Winona Ryder, Antisemitism and the Holocaust

Screenshot from The Plot Against America , HBO

My first memory of Winona Ryder was in the film Little Women, an adaptation of one of my favourite childhood novels of the same name. Ryder played the feisty tom-boyish character, Jo, who bucked the conventions of the day when it came to expectations for women. Ryder had already made a mark by acting in films like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, and has, since then, appeared in a string of movies. She has never been far from the news, having gone through a bad-girl phase, which included being arrested for shop-lifting, struggled with mental health and drug addiction, and had a few high profile relationships, such as her first with Johnny Depp, whom she met at the tender age of 17.

More recently Ryder’s Jewish background has been the focus of publicity. Daughter of authors Cynthia Palmer and Michael D. Horowitz, Ryder’s real name is Winona Laura Horowitz. Her godfather is psychedelic guru, Dr Timothy Leary. Her father’s family emigrated from Russia and Romania and many family members died in the concentration camps. 

In a recent interview the actress told of overhearing stories about the camps and the fears those stories invoked. She worried that ‘someone would knock on the door and drag them off to be murdered’ and often slept in the doorway of her parent’s bedroom, terrified that they might somehow be taken away.

Ryder’s experience of antisemitism within the movie industry ranged from being passed over for a period piece, because she looked too Jewish to be caste in a ‘blue-blooded’ family, to, at other times, being told she was too pretty to be Jewish. A spat with actor Mel Gibson also resurfaced when Ryder revealed that he had once asked her if she was an ‘oven dodger’. 

Screenshot from The Plot Against America, HBO

Ryder featured in the recently premiered HBO mini-series, The Plot against America. Based on the Philip Roth novel, this series presents a counterfactual history that imagines what might have happened to America’s Jews had the antisemitic aviation hero Charles Lindbergh become President in 1940. Ryder plays Evelyn Finkel who becomes the wife of a southern rabbi and avid Lindbergh supporter, Lionel Bengelsdorf. The rabbi rises to power within the party’s administration, whitewashes Lindburgh’s campaign and intentions, and uses his influence to persuade fellow Jews to put their trust in the Nazi-sympathising president. 

The story is centered on a traditional, but not overly religious Jewish working-class family living in an urban Jewish enclave in Newark, New Jersey. The responses of the various characters to the rise of a popular antisemitic leader are explored; from the teenage boy who admires Lindberg’s wartime exploits, to the passionate street-wise father who sees through it all, and the protective, perceptive mother who manages the fraught and conflicting relationships in her extended family. It is compelling viewing that’s hard not to binge watch. The parallels with Jewish responses in 1930s Europe are obvious; those who lived in denial, those who appeased and those who understood.

In speaking of the message of the series, Ryder remarked that it was ‘uncannily relevant amid the rise of political hate-speak’.

“It’s a very personal story… If you are a grandchild or a child of European Jews, it’s hard not to be untouched by it… It’s also a taste of what we’re living in now and what we might possibly be heading into in the future...”

If you haven’t seen the mini-series, it is recommended viewing. It’s power, for those familiar with the events of the 30s and 40s, is that it is all too believable

"I survived the war living as a Nazi"

We had just viewed the 1990 feature film ‘Europa Europa’ and were fascinated to meet its main character. In September of 2019 Perry and I, along with friends Shifra Horn and Peter Bolot, met Shlomo Perl in his Givat Ayim home. What we heard was not only an incredible tale of survival but also a fitting tribute to the establishment of the state of Israel. After the war Shlomo travelled from Munich to Jerusalem, joining the Haganah and fighting in the War of Independence. His story was also a compelling example of difficult choices made in complex and perilous times.

After a happy childhood in Germany, Shlomo’s family moved in 1935 to Lodz, Poland, following Hitler’s rise to power. He was fourteen when World War Two began. A few short months into the German occupation of Poland, Jews were forced into ghettos. Shlomo’s parents decided that he and his older brother Isaac would not enter the ghetto but would try to escape to Grodno in Eastern Poland, then ruled by the Soviets. There he lived in a Soviet orphanage.

Shlomo tells of a pivotal ‘life or death’ moment where his instinct for survival took over:

I was in the orphanage from 1939 until 1941. There was a selecting process there. The Germans gathered all of us and selected the Jews and told us where to go. They had orders not to take any Jews as war prisoners. The Jews were taken to the forest and shot. This was in Minsk.

I stood in one of the queues, where there were many thousands of Jews. I chose the longest line in order to gain some time. In the mean time I buried all of my Jewish documents. I walked step by step. My mind stopped working. My instincts were very vivid. I was sure that I would die any second.

All of a sudden I heard a German order, ‘hands up!’ - I lifted my hands. I shivered all over. I said, ‘Mummy, daddy, I don’t want to die!’ The German soldier asked me, ‘Are you a Jew?’. I remembered the farewell words of my father to me before I left home. My father said to me after praying, ‘Whatever will happen, stay Jewish and continue believing in God and God will keep you. Don’t forget who you are.’ But my mother said to me, ‘Shlomo, you have to live’.

And I recalled those memories when I stood there. To stay Jewish all the time otherwise God would desert you.

If I told him that I was Jewish, the German would shoot me. I had to choose a very fateful decision. Deciding between life and death. Deciding between the words of my father and my mother. I could choose only one. I knew I was going to die. I heard my mother’s voice, ‘Shlomo, you have to live!’ and the fear left me. I felt very secure and sure. And I said to the German, ‘I’m not a Jew. I’m an ethnic German’. He believed me.

Having convinced the Germans that he was a Russian-born German, Shlomo became a translator for a German Army unit. They gave him the nick-name Yoop. The commander adopted him as his son and Shlomo returned to Germany for training at a Hitler Youth barracks.

For three and a half years he was indoctrinated with Nazi theories which seeped into his being. He described his situation as a type of schizophrenia. ‘It was as if I was a traitor and a victim in one body’. In order to survive he had to forget that he was a Jew and he became an enthusiastic member of Hitler Youth.

He lived with the continual fear of being discovered because of his circumcision. On one occasion a German doctor who was a homosexual tried to rape him but was shocked to discover that Shlomo was Jewish. He didn’t disclose Shlomo’s secret because the revelation of his own secret would have led to certain death. They became friends.

Towards the end of the war Shlomo was mobilised to the army and sent to the war front. He became a prisoner of war to the Americans but was freed at the end of the war. He was reunited with his brother who had been in Dachau. His parents died in Lodz Ghetto and his sister died on a death march.

