These days, “resilience” has become a somewhat hackneyed word. But not for Inge Woolf. The Holocaust survivor, who found love, prosperity, acceptance and influence as an émigré to New Zealand, once declared that resilience was “the hope to see there is light besides all the darkness”. It is apt yet bittersweet, therefore, that the posthumous publication of her memoir is entitled Resilience: A story of persecution, escape, survival and triumph.
In the wake of current global tensions, Woolf’s call to “respect people no matter how different they are from us” requires the resilience to never give up the fight, and to heed her warning to “be careful who you elect”. She never forgot that Adolf Hitler was the legitimately elected leader of Germany.
Born in Vienna in 1934 to parents Evzen and Grete, Ingeborg Ponger would joke in later years that her “timing was all off” because anti-Semitism was sweeping through Europe, and the Nazis were in control of Germany at the time of her birth. Her assimilated prosperous Jewish family celebrated religious holidays and festivals but saw themselves first as cultured Viennese citizens.
Her paternal grandparents came from the small town of Krajné in present-day Slovakia, and her maternal grandparents, David Stiassny and Rosalia Landesmann, came from neighbouring towns in what is now the Czech Republic. They were drawn to the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for work opportunities, as Stiassny was entrepreneurial and not afraid to take chances on new products. When sewing machines came onto the market, he and his sons took them into the villages, where they taught large groups of women to use them, helping to change their lives. When motorbikes became popular, the family sold them as well.
Then the Anschluss occurred, and Hitler’s Third Reich occupied Austria.
“I was three years old when Hitler’s parade entered the city,” Woolf writes, “watching my happy neighbours hang swastikas out of their windows to welcome Hitler’s troops into Vienna … and I was afraid.
“The amazing thing is that fear has stayed with me and every time I talk about it, my stomach goes into a knot.”
One night after the Nazis came to power, Brown Shirts ran down her street, knocking on her door and demanding that her mother’s brothers open their shop, which was then looted without recompense. The family became poor overnight.
Her father had a keen memory of experiencing pogroms during his childhood in Czechoslovakia and upon hearing that the Austrian chancellor had handed power over to Hitler, he asked his family, “What are we waiting for?” He made immediate preparations to leave for Prague, since he was still a Czech citizen, and the family lived there for a year, putting together the documents necessary for departure. He and his wife also decided to convert to Christianity and did so at a Lutheran church in the town of Myjava, which was converting Jews to try to save their lives.
Escape to London
Woolf’s parents obtained a holiday visa to visit England and gave her a gold cross to wear as they prepared for their exit. They left on the last day they could use their Czech passports – the next day, Germany occupied their country.
On the train to Berlin, her parents told her to lie down and go to sleep so as not to draw attention to themselves, knowing that the papers that said they were Christian wouldn’t necessarily have saved them.
In Berlin, they embarked on a plane to London and once they were above the clouds, she began looking “for God and the angels”. And so her life as a refugee began. Her father enlisted in the Czech brigade of the British Army, while she lived with her mother in a London bedsit. During the London bombings, she hid beneath her eiderdown comforter, afraid that the Germans would come and shoot her.
She was evacuated to Maidenhead with other schoolchildren during the worst of the London bombings and spent the last year of the war in Edinburgh with her mother. She did not know she was Jewish until the war was over because her parents believed she was safer not knowing her true identity.
After the war, her father returned home a broken man. Woolf was scared of him as he would sit by the fire and talk to himself in Czech. In 1951, at the age of 38, her mother became pregnant with her brother Johnny. Their economic situation began to improve as her mother opened a market stall, selling children’s clothes inspired by those she made for her young son. But Woolf’s father never recovered from his post-traumatic stress and died in 1955 of a burst gastric ulcer.
Seeking a better life for Johnny, Grete started searching far-flung destinations offering freedom and opportunity. Her brothers, Paul Stanton and Teddy Stiassny, had emigrated to New Zealand and told her, “Come. It’s a good country.”
They arrived in Auckland in 1957. Woolf says New Zealand welcomed them from the start and she felt she belonged here.
In 1958, she moved to Wellington to take a job as a buyer for the DIC department store, which was a Jewish establishment, founded and managed by the Hallenstein family. She soon met the talented independent photographer Ronald Woolf, who had wild curly hair and a wicked sense of humour. He teasingly pursued her until she finally agreed to go out with him.
The couple married in 1959. Their son Simon, also a photographer and now a Wellington regional councillor, was born in 1960 and their daughter, now Deborah Woolf Hart, followed in 1962. By then, Woolf had also proudly become a New Zealand citizen.
Ronald and Inge were partners in business as well as life, and their photography studio flourished. “Ron was passionate about photography and taught me how to see,” she writes. In turn, she taught him about good business practice.
