Dame Lesley Max: Speech at IHRD 2025

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Wellsford, New Zealand, 26 January 2025

Kia ora koutou, shalom aleichem and good evening to you all,

I would first like to thank Sheree and Perry Trotter for giving me the honour of speaking tonight at this important occasion, in conjunction with the exhibition of Auschwitz Today here in Wellsford, to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I cannot speak highly enough of the way in which Sheree and Perry carry the burden, which they have voluntarily assumed, of telling this dreadful story, and of honouring the memory of the people who suffered the greatest crime in recorded human history.

The day chosen is the day of liberation of Auschwitz towards the end of the Second World War.  For many people, so many years later, the name Auschwitz conveys little information.  Yet it is the best known of all the camps established by the Nazis to carry out Hitler’s intention of annihilating every Jew in Europe.

This process started as soon as the German invasion of Poland and the East got underway.  First came the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ – where Jews were herded into forests and fields and shot.  Others were packed into sealed trucks and gassed to death by carbon monoxide.

But all this was not efficient enough.  So in January 1942, high-ranking officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to coordinate the implementation of what they called ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Question’.  This was a euphemism for mass murder, for the annihilation, the extermination of every Jew in Europe.

I wish this desire to exterminate Jews had died with the Nazis.  It didn’t.  It is what motivates the Islamic Republic of Iran and its clients, Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis.  They don’t hide their purpose.

But back to the Nazis.  We know all about the Wannsee conference, because one copy of the Minutes was not destroyed.  I recommend a brilliant film, ‘Conspiracy’, with Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth.  The dialogue draws heavily on those Minutes.  Of the 15 top officials, eight had doctorates.  So they were Germany’s intellectual elites.  Many of us remember that fact as we witness some of the activities at universities in support of the Hamas massacre of Jews in Israel, on October 7th, 2023.

Wannsee was a brief, focused conference.  They were finished in time for a leisurely lunch, having decided the fate of those millions.  And they were effective in meeting their targets.  Not many escaped those meticulous plans.  They annihilated 90% of the Jews of Poland, 90% of the Jews of the Baltic countries, including my husband’s paternal grandmother, uncles, aunts and cousins; 90% of the Jews who remained in Germany and Austria, including my husband’s maternal grandmother and other relatives; 77% of the Jews of Greece;  75% of the Jews of the Netherlands – and so it goes on.  Six million in all.  Of that six million, some one and a half million were children.

It’s hard to comprehend that number.  My assembly hall at Takapuna Grammar held about 1000 young people.  It would take 1500 school halls of that size to hold one and a half million children.  Thought of another way, the number of Jewish children and young people killed in the Holocaust is greater than the number of children and young people living now in New Zealand.  Now, THAT is what a genocide looks like.

The extermination camps in German-occupied Poland were one of the outcomes of that Wannsee conference.

The names of the extermination camps – where Jews were herded directly from the cattle cars they arrived in, to gas chambers – are less well-known, for the simple reason that there were virtually no survivors.  Those names should be known:  Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek,  and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Auschwitz-Birkenau had two functions.  It was both an extermination camp and a slave labour camp.  There was a selection process when the Jews arrived, after days packed without food or water into railway cattle wagons.  So that’s men, women, children, babies, the elderly, the ill, arriving to a scene of horror – snarling dogs, orders barked in German, men with guns.

People over the age of 50, pregnant women, children, babies and their mothers were directed to the left, to death.  Others who could be worked to death through slave labour and starvation were directed to the right.  There they were stripped, shaved, had numbers tattooed on their arms, and were given a light, striped uniform, all they had to protect them from the Polish winter.

Those who survived found it difficult to communicate what it was like to endure this place.  I think it’s important to try to understand the day to day misery, the all-pervading hunger, the extreme cold, the degrading, dehumanising absence of provision for bodily functions, and always, always, the terror of death, on top of the grief of loss of family.

Few survived longer than a few weeks or months.  Selections for the gas chambers occurred frequently as the starvation, slave labour, brutality and sickness took their toll.

Some had another function in this hell that was Auschwitz-Birkenau.  That was, as human guinea pigs, subjects for medical experimentation.  That deeply moving video we just saw of Ben Steiner gives us insight into this diabolical enterprise.

I have personally known three women who survived this horror.  One, Sara, had arrived with her family at Auschwitz from southern Hungary.   A Jewish prisoner, working on the arrival platform, asked if the baby she was carrying in her arms was her own.  She said no, it was her sister’s.  “Then give the baby to your sister,” he instructed.  She did.  Sara and her other sister, her twin, were then directed to the right, while her sister with her two little ones, her mother and father, were directed to the left, which meant death within hours.

Sara survived because she was a twin and so had some utility for the infamous Dr Mengele, who performed grotesque medical experiments on twins.  Her twin did not survive the death march towards the end of the war.  Sara somehow survived, getting back to Hungary as a skeleton weighing 35 kilos.  Forty years later, I met her in her home in Israel, tenderly cradling a baby grandson, the tattoo on her arm bearing witness of when she was just a number.

The other survivors I know of Mengele’s fiendish experiments on children are two people who, many years later, became the aunts of my daughter-in-law.  Another sister, Judith, was murdered in Auschwitz, at about six years old.  The two who survived, Eva and Marta, have given extensive testimony.  Eva has written a book, called “Gazing at the Stars”.  In that book she tells about the suffering of the children at the hands of Mengele.  Children were subjected to agonising procedures.  Children disappeared.  Eva tells of opening a door one day and finding, to her horror, the torso of a child she knew, his amputated limbs stacked alongside him.  Amputations done without anaesthetic.

I won’t tell you any more stories of horror.  But I will say that I am incensed that a young woman who has a huge following online, Candace Owens, a young woman who is going to do an event soon in Auckland, mocks these victims of Mengele.  It doesn’t make sense, she says.  Why would anyone bother, she says.  It’s lies, she says.  And much more besides – not so different from Hitler’s and Goebbels’ slanders.

Eva is too frail now to challenge this callous, deceiving young woman, but her recorded testimony and her book, provide the truth.  If you want to learn more, just search on YouTube the names of Eva Slonim and her sister, Marta Wise.  Get Eva’s book, “Gazing at the Stars”.  In it, you will see a very famous photograph of a number of miserable children standing behind barbed wire.  The photo is a still from footage taken by one of the Russian liberators of Auschwitz, on the day we are commemorating here, in Wellsford, 80 years later.

Eva, who was 13, looked like an ill, haggard old woman, with a white headscarf over her dark hair.  Marta, who was 10, is standing beside her, with a white scarf over her blonde hair.

I think of the other people I have known, who survived Auschwitz, most of them the only members of their family to survive.  I think of the beautiful Zosia, who came to Wellington, and the Aucklanders - Lily and her husband Victor, Mancie, whose daughter died in Auschwitz, the extraordinary Sol Filler, Ika and Karl.  None of them are still living, but most of them had children and grandchildren.

What is absolutely remarkable is that those children and grandchildren, like their parents and grandparents, are positive, contributing citizens of this country.  I have never heard expressions of hate.  I absolutely honour the survivors I know for their dignity, their restraint, the good lives they have led.  That is a kind of a miracle.  Bob Narev, whom you will hear from soon, epitomises that dignity, that restraint and a good life, well led, as does his dear wife, Freda.

I want to end on a note of hope.  So there it is.  The fact that human decency and goodness could survive the hell of Auschwitz.  And the fact that you are here tonight, to learn, to understand, to remember, and, I trust, to bear witness against attempts at trivialising or denying this unique and massive crime.

Thank you.