In Munich, an office had opened to recruit Jews for for the Haganah. Shlomo signed up. He arrived in Tel Aviv a few days after Ben Gurion’s 14 May 1948 Declaration of Statehood. He took the dusty and dangerous supply road to Jerusalem, which was under siege by the Jordanians and there fought in the War of Independence.

Many years later, Shlomo re-established contact with some of his Nazi Youth friends. He revealed that even now, when he sees the Nazi swastika and flag something of his Hitler Youth remains in him. ‘At that moment I put Shlomo aside and I become Yoop’.

Shlomo 4k50.mp4 from Perry Trotter on Vimeo.

From AIJAC: Poignancy and controversy in Holocaust commemorations

Originally published by AIJAC’s Australia/Israel Review

Six candles, each one representing a million of the Jewish people who perished in the Holocaust. Six young people, each one the grandchild of a survivor lighting a candle each. Around them, a 400 strong crowd watched in silence. 

It was a poignant, highly evocative moment. And it was this moment that New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern referred to as she began her address to those gathered at this year’s UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Auckland on Jan. 27.

The fact that each of those candles represents one million lives lost is unfathomable, Ardern said. “It’s a horrific reminder of what happens when extremist ideology is unchecked and shows us what humans, unfortunately, are capable of when left unchecked.”

In a heartfelt speech, she emphasised that antisemitism is an assault against our shared humanity and has no place in our global society. “And yet we find ourselves in a world that seems to have forgotten the horrors of history.”

Ardern pointed to the defacing of Wellington’s Temple Sinai with antisemitic graffiti just a week before Holocaust Remembrance Day as an example. “This is not the legacy of a nation or the legacy of a world that has learnt and understands fully the impact of the Holocaust.”

For that reason, it is critical that work to educate and inform about the Holocaust continues both in New Zealand and overseas. Ardern said the work of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand and Holocaust survivors “helps us to become the nation that we aspire to be”.

MP Alfred Ngaro speaking at the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation’s UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Bethlehem, Tauranga.

The Prime Minister’s presence at the event represented a stepping up in the official commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day this year. While former prime minister John Key launched the “Shadows of the Shoah” exhibition on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2013, government representation at subsequent commemorations has been sparse. 

However, this year the day also marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and, as such, was more widely recognised around New Zealand.

Besides Ardern, a number of government ministers attended commemorations. Minister of Ethnic Communities Jenny Salesa went to the Auckland event, Finance Minister Grant Robertson hosted an event at Parliament, and Minister of Housing Megan Woods attended the Christchurch event. 

Additionally, National MP Alfred Ngaro, the chairman of the Israeli-NZ Parliamentary friendship group, attended several events, and various local government politicians turned out around the country.

While the improved recognition of the day was notable, the lead-up to the day also saw the Government hit by criticism for failing to send any representative to the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Israel, one of the few Western nations not to do so (although New Zealand’s Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy did send an official message to the forum which will be included in the commemorative publication). 

Opposition MP Gerry Brownlee of the National Party described the non-attendance as disgraceful, while National Party leader Simon Bridges asked whether antisemitism was behind New Zealand’s absence.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters told the media that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFAT) had advised him of the invitation just a week out from the event. Efforts were then made to send the Parliamentary Speaker, Trevor Mallard, but ultimately it was not possible to do so, he said.

MFAT confirmed that Peters’ office was not advised of the invitation until Jan. 16, despite the invitation having actually been received in September last year. 

Dr David Cumin at the UNIHRD event in Bethlehem, Tauranga.

Israel Institute of New Zealand co-director David Cumin said the delay played a large role in New Zealand’s conspicuous absence. He also suggested it was, unfortunately, just the latest in a concerning pattern of behaviour from MFAT officials which puts New Zealand out of step with its traditional allies in regard to its relationship with Israel.

Holocaust & Antisemitism Foundation Aotearoa New Zealand co-founder Sheree Trotter said not sending an official representative showed poor judgement, but was also indicative of the broader issue of New Zealand’s problematic historical relationship with the Holocaust. Among the historical issues she cited was Wellington’s unwillingness to take significant numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, its decision not to prosecute suspected Nazi war criminals residing in New Zealand and the fact that one of New Zealand’s major universities holds a Holocaust denial thesis in its library. 

Sheree Trotter, Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand

She also added, “In recent years New Zealand has taken a hostile attitude towards Israel. Co-sponsoring UN Resolution 2334, which led to the withdrawal of the ambassador for several months, is just one example. We have no Embassy in Israel and the relationship continues to be uneasy. It’s hard not see a link between the attitude towards Israel and the lack of appreciation of the Holocaust.”

“The memory of the Holocaust is under attack from many quarters – from deniers to those who would distort the history through re-writing, relativising and universalising,” Trotter said. “In an age of increasing extremism, New Zealand needs to grapple with the meaning and significance of the Holocaust – the prime example of what can happen when toxic ideas gain a foothold in a nation’s psyche.”

From J-Wire: MP's challenged at "Auschwitz. Now." opening at NZ Parliament

First published on J Wire

Seventeen MP’s from across New Zealand’s political spectrum attended the official opening of the new exhibition “Auschwitz. Now.” at Parliament on Tuesday. 

Hon Alfred Ngaro, host of the event

Host MP Hon Alfred Ngaro addressed the gathering as did exhibition creators Perry and Sheree Trotter, founders of Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand (formerly Shadows of Shoah Trust). MP’s in attendance included Green Co-leader Marama Davidson who described “Auschwitz. Now.” as “A powerful exhibition. An important statement.” 

Hon Kanwal Singh Bakshi, Dr Itzhak Gerberg, Israeli Ambassador to New Zealand, Moka Ngaro, Hon Alfred Ngaro, Perry Trotter, Sheree Trotter, Hon Jenny Salesa, David Zwartz, Dane Giraud

Sheree Trotter spoke of NZ’s troubled relationship to the Holocaust, and related issues. She recounted NZ's response to the plight of Jews, from the pogroms in Russian at the end of the nineteenth century, to the refugee crisis of the 1930’s and 40’s. While expressions of sympathy were many, little concrete action was taken to help those fleeing persecution. In addition, when up to forty-six Nazi war criminals were suspected of having found refuge in New Zealand, despite a two-year investigation by a government-formed two-man taskforce in the early 1990s, none of the suspects was brought before a court of law.

Photographer Perry Trotter challenged MP’s in attendance to consider not only the events of the Holocaust but the broader historical context of pervasive and persistent antisemitism: “Antisemitism is an equal opportunities evil: it adapts equally well to German high culture, the medieval barbarism of many of Israel’s neighbours, ostensibly evangelical Christian theology, and the BDS-supporting intersectional left,” he said.

