KEY POINTS:
"Walk slower" was the best advice Clare Galambos-Winter ever received.
It was given to her by a Hungarian-speaking German soldier in the dying days of World War II, and it helped the concentration camp inmate to live.
The life stories of 83-year-old Mrs Galambos-Winter and fellow Auschwitz survivor Hanka Pressburg, 86, are told in the opening exhibition at Wellington's Holocaust Research and Education Centre, which will be officially opened tomorrow.
The centre will record the stories of survivors who moved to the Wellington region, as well as stage exhibitions relating to the Holocaust.
Mrs Galambos-Winter survived several months in Auschwitz, Poland, before being marched to work as a slave labourer in a munitions factory, understood to be in Germany.
During the long walk, the soldier advised her and her aunt to slow down and make their bid for freedom.
"We didn't know where we were going. We knew we were going to die anyway so we gave it a sporting chance."
A group of women got away and hid in some bush. When they awoke they found they were in no-man's-land, with German and American soldiers firing over their heads.
After the shooting stopped they moved on to a haybarn, where they were liberated the next day.
"A tank opened up and a Yankee soldier popped up from the top of the tank. He looked at us and said, 'What are you?' Not who, because we had no hair. We didn't look like women; we hardly looked like humans."
The camp dress Mrs Galambos-Winter was wearing that day is part of the centre's opening exhibition.
"It was an accident I survived," she said. "My 14-year-old brother, who was a beautiful big sporting boy, was murdered, and my 45-year-old parents. It's not very old.
"I think if it had been another two days, I wouldn't be talking to you, I wouldn't be talking to anybody, because I would have been dead from starvation."
After migrating to New Zealand, Clare Galambos married a Wellington doctor. She played first violin for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for 33 years.
"It is not the life I hoped for ... but just having a life at all is something.
"When you think of the young people who say they have such awful, awful lives where they can't have things. I would have been so glad for a piece of bread, but you can't compare it. I can thank New Zealand for keeping me sane. And my violin."
Hanka Pressburg spent 3 1/2 years in various camps, including Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Her parents, brother and husband did not survive.
"At Auschwitz conditions were indescribable. We came in winter, we got out of the train, the SS, the dogs, shouting 'Raus Raus'. We got out and walked and walked," Mrs Pressburg said.
"We went through the showers. We were very lucky - the showers were real water. That was when I got the number [tattooed on her arm].
"I arrived there in December 1943 and then through another selection with Dr [Josef] Mengele in June or July 1944 when the women were sent away in a goods train.
"That was the last time I saw my husband."
Mrs Pressburg was sent to Hamburg to clear rubble left by Allied bombing before eventually being liberated from Bergen-Belsen.
She returned to Prague, where she bumped into her future husband, George, in the street. They had worked in the same office before war broke out, but he had fled Czechoslovakia and joined the Free Czech Army.
