Queen's Birthday Honours: Vera Egermayer

Vera Egermayer

Vera Egermayer has two homelands - New Zealand, to where her family emigrated in 1948 when she was a child to escape the memory of the Holocaust, and her birthplace, with its haunted past for them, to which she has returned.

In 1993, after 25 years of working for the OECD in Paris, she moved back to her birthplace to become New Zealand's honorary consul.

Today Ms Egermayer is made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit "for services to New Zealand interests in the Czech Republic".

The citation is a prosaic distillation of her work.

As a child, she was held at the Terezin Concentration Camp during World War II. Of the 15,000 children imprisoned there, only 100 survived.

In 1948, she came to New Zealand as an 8-year-old with her parents and 2-year-old brother.

"The reason for wishing to leave Europe was that virtually all our family members had been killed in the Holocaust, and we hoped to wipe out the memory of our own suffering in concentration camps by starting a new life in a young, democratic country."

Ms Egermayer stayed in NZ until she was 28.