Perry Trotter, Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand founder

The Trotters visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in September 2019 and “Auschwitz. Now.” includes images captured at that time. The exhibition also includes large black and white portraits of Holocaust survivors along with three minute Shadows of Shoah survivor stories. “Auschwitz. Now.” was launched in January to an audience of 500 at a UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Bethlehem, Tauranga. The exhibition will remain at the NZ Parliament until 26 March and will then tour nationally.

“Auschwitz. Now.” to open in NZ Parliament

The Holocaust Foundation’s latest exhibition “Auschwitz. Now.” will open in Parliament next week. Sponsored by Hon Alfred Ngaro MP, the staging will be held in the Bowen House exhibition space.

An invitation-only event will be held on 2 March, attended by MPs and dignataries. Thereafter, public viewing will be possible Wednesdays and Thursdays 10am-3pm through the month of March. Group bookings at other times may be possible. Please enquire.

“Auschwitz. Now.” consists of images of Auschwitz shot in 2019, black and white survivor portraits, and three minute Holocaust survivor stories. 500 attended the exhibition’s January launch at an event commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The exhibition includes stories not only from those who experienced Auschwitz but also from those who survived elsewhere, whether it be France, Serbia, or Tunisia. And, of course, many of the stories featured are from those who settled in New Zealand.

From Newsroom: NZ's Troubled Relationship With The Holocaust

First published on Newsroom

The dust is settling after a flurry of commemorative events and articles, locally and internationally, marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In the days leading up to UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), the hashtag #WeRemember circulated on social media, with encouragement to contemplate that horrific period of history.

UN Holocaust Remembrance Day falls at the height of New Zealand’s summer holiday season, when sun and surf are uppermost in many Kiwi minds. So it’s hardly surprising that Holocaust commemoration commands relatively little attention. Of greater concern, however, is that according to a poll undertaken in July 2019, New Zealand appears to suffer Holocaust amnesia. The multi-choice survey revealed that only 43 percent of respondents knew that approximately six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, 20 percent thought fewer were killed, 37 percent were unsure, and worryingly, 30 percent were unsure whether the Holocaust had been exaggerated or was a myth.

Holocaust education is not compulsory in our schools - this may contribute to the knowledge gap. However, New Zealand’s failure to send a representative to the recent World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem suggests a problematic relationship to the Holocaust. Indeed, our history vis-à-vis the Holocaust makes for grim reading.

As Hitler’s programme of isolation, discrimination, and dispossession of Jews took hold in the 1930s, our local Jewish community undertook many desperate measures to bring family members to safety in New Zealand. Numerous statements of sympathy from the government, the churches, community groups and individuals were heard. Some groups showed great commitment to the Jewish people. The Christadelphians wrote letters and sent funds to the Jewish community. A Ngapuhi elder told me of his forbears travelling to Wellington to offer the government land for the Jewish refugees. They were told, “go back to your hovels”. The government did little to help refugees fleeing Europe.

In the period between 1933 and 1939 a paltry 1100 Jews were permitted into New Zealand - and those, under the most stringent requirements, as historian Ann Beaglehole describes in her book, A Small Price to Pay: Refugees From Hitler in New Zealand. Little consideration was given to their plight as refugees in a deadly predicament. Indeed, Auckland’s Rabbi Astor, writing to Mark Fagan, Acting Minister of Customs in 1939 on behalf of refugees seeking asylum in New Zealand, sought a waiver for one applicant who was unable to sign the form because he was in a concentration camp. The sponsoring relatives were required to declare that they would seek no further help for relatives or friends. New Zealand’s policy at that time was harsh and punitive.

Fortunately, New Zealand’s immigration policies no longer exhibit the xenophobia of yesteryear. More recent incidents, however, suggest there is still progress to be made in dealing properly with the Holocaust. Dr Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, also known as The Last Nazi Hunter, has spent much of his life tracking Nazi war criminals and bringing them to trial. Up to 46 Nazi war criminals are believed to have fled to New Zealand after World War II. Despite a two-year investigation by a government-formed, two-man taskforce in the early 1990s, none of the suspects was brought before a court of law.

Dr Efraim Zuroff was interviewed in Jerusalem by Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand

In a 2018 interview, Zuroff stated that ‘New Zealand was the only Anglo-Saxon country, (out of Great Britain, United States, Canada and Australia - South Africa was not open to immigration at that time), that chose not to take legal action after a governmental inquiry into the presence of Nazis in New Zealand’.

Government policy and actions are not the only areas in which New Zealand has been found wanting. Our nation has the dubious distinction of being the only Western country in which a tertiary institution holds a thesis denying the Holocaust. In addition, New Zealand is also one of the few western-style liberal democratic nations that has not joined the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which promotes education, commemoration and research.

If we are to be a nation that gives ‘nothing to racism’, we must grapple with the Holocaust, its causes and our relationship thereto.

The antisemitism that drove the genocide of the Jews was not new - it had festered for millennia. However, the efficiency and drive of the Germanic version honed the process of killing. Murder was industrialised on a grand scale. Unfortunately, antisemitism continues to fester and we are now witness to a surge in antisemitic attacks around the world, on individuals and groups.

New Zealand is not immune to this phenomenon. In the past few weeks, there have been several incidences of swastikas painted in public places. News sites that reported the recent incident outside Temple Sinai in Wellington received comments such as the following:

You would be surprised at who did it…

Check the rabbis garage for fluro paint.

These attacks always end out being zionists going after the sympathy note. Amoral scumbags.

The vile comments, frequently seen on social media, prompted Race Relations Commissioner Susan Devoy to comment in 2018 that “If Facebook were around during the Third Reich these posts would’ve fitted right in…".

Antisemitism has an uncanny ability to change its form to suit the season. One of the most prevalent forms of Jew-hatred today comes in the form of anti-Zionism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Association has formulated a definition of antisemitism explicitly connecting anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The IRHA definition states:

“Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity’ with the proviso, ‘However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

In addition to the alarming rise in antisemitism, we are also witnessing the re-writing of history in a number of European nations, in an attempt to create distance from the genocide that occurred on their soil. The Holocaust may have happened in distant lands but its reverberations continue in our own. If New Zealand holds to the values of justice and standing against racism, it is incumbent on us to examine our own history in relation to the Holocaust and to step up efforts to ensure that antisemitism is given no ground.

Dr Sheree Trotter, Co-founder Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand (formerly Shadows of Shoah Trust)

The Ritchie Boys: The Jews who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler

Guest Post: Book Review by Dr Norman Simms

Bruce Henderson. The Ritchie Boys: The Jews who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler. London: William Collins, 2018. Originally entitled Sons and Soldiers, 2017. xii + 428 pp. + numerous black and white photographs.