But in 1987, Ronald was killed along with his friend, pilot Peter Button, and property developer Dion Savage when their helicopter flew into power lines, blacking out all of Wellington.
Their deaths coincided with the October sharemarket crash, and keeping the business going gave Inge a focus and a way to channel her grief. To ensure trust was retained in the Woolf studio, son Simon followed his father into the business, and Inge continued to work there until her retirement. She flourished but never remarried; no one could ever replace Ron.
The idea for the memoir was born in August 2004, when nearly 100 Jewish graves in the cemetery at Mākara were desecrated, and the prayer house burnt down.
“We had buried Ron there,” Woolf writes, “… a place of exquisite peace in the hills.”
Work to be done
While many in the Jewish community were scared and didn’t want to speak publicly about what had happened for fear of further attacks, Ron was well known, she reasoned, and so was she. “So I knew that I could have an impact and I knew that there was work to be done in teaching tolerance and understanding.”
The Holocaust Centre of New Zealand opened in 2007 and Woolf was founding director. She began giving lectures and speeches about her wartime experience to schoolchildren and civic groups around the country.
Hart has followed her mother into a life of civic duty. A lawyer by training, she is chairing an independent review of New Zealand’s electoral laws and is also chair of the Consumer Advocacy Council. She serves on the Human Rights Review Tribunal and chairs the board of the Holocaust centre.
Hart says that when she was growing up, her mother didn’t really talk about her wartime experience. Like many Holocaust survivors, Woolf preferred to look forward rather than back. “To me, she was a great friend … we had a very strong relationship.”
Hart’s mother and grandmother Grete were both role models. Both lost their husbands at a relatively young age, and both went on to become successful businesswomen.
When Hart had a severe childhood illness, Woolf rarely left her side, and their relationship developed to be more like sisters than mother and daughter. Woolf also supported her when she was bullied by other children. “When you’re Jewish, the schoolyard bullies unfortunately target you. I had to learn very quickly to stand up for myself.”
But after the desecration of Ron’s grave, the social landscape changed. Woolf realised there was still work to be done to ensure that New Zealand remained a tolerant society. “She felt safe here,” says Hart. “That’s why it was such a rude awakening when my father’s grave was desecrated. The culprits were never discovered.”
The idea for the memoir was born when Hart went with her mother and brother to Vienna, Hungary and Poland in 2010 to visit the places her mother had not seen since childhood. They wanted to document their family history. Woolf’s maternal grandparents were deported by cattle train and murdered at the Sobibor death camp, and her Aunt Rosalie was deported and killed at Auschwitz. But “great chunks of our family tree are missing, the names of the lost remaining unknown”.
Last chance
Woolf started on her memoir many times, covering different aspects of her life. Then she took a course in writing family histories, but became increasingly busy with her work at the Holocaust centre. So the book remained incomplete.
“By the end of 2020, Mum’s doctors told her she had months to live,” says Hart. “Always practical and realistic, Inge said that everyone had to die some time. And yet her book, which had been an important but an on-and-off-again project for many years, was sitting incomplete, so I offered to finish the book for her. She loved the idea, so I sought to carry out her plans for its publication, not realising what that task would entail.”
Woolf’s health declined fairly rapidly and they tried to ensure she saw as much of the completed memoir as possible. “As she got weaker, she would read the copy and give me a thumbs up or add a simple word.”
The day before she died, Woolf was able to see a facsimile of the cover, which was dark and foreboding, in keeping with a book about the Holocaust. “But the book isn’t really about the Holocaust,” Hart explains. “It’s really a New Zealand story. My mother was a victim of the Holocaust but her experience was not dominated by what she lost, but what she became.”
After Woolf’s death at age 86 in early 2021, Hart discovered a photo of her that was taken on her honeymoon, in front of Aoraki/Mt Cook. She suggested it as a more positive image for the cover.
“We chose that photo because it speaks of the numerous possibilities that my mother discovered after restarting her life in New Zealand. She was such an ardent New Zealander. She wanted to contribute to this country. Even though she never saw the finished book, my brother and I knew that she would have absolutely loved it.”
All the proceeds from sales will go to the Holocaust centre, as Hart and her brother paid for its publication.
“My mother would be happy about that as she wanted to leave a legacy for the Holocaust centre … She was a very powerful woman … five foot nothing but capable of charmingly negotiating everything or anything she wanted. It pained her to tell her story. She found it physically difficult. At the end of her life, she needed her children to stand behind her because she felt she couldn’t do it alone any more,” says Hart.
But she says her mother knew she had to speak up because her story had power.
She was fierce in her belief that all New Zealanders have the responsibility to look after the country’s democracy and human rights. “And that responsibility started with her.”
Resilience: A story of persecution, escape, survival and triumph, by Inge Woolf (Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, $35)
