ...the country, like so many others worldwide, has nose-dived into a deep economic crisis as a result of Black Friday on the New York Stock Exchange in 1929. The mood [in New Zealand] is wretched - there is no trace of the slight economic buoyancy of the 1920’s that had revived the New Zealand economy for a time...

Lochore is enraptured [blown away] by the Reich’s capital [Berlin]. The economic downturn there is comparable to that in Wellington. Bankruptcies, inflation and unemployment dominate daily life - yet the cultural scene and atmosphere of this bustling metropolis fascinate him.

Just a few days after his arrival, knowing only a few scraps of German, [he] is caught up in an altercation [fight] between National Socialists [NAZIS] and Communists, which are common in 1930. He is thronged by an angry mob and does not know what the commotion is all about. A young man approaches him with a leaflet and bystanders warn him not to accept it under any circumstances. When ...he takes it - just out of curiosity - a man turns to him and asks whether he is a Communist. “No,” answers Lochore, “I am a foreigner.” At that, men start pummelling from all sides. He panics.

“I pitched my whole weight against them and managed to clear a bit of space around me,” he told the New Zealand historian Michael King, in an interview with Metro magazine decades later. “I was ready to have an argument and said clearly,” “‘I do not understand what you want’”. I was ready to prove it, but a man immediately behind me said, “Look, get out of here!” he cleared a way through the crowd for me to get away. I left. I was not seriously injured. However, it gave me my first inkling of what was brewing in Germany.”

Reuel Lochore actually had no idea what was fermenting there. In this respect he was no different from the majority of Germans at the time, or from the Jewish citizens who could not have conceived [dreamed of what would happen in their country] in just a few short years.

__Questions:__

1.This is an example of the unsettled political situation in Germany after WW1 while the country was still a democracy called the Weimar Republic. Who were the two different political parties that had supporters fighting on the street?

2.What was the economic situation like in Germany when Lochore went to Berlin?

3.How did the economic situation contribute to social problems for people living in Germany, just as it had in New Zealand at the same time?

4.Read through the following paragraph structure to understand how you could use the extract in an internal or external assessment that asks you to write about the causes and consequences of an event significant to NZers.

<span style="background-color: #ff0000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">A KEY HISTORICAL IDEA that is shown by this extract about Lochore’s experiences is that:

<span style="background-color: #ff0000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">__Some New Zealanders found themselves affected by the violence of Germany’s political landscape as the Nazi Party and the Communists sort to gain the support of German voters prior to Hitler becoming the German Fuhrer.__ AN <span style="background-color: #4a86e8; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">EXPAND/EXPLAIN STATEMENT ABOUT THIS is: <span style="background-color: #4a86e8; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is because New Zealanders travelled to Germany for education at the university of Berlin during the 1930’s. A <span style="background-color: #ffff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">GENERAL EXAMPLE OF THIS is: <span style="background-color: #ffff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">For example Reuel Lochore had travelled to Berlin to begin his German language study and teaching degree in 1930 and he was caught up in a street fight between opposing political parties where he found himself punched because he had wanted to read a leaflet that explained the Communist Party’s ideas. He also found himself punched when he said he was a foreigner. A <span style="background-color: #00ff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">SPECIFIC EXAMPLE/ EVIDENCE OF THIS is: <span style="background-color: #00ff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">Evidence for this comes from Freya Klier’s book, __Promised New Zealand: Fleeing Nazi Persecution__ in which Lochore recounts this experience to New Zealand Historian Michael King. He stated that when asked if he was Communist he answered that he was a foreigner and at that “men started pummelling him from all sides….I was not seriously injured. However, it gave me my first inkling of what was brewing in Germany.” AT THIS POINT IF YOU WERE WRITING AN EXTERNAL ESSAY YOU WOULD CITE OR SAY WHERE THE INFORMATION CAME FROM BY WRITING (Klier, 2009). IF YOU WERE WRITING AN INTERNAL YOU WOULD CITE OR WHERE THE INFORMATION CAME FROM BY INSERTING A FOOTNOTE (no.1) AND THEN RECORD THE AUTHOR, TITLE, PUBLISHER, WHERE PUBLISHED AND DATE OF PUBLICATION AT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR TEXT. You would then carry on this paragraph with other examples of how New Zealanders had been affected by Nazi Germany apart from being soldiers and then complete the paragraph by <span style="background-color: #ff00ff; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">ANALYSIS along the lines of : <span style="background-color: #ff00ff; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">These examples provide evidence of/illustrate/show/tell us about how New Zealanders were affected by Hitler’s Germany aside from being soldiers in WW2. YOU WOULD THEN FINISH UP YOUR PARAGRAPH WITH A <span style="background-color: #ff9900; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">SO THEREFORE / SIGNIFICANCE statement like: T <span style="background-color: #ff9900; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">herefore one can say that the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany has significance for some New Zealanders that came into contact with its violence or policies.