A small group of several hundred Jewish teen-age boys who had managed to escape from Nazi Germany before the Holocaust began, eagerly sought an opportunity of fighting against Hitler when the United States entered the Second World War at the end of 1941. Leaving parents, siblings and other relatives and friends behind in Europe, they suffered the further trauma of dislocation and learning a new language and culture, and they burned to take revenge on the nation that had betrayed them. Once they reached the appropriate age to volunteer, yet unable as enemy nationals to be accepted, they waited to be drafted. Not soon enough, their talents and determination were noted, and they were granted citizenship.

The first part of this historical work weaves together brief biographical backgrounds in Germany, France and Holland of a selected number of these adolescents, their lives before and during Nazi rule, the desperate efforts by their parents to send them out of harm’s way, and their initial experiences in the New World. In the examples given by Henderson, these adolescents grew up in ordinary households, were not rigidly religious, and seemed no different than the children they went to school with and played on the streets, that is, until Nazi racial laws came along.

The second part advances their experiences in America. It begins with the difficulties of assimilating into new families and communities, where well-intentioned relatives struggled in the Depression to accommodate them and an uncomprehending and often unsympathetic society grumbled about their presence, and then to the training they received at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, following a period of months or years of being considered enemy aliens and therefore either unfit altogether for military service or given limited non-combat training and assignments. While these limitations and exclusions were frustrating and disappointing to the young men eager to make war on Nazi Germany, the conditions never approached the harshness or cruelty they had already undergone in their homelands in Europe.

The third part takes the narrative into the war. Trained to be interrogators of German prisoners of war and act as liaison with the French civilians once the invasion of Europe began, the boys found that reality did not always match with intentions—and that combat is a very messy and brutal business; that parachutes don’t land where they are supposed to; and that following the laws of engagement is something to be set aside in the heat of battle. They also discovered that Europeans did not all want to be liberated from the Nazis, certainly not by Americans or Jews. Yet eventually the Ritchie Boys were able to do the jobs they were sent over to perform, and they did them very well. Even when they themselves were captured by the Germans, their well-learned lessons in how to deal with the enemy came in handy and helped to save many American lives.

The Ritchie Boys came into their own during the D-Day landings in Normandy, the securing of beachheads and advancement to liberate France, and then enter Germany. Henderson continues to focus on a few of these German-Americans and their work alongside the American and British forces, sometimes bringing one or two of the boys together in the same actions. Much as the narrative gives a personal touch—the emotions felt by this soldier and that, the thoughts of their families still caught in Nazi territory and their hopes for a better life after the defeat of Hitler—to the description of battles in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany the traumatic effects of the war are superficially touched on.

If captured, there was an extra liability in being a Ritchie Boy, that is, a German-Jew with an American uniform, so that sometimes a rabid Nazi officer would pull them out of a group of POWs for special treatment, that is, summary execution. The closer the Allies came to the heart of the Third Reich and the entry into the death camps of the Nazi regime, the more the professionalism of the German-Jewish American soldiers was tested. Just before the start of the third section of the book, the author speaks most explicitly of the conflicted emotional state of the young men:

Like other Ritchie Boys, Stephen [Lewy] had been trained to detach himself from any personal or emotional aspects of interrogation. But as he faced the SS major that day, he could not shake the sense of haunting danger such men had instilled in him most of his life. Stephan realized that the closer he came to returning to Nazi Germany, the more pent-up resentment, anger even rage he was feeling. (p. 321)

It is tempting here to translate this rather superficial description into a more incisive psychohistorical statement more apt to the traumatic memories that came flooding back into the consciousness of this young man. Out of an unconscious memory, where the unbearable and unspeakable pains and humiliations had repressed, but where they continued to build up an energy by the almost daily experiences of separation from family, fear of the death of all whom he loved, and the knowledge that people he thought he could understand and trust were likely to be beyond comprehension and incapable of sympathy or empathy: these unimaginable truths were on the verge of breaking through into his rational and controllable part of his mind and overwhelming his normal self.

It was not just that the war was a personal way of coping with the confusions in their youth, but that they saw the Holocaust in a personal way that non-Jews couldn’t, even when fellow enlisted men and officers wept at the scenes of so much suffering. The Boys visited German homes, spoke to inhabitants, and came away feeling angry and sickened by the callousness and indifference and the denial of knowledge or complicity. Clearly the full larders, the warm clothing and the smug complaints against Allied bombing indicated that ordinary Germans profited by the robbing and murder of the Jews; and resented being forced to confront their outright or even tacit collusion. When forced to walk through the concentration camps and help with cleaning up the mess, “They watched the proceedings without showing any sympathy or remorse.” As one of the Ritchie Boys said, “It was a nation that would have to pay for its crimes for years to come.”

Throughout most of these war years (and for the German Jewish boys the Second World War began on 1 September, 1939, not with Pearl Harbour on 6 December 1941) the Ritchie Boys felt deep regrets about losing touch with their families and not being able to know whether or not their parents, siblings and other relatives were still alive. It was something always at least at the back of their minds. It was difficult for them to understand American isolationism, racism and poor educations. They had not grown up in very religious homes and assumed they were Germans before they were Jews, but Hitler made them acutely aware of who and what they were, and they wished to punish the Nazis for what they were doing and to make Germany the land pay for the crimes committed against Jews. More than that, the Ritchie Boys looked forward to a more liberal, just and cultured world, and they came to hope that they could help America become such a nation.

Most of the Ritchie Boys were separated from their birth families at a young age, and had experienced seeing friends, neighbours and relatives beaten or killed before their very eyes. Eventually they would understand why parents sent them away or why schoolmates turned on them after the Nazis came to power, but as youngsters these were confusing, frightening and traumatic events. The journeys to America were also fraught with dangers and fears for what lay ahead, and even the landing in the United States was a shock, especially when those into whose care they were given were not up to the task, either because their own families were suffering in the Depression, they lacked the emotional sympathy or stamina to deal with traumatized children and whose stories and backgrounds seemed incomprehensible to them. Henderson tells us about the successes, when the boys were able to fend for themselves, do well in school and take on small paying jobs to help the host families. We can only guess that not every child from Germany was able to cope or had the inner resources to gain top marks at Camp Ritchie and earn promotions during service overseas. Nor do we know how many young men grew up resentful of both their own and their foster parents, raged at a society that displayed anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and eventually slid into life-long mental illness.

