Lessons of the Holocaust shared by survivor

Jack Efrat, at home in Auckland, says he feels no hatred for Germans but wants them to know what their country did so it will never happen again. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

You can make positive use of horrific experiences, says Holocaust survivor Jack Efrat, 78, or you can let them consume you.

The Mission Bay man has opted for the latter and has spent years sharing his World War II story with schoolchildren.

Late last year he was a guest of honour at 1200th anniversary events in the German city of Magdeburg, where he was interned during the war.

German media documented his two-week, all-expenses-paid visit, with one organiser pointing out that living links with the Holocaust will soon be gone.

Mr Efrat found the visit emotional. But the life story he shared with students there dwelled not on atrocity but on the kindness of strangers.

These kindnesses and "plain luck" helped him survive.

Mr Efrat is one of the few Latvian Holocaust survivors - of the country's pre-war Jewish population of 95,000, barely 4000 were spared.

A survivor's story is invariably horrific and a newspaper precis can't do it justice. But in short, Latvian Jews were marginalised into a ghetto in Riga, the capital; Mr Efrat, an only child, was 15 when his parents were killed, with 25,000 others, in a 1941 massacre.

Their bodies lie in mass graves.

Mr Efrat ended up in Poland's Stuthof death camp, then lied that he was a locksmith so he could be transferred, via the notorious Buchenwald, to a work camp attached to a Magdeburg ammunitions factory.

In the end-of-war chaos, German reservists marched the workers towards another camp, during which they were attacked by American planes. Several of Mr Efrat's friends were killed in front of him; he was hit in the back by shrapnel.

He ran to the cover of a forest, but after several days hiding there was found by a German soldier. This soldier, Friedrich, was a deserter and took care of Mr Efrat, getting his wound tended and finding him a bed.

After several years in a displaced persons' camp after the war, Mr Efrat migrated to South Africa and moved to New Zealand two years ago. He is divorced with two children.

He tells of other wartime kindnesses in a compelling, 325-page autobiography he would like to see published.

There was the Gentile family who took the young Jakob into hiding for six months, and the German foreman at Magdeburg who discovered Mr Efrat knew nothing about locks, but protected him anyway.

Mr Efrat gets great satisfaction from his audiences' engagement. And he notes that Germans 60 years after the war's end "are completely different people. They want to hear the stories. When you were persecuted, you could not talk to them ... one wrong word, one wrong smile, and you were a goner".

The first question German audiences ask, he says, is: What happened to Friedrich? Mr Efrat doesn't know. The second query is: Do you hate us? No, he replies, you cannot be responsible for the actions of your grandparents - but you must know what happened. Never again.

Mr Efrat, who speaks Yiddish, German, English, Russian and Latvian, had no qualms about returning to Magdeburg, his second visit in recent years; it was, he explains, a place of liberation.

He feels differently about Riga. His first post-war visit was in 1991 and he won't return.


* To contact Jack Efrat, email julie.middleton@nzherald.co.nz