<span style="background-color: #ff0000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">STATEMENT (KHI) <span style="background-color: #4a86e8; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">EXPAND EXPLAIN STATEMENT <span style="background-color: #ffff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">GENERAL EXAMPLE <span style="background-color: #00ff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">SPECIFIC EXAMPLE/EVIDENCE <span style="background-color: #ffff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">GENERAL EXAMPLE <span style="background-color: #00ff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">SPECIFIC EXAMPLE/EVIDENCE <span style="background-color: #ffff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">GENERAL EXAMPLE <span style="background-color: #00ff00; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">SPECIFIC EXAMPLE/EVIDENCE <span style="background-color: #ff00ff; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">ANALYSIS OF WHAT THE EXAMPLES POINTS TO <span style="background-color: #ff9900; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">SO THEREFORE / SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT OF CONCLUSION OF PARAGRAPH.

Use this structure in English as well if your paragraph is building up evidence to support your point.

1933 “Adolf Hitler has saved us” When the National Socialists [NAZIS] came to power in Germany on 30 January 1933, Peter Muenz recalls that he was skating on Lake Krumme Lanke in Berlin: “One of my classmates ...clapped me on the back and said, “‘You know Hitler has become Chancellor!’” I went home and told my mother, who of course had already heard and was horrified. A cloud immediately descended on the home and on our friends as well - Jewish and non-Jewish. They were all left-wing [socialist political ideas]. Then very quickly we decided to emigrate.”

[Peter is 12] deeply affected as he thinks of himself as a Communist. He has frequently been knocked around because of this - no one else has Communist leanings at his school...which makes things difficult. The parents of his classmates tell their children that Communists are terrible people who want to ruin Germany and say that Peter deserves a hiding. Fortunately word has not yet spread that Peter is Jewish as well.

...Peter’s grandfather, who was loyal to the Kaiser, owned a textile factory… During World War 1, Peter’s father was a doctor with the German forces….he was cultured and well read and came from a long-established Jewish family. He was a pacifist [didn’t believe in fighting], a Social Democrat and a founder of the Worker’s Samaritans Association. [Samaritans care for others].

...Peter’s lat schoolboy memory of Germany is of the Reichstag fire on 23rd February. Many Berlin schools organise school trips to the city centre the following day. Peter’s class also goes to see the gutted Parliament building, which is supposed to serve as a warning to show what the Communists would do to the whole of Germany if they were to come to power. “Adolf Hitler has saved us,” [Peter’s] teacher remarks. “Otherwise it would be like this all over Germany.”

Questions: 1.How old was Peter when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany? 2.Was Peter’s family right-wing or left-wing in their political and social beliefs? Left Wing means socialist eg Welfare and care is organise by the government to give to people in need. It also means Communist where all ownership of factories and farms, and the profit from them, is shared with all the people of a country. 3.What date was the Reichstag fire? 4.Who did Hitler blame for the fire?

...15-year-old Hans Jottkowitz belonged to the German-Jewish Youth League, a liberal group whose members value being Jews in Germany. They see themselves as Germans first of all and [see that this makes them different from ‘Zionists’ who wish to set up a separate Jewish state in Palestine].

...The Jewish community owns a house in Lehnitz not far from Berlin and Hans Jottkowitz is spending a beautiful spring weekend there with his youth group. The young Jewish girls and boys have not properly grasped [understood] the changed political climate in their country.

...the young people are lying in bed late at night and doors are flung open - the SA Sturmabteilung is having a raid. Men in brown uniforms take possession of the building, yelling. Petrified and paralysed with fear, the young people watch…

What else could happen to them? Hans is in Year 11 ...at… secondary school, and is intending to study law. However his parents urge him to leave school:

We spoke about it openly at home. My parents said, “It is better to have an occupation that is in demand throughout the world.” So I left ...In the last weeks there I hardly had any interest in lessons and dropped behind a bit. When it came to report time, my Christian fellow students told the teacher to “Give Hans some higher grades!” One of my classmates rang me and apologised for joining a Hitler Youth Group. Despite this we remained friends, even after I left school. I considered becoming a chef, however there were no apprenticeships open to me as a Jew. 1933 Reuel Lochore is still in Germany.