Four final sections round out the book. There is a list of the nearly two thousand young German Jews who went through Camp Ritchie. A series of acknowledgments on all who aided the writer in compiling his data also serves as a guide to further reading and investigation. There is also a brief account of what happened to the main actors in this book after they returned to America, how they completed their educations, started families and pursued various careers, most having long and prosperous careers. Yet, as noted above, these success stories seem too neat and pat and gloss over what were surely other Ritchie Boys who could not adjust and aspects of the lives which seem so normal which could not all have avoided deep psychological injuries. In addition there is an Index, mostly of personal names, relevant places and key actions.

Images of UNIHRD Event, 25 January, Bethlehem

It was heartwarming to see so many act on the phrase #WeRemember, by attending the Holocaust Remembrance event held in Bethlehem, Tauranga on Saturday 25 January.

500 turned up to the beautiful Performing Arts Centre at Bethlehem College on a sweltering evening, with many other events competing for attention.

In a Powhiri earlier in the day Kaumatua Huikakahu Kawe welcomed dignitaries and Jewish guests and blessed the proceedings. Kaumatua Tony Wihapi opened the evening event with a karakia. We were treated to a thought-provoking array of speeches from Dame Lesley Max, National MP Hon Alfred Ngaro, Ron Matsen from Koinonia House and Perry Trotter. Dr. David Cumin ably MC’d the evening which finished with a stirring blowing of the shofar by Joel van Ameringen, followed by the Israeli and New Zealand Anthems - expertly accompanied by violinist Joel van Ameringen and pianist Chris Archer. HAFANZ express its gratitude to Graham Preston and his wonderful team of assistants, Christian Education Trust and Bethlehem College and all those who helped to make the evening a great success.

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Guest Post: The Train

It was winter as I made my way by train from Berlin, across the Polish landscape toward Krakow. I was going to Auschwitz.

The train slowed as it entered Poland as there was dispute as to who was going to make good the length of rail in this strip of the journey. The carriage was warm and I was accompanied by a young German woman who was going to work at a German speaking newspaper in Poland. It was a reasonably pleasant trip, polite conversation about her job and the town, which had a large pre-war German History. The journalist disembarked at her stop and I journeyed on.

Once I arrived in Krakow I found the backpackers I was booked in and settled in before heading out to a hearty meal of potato dumplings served in a vegetable soup. Two days after I was on a little bus heading toward Auschwitz I. I could feel my stomach trembling. I was alone and anonymous. As the bus pulled up to the entrance I could feel the weight of winter, the cold was chewing into my bones and the foreboding entrance stood above us. I paid my fee, this act alone causing the bile to leap in my gullet, feeling like a tourist in a museum.

I began my tour through the clean brick buildings and grounds all kept spick and span for the modern visitor to admire. The saddening and deeply sickening aspect of Auschwitz I was the rooms filled with glasses, with suitcases. Rooms dedicated to some thing, hair brushes, shoes, shaving brushes. Glass windows staring into these rooms. These were possessions that belonged to someone, to thousands of someone, to millions.

After some time walking around the wooden floors resounding with footsteps of viewing customers I made my way to the transport which would take me to Auschwitz 2, Birkenau. I had to stop for a moment and let those images become part of me, to let them insinuate my cells so I would not forget them and not cease to understand this aspect of humanity. I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke drift across the winter air, disbanding into nothing like souls turning to vapour.

By the time the transporter had stopped outside the gates of Birkenau I was beginning to slow down, like I was in a dream, staring out at a vast landscape. And there were the train tracks, the rails upon which so many rattling wagons deposited people, like stock, into the clutches of death. As I walked through the gates my breath was taken away, there was a silence of order, a majesty of precision that one could not avoid, the brilliance of human endeavour to construct something so exquisitely perfect in its function. And then the disturbing force of horror and tragedy as to what that purpose was, an attempt at utter destruction, a genocide so well conceived. These two qualities of humanity colliding in me to leave me frozen on those tracks. As I looked up at the crows flying about the walls, I thought to myself, “your ancestors ate my ancestors, those fields beyond the walls grew food upon the ashes of the dead taken from the crematoriums of this dreaded place”.

They say it takes seven generations for healing to mend, for cells to change, for people to forget. I am not sure if the Jewish civilisation can heal from this atrocity yet, can let it pass into history in order to build a more whole and undefended persona. No matter what intent, such an event will stay buried in the collective psyche for years.

The Shoah caused many Jews to flee their community, to change names, identities, to find places far reaching to hide away from prying eyes, to become non-Jews, to quietly get on with their lives so they can survive. Others travelled far away, where people would accept them, to build Jewish communities, safely in suburbs that resembled the shteltls of Europe, not in construction, rather in closeness of population. There, synagogues emerged, kosher butchers, schools and bakeries, delicatessens developed in a proud yet cautious showing of survival. The diaspora spread.

Others were determined to build a Jewish state, to create a land that Jews can call home, a place where one did not have to run or hide, to make good what is Jewish in the world. A place where a people can be a people. Where stereotypes don’t exist, and the full dimension of Jewish life can flourish. Has the Jewish nation achieved this, has Israel become a place of nourishment for it’s people? Perhaps the Shoah split the Jewish civilisation up into so many fragments that it will take years for it to find a central place once more and the land of Israel will not achieve it alone. Perhaps we need to take hold of our spiritual practice, to find ways to grow amongst ourselves and to participate in the world, undefended and proud in new ways.

In Berlin there is a platform with brass plaques along the edge, recording every group of people that was being sent toward a camp. Let us hope and pray that we can find new destinations, new ways of travel in order to restore the Jewish people.

Phillip Gordon

Phillip grew up in Wellington New Zealand. He has had a career in film, television and theatre. It was not until later in life that Phillip embraced his Jewish heritage and began to explore the religion, culture and identity of being a Jew. Trying to understand the spiritual and political implications, not only in his country of birth, but also in a global environment. After many years of travel he now lives  on 10 acres north of Auckland, where he is developing a permaculture property.  He is an active member of the Beth Shalom progressive Jewish community in Auckland.

From NZ Herald - Auschwitz: A Personal Reflection

First published on NZ Herald

Twelve years ago I began interviewing Holocaust survivors. I have spent countless hours listening to stories of hell on earth. With reluctance, I realised it was time to visit the place where many of these incomprehensible events occurred - Auschwitz.

The books, the films, the first-hand stories of survivors, all rendered the scenes I witnessed eerily familiar - the entrance with the cynical sign Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes Free), the railway tracks, watchtowers, electric fences, crematoria and gas chambers, the displays of tonnes of human hair, thousands of spectacles and shoes of all sizes.

