Boyd Klap at the Anne Frank exhibition at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. He stands behind a scale model of the Anne Frank house.
Boyd Klap at the Anne Frank exhibition at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. He stands behind a scale model of the Anne Frank house.
Lindy Laird meets a man who is helping young New Zealanders learn about the evils of discrimination.
Boyd Klap, CNZM QSO, was a 13-year-old growing up in Holland when the Germans invaded the country and would occupy it for another five years.
He remembers children having to hand over their school books and have them returned with pages missing, history texts blacked out, and a Nazi SS (from Hitler's elite political soldiers corp, Schutz Staffel) officer installed as school principal.
The synchronised blades of the propaganda, spy and persecution machine sliced through the fabric of Dutch people's life, whether Jewish or not.
Increasingly inhumane restrictions and demands were imposed on Jewish people for the first two years, and then the mass scale disappearances started.
''My neighbours were Jews,'' Klap, now 92 years old, said. ''Their windows were smashed, Swastikas were painted on their walls.
''Whole families started going missing. I didn't understand what was happening, I didn't know where they went. We were under the impression that they were sent to labour camps, I had no idea that there were extermination camps.''
Later his family would learn that out of 82 of their neighbours who were Jewish, only four survived.
Klap — his name Boudewijn shortened to Boyd, which Kiwis could say, when he moved here in 1951 — is the man who has brought two internationally touring exhibitions about Anne Frank to New Zealand and Australia.
Boyd Klap at the Anne Frank exhibition at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. He stands behind a scale model of the Anne Frank house.
The retired Wellington resident agreed to be chairman of the Anne Frank Travelling Exhibition and manage the New Zealand leg of the first tour for, oh, around three months. He's had the job for three ''amazing'' years.
''Then Amsterdam (where the exhibition originates) said, 'Boyd, this is so successful why don't you take it to Australia for five years?'.''
Now he is in charge of the second exhibition, Anne Frank - Let me be myself, which is currently showing at Whangarei Museum for several months during its three year New Zealand tour. Klap, also chairman of the Holocaust Centre in Wellington, was in Whangārei last month for the launch.
The Holocaust - the genocide during World War II of millions of Jews, Gypsies and other ethnic minorities - is discrimination at its worst, he said.
''We must not forget the Holocaust, it was the most horrific thing that has happened in the world.
''Discrimination in any form is wrong. What we're doing with this exhibition is focusing on education, using Anne Frank's diary and the Holocaust to help inform young people about discrimination and bullying."
He cares greatly for the future of ''children, and their children''.
''I have a lot of faith in young people. I think a lot of them are more 'green' than my generation. I am concerned about the materialism today, in individuals and business.
''To me the family, whānau, the community is everything. Companies used to be an extension of the family, the bosses knew everyone's name, the names of their children.
''Companies are now organisations with a main focus on growth and profit, not on the people working for them.
''Civility has changed, too. That's a shame.''
Dubbed ''the grand old man of the insurance business in New Zealand'', in 2011 Klap was made a Companion of the Order of Merit in the Queen's Birthday honours, for services to business and the community.
His business career started at the very bottom. Arriving in Wellington with wife Ria in 1951, he thought perhaps farming was for him.
He was already a ''failed tea farmer'', the plantation life in Indonesia not working out politically or personally for the young Dutch man with a degree in tropical agriculture.
Instead, desperate for employment, he took the lowliest of jobs in insurance.
''I started on my pushbike collecting premiums for a small commission. I would go door to door, collecting 10 shillings here and there. I rode my bike all over Wellington. I would take it on the bus to some places I couldn't get to easily, like Wainuiomata.
''That's how I started out in the business. I noticed things that could be done differently, improvements. I worked my way up.''
He became chief executive of Prudential New Zealand and of the Life Offices Association, chairman of the New Zealand Police Superannuation Fund and of the reverse mortgage company Sentinel, chairman of Partners Life, and the Life Education Trust.
He worked with the Government on superannuation policy and planning and has represented New Zealand at a related OECD conference. He has been chairman of the Greater Wellington Promotion Council (now Positive Wellington) and the Wellington Civic Trust, a board member of Lambton Harbour Management, and was involved in organising the 1990 celebrations on Petone Beach.
Klap is the founder/vice patron of the New Zealand Netherlands Foundation and was responsible for the 1992 Abel Tasman Anniversary celebrations.
He is a philanthropist and a gentleman. From his and his late wife Ria's decision to settle here, New Zealand is home to four generations of their family.