He has mastered the German language and his image of Germany has been shaped by the cultural outings and courses that were offered by the Institute of Foreigners. ...He is warmly welcomed and is entertained by Nazis and so he does not perceive the increasing number of torch-lit processions and demonstrations as threatening.

It appears to escape his notice that all the Jewish lecturers [at his university] are being dismissed from Bonn University, where Reuel ...is enrolled. …[he doesn’t notice that] in place of an internationally oriented education, “Our Genetic Inheritance as Nordic Peoples” suddenly appears as part of the curriculum…. There is a [movement towards studying] Volk themes such as “homeland and race.” The art of teaching is transformed into training, a love for peace is transformed into a readiness to take up arms in defence of the homeland. Inferior genetic make-up is set against superior racial origins and there are many posters and family trees with photos of alcoholics, the ‘feeble-minded’ and criminal families on display, which also warned against liberal Marxism [socialism]. The Hitler Youth, its subdivision the Junvolk, and the Stormtroopers (SA) regularly parade in the grounds of the Mainz Citadel [where Reuel’s institute or university is situated.] A new spirit of popular nationalism [love for one’s country or race] is being created through song, dance and gymnastics.

Ofcourse there is singing, dancing and gymnastics in communities in NZ too. However, it is the first time that Reuel Lochore witnesses such military-style parading.

The land is split into two different worlds, one for those who “belong” and one for those who do not. With [society changing] friendships and work relationships unravel…

1933 - Don’t buy from Jews! On 31 March, Joseph Goebbels calls for the boycott of Jewish businesses starting at 10 am the following day. Barely two months after Hitler seizes power the first stage of a systematic policy to eliminate jews from public life is introduced. The Nazis use the boycott of German goods by the West, which was intended as a protest against anti-Jewish propaganda, as a pretext. Jewish businessmen are intimidated into quickly [giving up] their businesses through open terrorisation and a [campaign of public anti-Jewish propaganda].

...in Hildersheim ...on 1 April ...500 Jews [are] in the city. Unidentified persons smash windows of numerous Jewish shops….Men in SA uniforms … stand with their legs wide apart holding placards ...with “Don’t buy from Jews!”, “Curses on anyone who buys in this Jewish temple!” or “Jewish business - they are our downfall.” __Questions:__ 1.How is Reuel being treated differently to the German Jews? 2.What is he not noticing about the changes to his lecturers and the curriculum at his institute/university?

1934 Wool sales to Germany from New Zealand go through London.

George Forbes has become NZ’s Prime Minister and Adolf Hitler is the Chancellor of Germany. The Germans feel discriminated against: wool, butter and apples worth 33 million Reichsmark are imported annually from NZ but this barely features in NZ trade statistics because goods are transferred via the London market, which disadvantages the GErmans. In 1934, a German trade delegation travels to Wellington to try once more to obtain an equitable trade balance: more than 10 percent of Germany’s wool imports come from NZ, while in [NZ] a strong aversion [dislike] to importing German goods prevails [is still happening at this time].

Questions: 1.Do NZers want to buy goods from Germany in the 1930’s?

1934 After the Nazis come to power, 40,000 Jewish citizens hurriedly leave the country to escape persecution. Many of them are young and unmarried; there are also those who are further endangered by their political involvement. Among the 250 writers who decide upon exile [leaving] ...Else Lasker-Schuler ...is publicly beaten in the street by SA men with a steel rod shortly before her departure. In her 1932 play, Arthur Anonymus and his Ancestors, the poet prophetically foretells the persecution of Jews; “They will burn our daughters at the stakes as in medieval times, Belief in witches has been resurrected - from the rubble of the centuries. Flames will devour our innocent Jewish sisters.”

...News of the atrocities [against Jews] in the spring of 1933 went round the world and unleashed horror and harsh protests. ...Hitler limits the authority of the SA and [states] only the economic destruction of the Jews is intended. The temporary ebb in brutalities and also a sudden upturn in the [German] economy in which a few Jews [still] participate despite the the [discrimination, brings] hope in many that they can somehow survive this terrible time in Germany.

In particular, the Jews who distinguished themselves as frontline soldiers in World War 1 are under this dangerous illusion. ...The total of emigrants from 1934-37 ...never exceeds 25,000.

Anti-Semitism, which in the meantime has become a state doctrine, has caused people to think about their German-Jewish identity. ...The shock of abrupt rejection now leads to a return to Jewish roots and to Jewish community life. Synagogues [Jewish churches] fill, many begin to research their family roots, learn Hebrew and find out about Jewish traditions. ...by 1934 nearly every Jewish family reads one of the almost sixty Jewish newspapers and magazines still published in Germany at the time. The imposed segregation welds the persecuted people together.