Stepping through the dark and dank barracks I was reminded of the accounts of bodies packed into three-tiered wooden bunks, like sardines.

One survivor spoke of so many bodies lying side by side, that when one person had to turn, everyone turned. Another recounted her efforts to ensure she slept on the bunk above her mother to protect her. With so many women suffering dysentry and chronic illness, and the inadequate toilet facilities, many accidents occurred.

More than the remnants of the infrastructure of annihilation, I wanted to know what had become of the remains of the victims. The guide led me to a pond where tonnes of ashes had been dumped. While I understood the thinking of those who determined that things should be preserved largely untouched, it was difficult to accept that the remains of thousands upon thousands lay before me in a sump hole, exposed to the elements.

Visiting Auschwitz was as horrendous as I expected. What I had not anticipated was the sense of normalcy that surrounded this camp. I was shocked that our accommodation was a two-minute walk from Auschwitz and that the town of Oświęcim was immediately adjacent. Why were the townspeople laughing, smiling and behaving as if it were normal to have a death camp on one's door-step? Didn't they know what happened here?

Even more disturbing was the advertising in tourist shops in nearby beautiful Krakow, promoting Auschwitz like any other major tourist attraction. Indeed, our guide informed us of the 8000 daily visitors, and Auschwitz's importance to the local economy.

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum certainly takes seriously its responsibility to educate and inform the public. Preservation, restoration and documentation efforts are extensive and laudable. However, we left Europe with a distinct sense that many there have not truly taken ownership of the genocide that occurred on their soil, a short 75 years ago.

I am yet to shake off the discomfort that accompanied my visit to Auschwitz. However, our next stop in Ben Gurion airport provided a much-needed contrast. The vitality and energy of the people, many of whom are descendants of survivors, facing enormous challenges and yet thriving, was refreshing. Attending a joyful wedding was a fitting antidote to my angst.

While in Jerusalem, we visited 92-year-old Auschwitz survivor Dr Giselle (Gita) Cycowicz, a great-grandmother and still practising psychologist. Over four hours, Gita shared the story of what happened to her family - how they were rounded up into ghettos, sent by train to Auschwitz, subjected to the selection process, humiliated by being forced to strip and having all hair shaved. They lived in inhumane conditions, hungry, thirsty, battling cold and disease.

After five months, Gita was sent to a labour camp, until she was finally set free at the end of the war. She described that moment: "We just stood there - terribly, terribly tired and exhausted in every way and manner. Physically, spiritually and emotionally. And we couldn't smile when told we are free and can go wherever we want, because there is no place we want to go. We don't know why we would be going home. We don't want to go home. To the non-Jews. Who never embraced us and never said a word to try to spare us."

Gita, like so many survivors, did go on to live a full and fruitful life.

My visit to Auschwitz was as profound as it was disturbing, a sense made more acute by awareness of the resurgence of antisemitism across much of Europe.

If Holocaust memory were only facing simple neglect the matter might be easier to address. But the greater challenge is that the history of those events is being denied, distorted and universalised.

In 2005, the United Nations designated the day of the liberation of Auschwitz as International Holocaust remembrance Day. Seventy-five years on, remembering is more important than ever. To mark the occasion, the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation Aotearoa New Zealand will launch a new exhibition entitled Auschwitz. Now. A memorial event and launch will be held in Bethlehem, Tauranga on January 25.

• Sheree Trotter is a co-founder of the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation Aotearoa New Zealand and has worked with Holocaust survivors for the past 12 years.

Bethlehem Remembers Auschwitz

Originally published on Times of Israel

At least twenty-eight locations around the world carry the name Bethlehem. Best known of these is, of course, the birthplace of Jesus, twenty minutes drive from Jerusalem. 

The Bethlehem most distant from Jerusalem can be found in Tauranga, New Zealand – adjacent to a suburb named Judea.

The original Bethlehem has become symbolic of evangelicalism’s drift toward anti-Zionism, being host of the notorious Christ At The Checkpointconferences. New Zealand’s evangelical community has hardly been immune to the drift. Anti-Zionist Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, whose name was cited in recent months as evidence that Jeremy Corbyn is indeed an antisemite (Corbyn defended Sizer’s antisemitic postings), was an honoured guest at New Zealand’s largest ostensibly evangelical institution in 2012. 

New Zealand’s Bethlehem College has apparently bucked the anti-Zionist trend, however. A thriving Christian school with a roll now exceeding 2,000, was founded in the 1980’s with a pro-Israel position in its charter.  When approached by the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand, the college enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to host a UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day event in its upmarket 550 seat auditorium.

The event will be held Saturday 25 January, two days prior to the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Guest speakers include Member of Parliament Alfred Ngaro, Dame Lesley Max, and Dr David Cumin, Israel Institute of New Zealand.

The event will also launch the national tour of our new exhibition “Auschwitz. Now.” Large exhibition prints of images shot last year at Auschwitz-Birkenau will be displayed along with survivor portraits and Shadows of Shoah stories.

Auschwitz survivor, the late Alexander Lowy.

Auschwitz, being best known of the Nazi death camps, has come to function as a kind of metonym for the entire Holocaust. We have chosen to include not only Auschwitz survivor stories but also stories from those who survived elsewhere, whether it be France, Serbia, or Tunisia. 

“Auschwitz. Now.” has been curated to provide a well rounded introduction, mindful as we are of the quickly diminishing general knowledge of the Shoah. Equally problematic is the trend toward universalisation. Holocaust memorialisation, where it does take place, is too frequently diluted in service of other causes. These are trends to which “Auschwitz. Now.” and the broader work of the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation will give no ground.

Seventy five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the incomprehensible events of the Shoah, in all their particularity, will be remembered in the uttermost parts of the earth, in Bethlehem, Tauranga.

Information on the event can be viewed at www.25january2020.com

Two Holocaust Foundation Trustees Honoured

Chairman Robert Narev (left) and Trustee John Barnett (right)

Two of our Holocaust Foundation board members have been awarded special honours in the New Year honours list.

Our chairman, Robert Narev, has been made Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to the community and education. In 1999, he was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

Robert was born in Germany and is a survivor of Theresienstadt Concentration Camp.

Trustee John Barnett has been made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to film and television. John is a prolific film producer and has produced or executive produced many of NZ's most successful works including Whale Rider, Sione's Wedding, Footrot Flats and What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted.

