Robert Narev ONZM: Destined for Auschwitz
INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
WELLSFORD 26 JANUARY 2025
Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena kouto katoa shalom and good evening ladies and gentlemen
My brief address is titled Destined for Auschwitz, a topic which, in my case, is followed by a question mark for reasons which will become apparent shortly.
I was born in a small town in central Germany on 6th October 1935, exactly three weeks after the promulgation by the Nazis of what became known as the Nuremberg Laws. While initially discriminatory only against the Jewish population of Germany, those laws effectively established the foundation of the Holocaust and the systematic state-organised and executed murder of six million Jews in occupied Europe.
I was an only child, clearly because the mid and late 1930s were not a propitious time for Jewish parents to have children in Germany.
My father was a high school teacher, soon deemed to be unsuitable as a Jew to teach Aryan students and my mother’s career as an opera singer was cut short for similar reasons in accordance with Nazi ideology.
There followed 5 years in Frankfurt under conditions which must have been a most stressful and indeed traumatic time for adults, compelled as we were to limit our movements to a small part of the city and to wear the Judenstern, the Jewish star, of which the one on my jacket is an original example.
Then in August 1942 the order came for us, together with over 1000 other Jews, to assemble at the local railway station, to be transported across the border into Czechoslovakia.
The journey finished at a railway junction some 3 kilometres from what turned out to be the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, to which we had to march in the summer heat with the few belongings which we were allowed to bring with us.
The town had previously served as a Czech army camp, housing some 5000 soldiers in barracks, which became the cramped living and sleeping quarters for never fewer than 40,000 Jewish deportees. The men were separated from the women and children and all were placed in large dormitories consisting of two or three-tier bunks.
My two elderly grandmothers died after a short time there and in the following months my father did not survive an operation carried out by no doubt skilled Jewish surgeons but with little medical facilities and equipment.
I come now to my speech title Destined for Auschwitz, including the question mark to which I referred earlier. Unbeknown to me in my two and a half years in the camp as a 6 to 9 year old, Theresienstadt was not designated as an extermination venue, but rather a transit camp to which a total of some 150,000 Jews were taken from various European countries between 1941 and 1945.
The vast majority of these, or rather of those who survived the deprivations of the camp, were regularly transported to Auschwitz and to their virtually inevitable death.
After only a short time with my mother, I was transferred to what was euphemistically called a children’s home, housing youngsters from a variety of European countries, to the extent that Czech became the lingua franca, the common language for all of us.
There was a continual arrival of new occupants, the majority of whom were more often than not there one week and dispatched to their fate the next, so that the forming of even short friendships was a rarity.
The basically unanswerable and therefore unanswered question for me, even today, is why I remained in the home for two and a half years, while children around me invariably disappeared, indeed why I was not destined for Auschwitz.
Was it the vagaries of fate or divine intervention that kept me there, was it that privileged status was given to me by reason of the fact that my father had been awarded the Iron Cross second class in World War 1 for fighting valiantly for the Fatherland which had now deserted him or that my mother was required to contribute to the Nazi war effort by working as a slave labourer in a camp factory and, finally, was it one of these which enabled my mother and me to be freed to Switzerland 3 months before the end of the Holocaust rather than succumbing to a typhus epidemic which erupted in the camp after we left and which took many lives of inmates who had remained there.
I digress from my story for a moment by mentioning that my wife Freda, to whom I have now been married for 67 years and who regrettably was not able to join us this evening, is also a Holocaust survivor, having been hidden from the age of three by a kindly Catholic family in Poland after both her parents had been murdered either by the Nazis or local sympathisers. It is worth recording that, 75 years after those events, three generations of descendants of that courageous woman were presented in Poland with a prestigious Israeli award, granting to the lady the posthumous distinction of being named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Are there therefore obligations incumbent upon people like my wife and me as survivors of the Holocaust? There are those who attempt, more or less successfully, to blot out or to be silent about their experiences and sufferings and then there are those who, like ourselves, who feel a duty to ensure that the millions who perished are not forgotten, that the lesson of the Holocaust should be conveyed to those who would listen, so as to give emphasis to the dictum of the 18th century British philosopher Edmund Burke when he said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
Thus we have both spoken of our experiences to over 120 school and adult groups over the last 15 or so years, thereby making a small contribution to the growing realisation also in this country, of the importance of Holocaust education, a realisation to which perhaps even Her Majesty the Queen came in my case when compiling the New Year’s Honours list 5 years ago.
I cannot of course testify from personal knowledge that 6 million of our people were murdered during the Holocaust. I leave that to the records which the Nazis themselves largely kept. I can only hope that, with our efforts, we keep alive the memories of my father Erich, my two grandmothers Emma and Agnes, my uncle Albert, his wife Edith and teenage son Hans Peter, my father-in-law Yakov, my mother-in-law Kora and my sister-in-law Esther, a list small in itself but hopefully enough with those provided by many others to at least give pause to the diatribes of doubters and deniers.
I hope that I have also been able, at least in part, to answer the question of why I was not destined for Auschwitz and thus able to speak to you this evening.