...In January 1934, the membership of the Cultural Association of German Jews, which is under Gestapo surveillance, has grown to 20,000 members. Its network absorbs actors, producers, singers and musicians who have been forced out of their professions by the Nazis. Hans Jottkowitz …[attends] concerts and theatre productions. Many of his Christian friends envy him because artists appear whom an “Aryan” public is not allowed to see.

Questions: 1.What does the writer mean when they write that the “imposed segregation [separation of the Jews from the rest of the Germans] welds the persecuted people together?

2.What was Jottkowitz able to see and hear because he was a Jew?

13-year-old Peter Dane from Berlin ...has to produce proof of “Aryan” ancestry to his secondary school. ...He discovers that his maternal grandparents are of Jewish extraction [part Jewish]. He is extremely surprised: Jews do not play a part in his social network. His entire family are baptised Christians. His [ancestors] have been active for generations in the Protestant church.

Peter Dane is the offspring of a family of lawyers; his father is a lawyer and both his grandfathers. The most famous of them being his maternal grandfather, the barrister Doctor Bruno Marwitz, who is regarded as an expert in German patent law. In the 1920’s he won a case for Adolph Hitler about the rights to Mein Kampf. Now grandfather is suddenly supposed to be Jewish - with no stake in society. Bruno Martwitz has to give up official legal practice… one of his friends, also an elderly gentleman, was dragged off to barracks and abused for days by the SS. Peter Dane sees the man who was tortured crying at his grandfather’s desk, an image that he can never forget.

Reuel Lochore, the young NZer is now in his 4th year in Germany. ...He has no contact with Jewish families or others who are persecuted. The National Socialists who invite him to their events and gatherings espouse [talk a lot about] big idea and appear to the young man from the other side of the world to be energetic and dynamic.

…..Peter Muenz has moved with his mother and sister from Switzerland to Florence. The city is an oasis of refuge for emigrants from Germany and Austria….Peter Muenz goes to a boarding school in the mountains near Bolzano in the north of Italy. It is a liberal minded school for refugees from Germany. Peter returns to Florence in the school holidays.

While the Nazis in Germany constantly strengthen their position, the fascist New Zealand Legion is in a state of dissolution as 1934 closes.

__Questions:__ 1.What came as a big surprise to Peter Dane aged 13? 2.Bruno Martwitz had been a lawyer that had defended Hitler’s rights to his book Mein Kampf. What happened to him when Jews were boycotted? 3.What had happened to Martwitz’s friend? 4.Who does the NZer, Reuel Lochore, think is dynamic? 5.Where has Peter Meunz’s family shifted to to escape Germany? 6.Where does he go to boarding school?

1935 The “Spontaneous wrath of the people”

In 1935 ...Peter Dane’s father divorces his Jewish wife, the daughter of Bruno Martwitz, the barriser. 14-year-old Peter no longer feels at home in this country but it is not so easy to sever one’s roots and leave…

As the number of unemployed in Germany shrinks to 1.75 million and the first stretch of the Reich’s autobahn [motorway] is opened by Hitler, Nazi propaganda [is believed by] many Germans and Jewish citizens are further [hated and feared and pushed out of society] by Germans.

An increasing number of professional associations and organisations - from the pharmacists association to soccer clubs and rifle clubs - introduce an Aryan paragraph and exclude Jewish members. Swimming pools prohibit entry to Jews. Hotel guest-houses and entertainment venues make it known through signs and advertisements that Jews are not welcome. “Spontaneous” outbursts of ‘the people’s anger” are staged.

In July, the regime orchestrates five days of anti-Semetic demonstrations in Berlin.

In Dortmund, labels with “I am a traitor of the people - I have just brought from Jews is written and stuck on the backs of people who have made purchases in Jewish shops. Faced with these conditions, more and more Jews [give up] their business. By the middle of 1935, just under a quarter of firms run by Jews have ceased to operate.

The radicalisation of anti-semetic policies reaches new heights in September, when the so-called “Nuremberg Race Laws” are announced. They include the notorious “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour,” which prohibits German Aryans from marrying Jews and having sexual relations with Jews outside of marriage...The “Reich Citizenship Law” ...robs Jews of equal rights as citizens and officially degrades them as second-class people.

Anyone with their eyes open has realised by now that it is only a matter of time before [the taking of] and “Aryanisation” of Jewish property will occur.

...the questions of how long it will be before Nazi discrimination spreads beyond Germany’s borders is becoming [a concern].