We take this opportunity to offer our congratulations to Bob and John and to thank them for their service to the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Bethlehem, Tauranga

The Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation will stage a UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day event in cooperation with Tauranga’s Christian Education Trust, on Saturday 25 January 2020 at 7pm. Bethlehem College’s beautiful Performing Arts Centre, is the venue for the event - it is a modern and well equipped facility with capacity of more than 600.

The event will be filmed for later broadcast.

Guest speakers include Hon Alfred Ngaro, Dame Lesley Max, Ron Matsen and Perry Trotter. Dr David Cumin will serve as MC. New Shadows of Shoah stories will be shown including some captured in Europe and Israel in recent months.

Bethlehem College is a flourishing Christian institution of more than 2000 students. Bethlehem Tertiary Institute is situated adjacent and has close to 600 students enrolled. The Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation has been invited by the Christian Education Trust to stay on following the 25 January event to address teachers and students.

Admission to the 25 January event will be free but registration is requested: www.25january2020.com

Download a printable PDF flyer here.

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An interview with Theresienstadt survivor Bob Narev MNZM

Our chairman, Holocaust survivor Bob Narev MNZM, recently shared his story in an interview for Shine TV. Bob is a survivor of Theresienstadt. Interviewer Gary Hoogvliet asked thought provoking questions ranging from Bob’s memories of the events of the Holocaust to faith and forgiveness.

Both Bob and his wife Freda, also a survivor, felt that they had arrived in paradise when they immigrated to New Zealand following the war. Bob remarked that while they have never personally experienced discrimination in New Zealand, he was concerned about rising antisemitism. He considers it not impossible that the terrible events of the 1930s and 40s could happen again.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz. In popular culture the term has become an archetypal symbol, a metaphor for ultimate evil. So mind-bending were the actions undertaken at this, the largest mass murder factory in human history, that Auschwitz has become ground zero on the moral landscape.

It was only last week that we for the first time visited Auschwitz. On three different mornings I arrived before dawn to film and photograph in and around what has become the very symbol of Europe’s determination to purge itself of Jews.

And yet, while our visit to Auschwitz was deeply disturbing, it has not been the most impactful aspect of our visit to Europe. Rather, it has been the overwhelming impression that much of Europe has not, and probably will not, take responsibility for the Holocaust. While the Nazis were the drivers, their work would not have been so devastatingly successful but for the active (or passive) cooperation of vast numbers of ordinary Europeans. There seems little acknowledgement of that reality. Instead there are too many cases of active denial and, increasingly, an aggressive rewriting of national histories.

So, what is Europe to do with its ancient hatred now that most of its Jews have been murdered or have since departed?

Saving The Shoah: A Brief Survey of Denial and Distortion

Our event entitled Saving The Shoah featured presentations by Dame Lesley Max and Professor Dov Bing. The evening’s theme was The Holocaust in an Age of Denial and Distortion.

As final speaker I presented a brief lecture on Denial and Distortion, outlining a tentative taxonomy for the evolving challenges to Holocaust memory. The lecture is presented below (13 minutes, audio plus slides).

Denial and Distortion: A Brief Survey from Perry Trotter on Vimeo.

This evening I will present a brief survey of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. My intention is to present the main categories and in most cases to provide an example of each. This is a work in progress and one that I hope to expand and refine. It also serves the purpose of setting out some of what will be examined in future meetings in this series.

I have relied in the first instance on the work of Holocaust scholar Dr Manfred Gerstenfeld, but have made a number of modifications and used different categories and definitions. Many of the categories will of course overlap and there will be debate as to whether some of these phenomena are best described as Holocaust distortion or Holocaust abuse. In my view, Holocaust abuse usually involves some degree of distortion and so should be included here.

But before beginning a survey of categories I wish to make some preliminary observations and comments:

Universalism versus Jewish particularity and distinction

In a future meeting I plan to present a detailed argument for the uniqueness of antisemitism - and its target, the Jewish people. But in the meantime I will opt to quote others.

In a recent article in the Jerusalem Post entitled CONTEMPORARY ANTISEMITISM IS NOT RACISM OR XENOPHOBIA, a professor at The Technical University of Berlin, said “Comprehending this unique character of Jew-hatred as a cultural category sui generis rather than as one form of prejudice among others is a precondition to challenging it successfully.”

American Jewish commentator Dennis Prager writes:
“Among those most committed to these dejudaizing interpretations are secular and non-Jewish Jews committed to the notion that the Jews are a people like all other peoples. Accordingly, they want to believe that antisemitism is but another form of bigotry, and that in the secular world it will die out...

Prager continues:
“...Modern scholars tend to promote secular and universalist explanations for nearly all human problems, including, of course, antisemitism. In contrast, the traditional Jewish understanding of antisemitism has been the opposite—religious and particularist. Among modern scholars there are a large number of Jews whose universalist worldviews make them particularly averse to the Jewish explanation of antisemitism. Indeed, they oppose any thesis, about anything, not only antisemitism, which depicts the Jews as distinctive, let alone unique.”

Decontextualisation

The Holocaust is the paramount event in the history of antisemitism, and it must be examined within that history.

The Shoah must be studied in its context. Too often the Holocaust is considered as a standalone event, almost as though the Jews of Europe were simply unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the events of 1940s did not happen apart from the events of the 1930s. And those events did not happen apart from the German philosophical and theological writings of the previous four centuries. Whether we choose to widen our view by centuries or by millennia we find a context that is both relevant and tragic. Aberrant Christian theology is correctly credited for nearly 2000 years of antisemitism but in fact Hitler’s attempt to rid the world of Jews finds an antecedent in Pharoah’s attempt to kill the Israelite baby boys.

Again, the Holocaust must considered within its context - whether the view is decades, centuries or millennia.

And not only does the Shoah have a past - it also has a future context. Many of the same ideas manifest today in the anti-Israelism so fashionable on the left - and hard right, and elsewhere.

And so to our very brief survey of ten categories, beginning with…

Denial: A denial of central facts pertaining to the Holocaust

David Irving’s denial of the facts of the Holocaust is probably the best known example and has been referenced in this evening’s material. The case is presented in the movie entitled Denial.

Minimisation: A diminution of the facts of the Holocaust

Surveys have revealed a significant percentage of the general population believe the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated. But it is also within academia we find minimising distortion. In the academic publication Journal of Genocide Research we are told “’...that the Hungarian Jews shipped to Auschwitz were not singled out as Jews” and “... that the Wannsee Conference was not specifically directed at a ‘final solution’ of the Jews.”

Justification: Placing blame on Jews or Jewish behaviour for the Holocaust

Five or six years ago I had a conversation with a German acquaintance while watching my son play sport. When he learned about my Holocaust work he explained that as a German growing up in Munich he was repeatedly taught about the Holocaust but it was always from the perspective of the Americans or the British. He complained that there was no consideration of why these events really occurred.

