My father was a bit of a magician. When I was little, he would come home after work at his tailor shop and conjure coins from the ears of the neighbourhood kids on a Vancouver summer evening. I didn't understand then that, a few years before I was born, he'd
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, signs of the past in the present
When I was 13 my Kiwi mother packed up my sister, brother and me and took us home to New Zealand. Dad was meant to follow. In researching what happened to him in Canada after we left, I found an official document with a devastating note: "Wants to go to New Zealand".
He never made it. Many did. The theme of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand's public commemorations in Auckland, Napier, Wellington and Christchurch this year is the resistance and resilience of displaced persons who started again, going on to make significant contributions in a new land.
Artists, musicians, architects, the German writer Karl Wolfskehl… It was a treat for a girl who'd landed up shipwrecked on Milford Beach in the homogenized culture of 60s and 70s Auckland to occasionally meet people like Prague-born photographer Frank Hofmann. I mentioned my father's background, but the talk soon turned to other things. It was a time to look forward, not back.
Viennese philosopher, Karl Popper, wrote what Michael King called "the most influential book to ever come out of New Zealand", The Open Society and Its Enemies, while waiting out the war in Christchurch.
There's much that still resonates in an age of MAGA and fake news. "The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism," he wrote, "the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police and at a romanticised gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human."
A small number of refugees were accepted by New Zealand before and after the war – about 1100. As historian Ann Beaglehole has written, "Edwin Dudley Good, Comptroller of Customs, in the mid 1930s, was quite explicit in his interpretation: 'Non-Jewish applicants are regarded as a more suitable type of immigrant.'"
Those who did make it were still battling the odds. They helped transform the local culture, as have refugees and displaced persons throughout history.
But the past doesn't stay put. Fueled by chaotic times, anti-Semitism and racism is on the rise, as seen in the white supremacist trappings among those who attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, incited, incredibly, by the President.
The Christchurch mosque attacks of March 15, 2019 and life in the time of Covid have showed us – and the world – how powerfully all of us in Aotearoa, from here and from everywhere, can do the mahi together in tough times.
The strength and grace of our Muslim community over the sentencing of the mosque attacks perpetrator, and the support they received, turned what some feared might be used as a platform for hate into an occasion that offered a valiant response to intolerance: unite as a community, tell our stories, speak out.
The legacy of New Zealanders displaced by the horror of the Holocaust and their descendants goes on. My father's story ended as tragedy, but my children and grandchildren have demanded that I also see it as a story of resistance and resilience. He jumped and fought and survived. He went on the make a new family who won't forget.
Diana Wichtel is a journalist, author of the memoir, Driving to Treblinka, and serves on the board of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. Centre patron Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy and Auckland Mayor Phil Goff speak at a memorial event this evening at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Southern Atrium.