__Questions:__ 1.Why is it looking like it is only a matter of time before Jewish property is taken from them?

Taken from Klier, Fryer, Promised New Zealand: Fleeing Nazi Persecution, Otago University Press, 2009, Dunedin.

Peter Dane - moves to New Zealand as a young adult having acquired a degree at Leicester University with First Class honours in English. The country appeals to him and his wife straight away. The family spends the first week after their arrival in a tent on remote beaches, where they are captivated by the beauty of the NZ landscape. Peter starts his job in the English Department of the University of Auckland. The generally high standard of living in NZ, which also extends to the lower levels of society, impresses them and fits in with their own ideas of social justice: even simple workers earn enough money to afford a boat or a bach at the beach. There is not a great pay disparity between academics and workers.

Hans Jottkowitz (Hans Johnson) Hans Jottkowitz, who since taking citizenship in NZ is called Hans Johnson. As a Jewish pupil in Berlin, Hans is treated decently by his teachers and fellow pupils; he leaves Germany a week before Kristallnacht, when his father is taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After Jewish welfare organisations helped to arrange for him to flee to NZ and pay for his fare in a luxury Jottkowitz arrives there penniless but he soon finds work as dyer in Dunedin. When war breaks out, he is dismissed, because of his German origins, and is sent into the country as a farmhand. Finally he gets a job as a textile weaver in Milton and alter works as a master dyer in Invercargill.

What weighs heavily on Hans, however, is loneliness and self-reproach for not managing to get his parents out of Germany in time.

In 1959 he and his wife move to Auckland, where Hans works for almost twenty years as a master dyer. His wife Patricia becomes interested in the Jewish religion and the family becomes part of the recently founded Jewish Progressive Synagogue, Beth Shalom. ...Hans Johnson thanks NZ society for accepting him when he was in such great need in his own way: for eleven years he does voluntary work for the Citizens Advice Bureau.

Hansi and Fred Silberstein Probably no one among the NZ refugees experienced as many facets of the Nazi regime’s atrocities as the siblings Hansi and Fred Silberstein. In 1938 the children see their father - whose store the Kaufhaus Boga was first wrecked, then confiscated - return home completely broken after being locked up in a concentration.

Two years later, the Silberstein family has to vacate their flat.

In 1942, the Gestapo drag 14-year-old Fred off to a building by the Grosser Wassnee to work for SS officers. At the end of February 1943, he is deported to Auschwitz concentration camp.

At around the same time, his sister Hansi is forced to embark on the same journey from the other end of the city. She is deported directly from the munitions factory where she is doing forced labour, to Auschwitz. While the SS herd wagon-loads of people into the gas chambers, Hansi Silberstein, who looks “Aryan” is selected on the platform to work as a clerk at the camp’s dental clinic. She is the only one of her transport [wagon] to survive.

How Fred survived, he does not know to this day. He is likewise “selected” but in his case the selection is by the sadistic doctor, Josef Megele, who subjects him to cruel medical experiments for months on end. When he attempts suicide, fellow prisoners intervene and save his life. Seemingly miraculously, Fred also survives the evacuation of Auschwitz concentration camp and the captivity in the Dora-Mittelbau camp.

Hansi Silberstein likewise survives one of the long “death marches” in which so many thousands perish. She arrived at the Bergen-Belsen camp and survives the murderous conditions there before being finally liberated by the British.

When her brother Fred is freed by the American troops in Nordhausen and taken to a hospital, he is closer to death than life but recovers quickly. He lives where he pleases for a period of time.

When the Silberstein siblings are reunited in post-war Germany, they decide to take up an invitation from relative in NZ. The very thought of emigrating to the country furthest from Germany gives them renewed courage to go on living.

...Like others, Hansi experiences deep gratitude towards NZ. She therefore spends seven years assisting the Citizens Advice Bureau as a volunteer, where she acquires skills in asking people the right questions in order to support them appropriately. These encounters are very significant for her.

Hansi never talked with her children about what happened to her in Germany at that time. When they were small, they asked her about the meaning of the number tattooed on her arm - she told them that it was her telephone number so that she could see it better. She later tells her grandchildren the same thing.

Fred works first of all as a joiner after his arrival in NZ and later works towards his childhood dream job. He learns to cook and is trained in restaurant management.

In 1963, Fred Silberstein is in a position to open his own restaurant in Auckland.

In 1985 he closes his restaurant but he wears a distinction for his culinary skills on his lapel which was awarded by the Queen. Still Fred does not take it easy. As long as it is possible for him healthwise, he helps needy people through the Citizens Advice Bureau. In June 2006, he receives another honour from the Queen - this time the Queen’s Service Medal (QSM).

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