As my well educated acquaintance began to reveal his views I asked him to repeat some of his statements so that I could be sure I had not misunderstood. And what is it that this German believes?

A powerful and wealthy group of Zionists effectively sacrificed millions of their own Jewish people in order to create a pretext for the establishment of a Jewish state on Palestinian land. He believed the Jews were not innocent victims but in fact were responsible for the economic woes of the earlier years. It was the Jews who caused the suffering of other Europeans, through their control of international finance.

Deflection: Avoiding complicity for the Holocaust by shifting blame

Manfred Gerstenfeld writes: “In Germany, Holocaust deflection has taken specific forms. These include the false claim that the Holocaust was implemented solely by special units, denying that the Wehrmacht (the regular army) was involved to a great extent in the mass murders.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger attributed the responsibility for the crimes of World War II to modernity in general.”

Equivalence: Likening the Holocaust to other atrocities or causes

Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, and animal rights groups have drawn a comparison between the treatment of animals and the Holocaust.

Deborah Lipstadt refers to false equivalence as a form of denial. She has said “When groups of people refuse to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day unless equal time is given to anti-Muslim prejudice, this is soft-core denial."

Inversion: Reversing the roles of Holocaust victims and perpetrators

One sometimes hears the charge that the Israelis are the new Nazis. Thus the victims have become the perpetrators. An example from Twitter: (kimsingh) what is ironic and absolutely devastating...that after surviving the Holocaust...the Jewish people displaced the Palestinians from their own land...and for the past 60 years...Israel has unleashed a Holocaust of the Palestinian people...The Jewish people vowed “never again”....but they themselves did it again...this time they became the oppressors...

Appropriation: Hijacking or recasting Holocaust terms, memorials or events in order to promote other causes, or in order to avoid the charge of antisemitism

UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn provides an example. Corbyn participated in a 2019 Holocaust event and signed a book stating: “Let us never allow antisemitism or any other form of racism to disfigure our society.” And yet Corbyn has called members of Hamas, which preaches the genocide of the Jewish people, his “friends.”

Decontextualisation: Neglect or denial of the broader historical context of the Holocaust

This I dealt with in my opening. To consider the Shoah apart from its broader context is to distort the Shoah. It was not an historical anomaly. It was the worst fruit of a hatred that for millennia has simmered and frequently boiled over. Attempts to rid the world of the people of Israel stretch back to the time of Moses, and beyond. In the modern period, pre-Holocaust and post-Holocaust philosophy and theology are rich with antagonism toward Jewish particularity. These are examples of essential context for any broad analysis of the Shoah.

Universalisation: A downplaying or denial of the Jewish particularity of the Holocaust while emphasising aspects that may have commonality with other causes

A January 2017 White House speech for International Holocaust Remembrance Day did not mention Jews or antisemitism. The White House defended the speech saying that by not referring to Jews, it was acting in an “inclusive” manner. Thus the Holocaust is morphed into a universal symbol of evil and suffering and is inevitably de-Judaized and decontextualised in the process.

Thus ends my survey of categories of Denial and Distortion. It has been very brief and has sought only to tentatively layout the categories within which these phenomena can examined. In order to address a problem we must first identify it. In future meetings we hope to address some of these issues in detail, perhaps with panel discussions.

Let me make a final observation: Holocaust memory today suffers at the hands of both its foes and its friends. It is possible to distort the Holocaust with the best of intentions. This becomes particularly relevant where there is a strong desire to market the Holocaust and to seek points of connection in a culture in which the Shoah is unknown or has been forgotten.

There is an argument that soft distortion is more dangerous than the obvious hard core denial of the lunatic fringe. With soft distortion the change is creeping and incremental and it often takes place within the camp. Those of us, who, in one sense or another, see ourselves as custodians of Holocaust memory must be alert to all forms of denial and distortion.

Thank you.

Perry Trotter, Founder, Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand

Dame Lesley Max: Challenging Holocaust Denier David Irving

Dame Lesley Max spoke at our recent event, Saving The Shoah: The Holocaust in an Age of Denial and Distortion. She presented a fascinating and important slice of New Zealand Jewish history. Dame Lesley grew up hearing the stories of the Holocaust, as experienced by friends and family members - the imagery was disturbing and at times particularly intrusive.

In the 1980s Dame Lesley encountered Holocaust denier David Irving and witnessed his encounter with survivor Alice Newman. 

“I’m honoured to have been asked to speak tonight.

In 1986 or 1987 I had an electrifying encounter with Alice Newman, not that I knew her name. It was at the time of the visit to New Zealand of David Irving, now known as a Holocaust denier and revisionist, but then with a reputation as an accomplished historian, even though somewhat controversial.

My first connection with him was to challenge him on talkback radio, where he was being given free rein by a hopelessly outweighed interviewer, Liz Gunn, who kept on weakly expostulating, “But, David…”

His purpose was, essentially, to exculpate Hitler for responsibility for the genocide of Jews. He quoted some words written by Hitler with reference to deportations which he asserted indicated Hitler’s more benign intent. I knew just enough German to challenge his translation and my recollection is that, to my surprise, I won the point.

I then went on to his press conference, held in a hotel in Customs St, in an ugly atmosphere of mutual suspicion. I had a press card at the time, so got in without trouble. I was listening to his spiel when suddenly a woman stood up, interrupted him and challenged him, on the basis that she was a survivor, she was a witness, and he was misrepresenting the Holocaust.

He turned on her savagely, derisively, dismissively and told her that the worst she had ever suffered was that she had had to peel potatoes.

I think she was hustled out of the room at that point.

About three or four years ago, I attended the International Holocaust commemoration at the Auckland Museum. I was sitting at a table later in the cafeteria, when a woman and her son sat down at the table. There was something about her Polish accent and style that triggered a memory. I asked her, “Did you challenge David Irving at his press conference?” Yes!

What a pleasure it was and has been subsequently, to meet the valiant Alice Newman! What a satisfaction it is to know that the remarkable, unique Perry and Sheree Trotter, have captured her story, the story of suffering, of immense loss and of incredible resilience.

I approach this subject of the Shoah with trepidation, because of its magnitude in terms of numbers and of sheer evil, and because of my recognition that I am just a distant commenter.

I was born in the safety of New Zealand, very soon after the Nazis murdered their last Jewish child. I am so lucky that one of the last couples out of Germany were Robert’s parents, so he could be born in Auckland, in safety.

An awareness of the Holocaust has been with me from very young. My mother’s youngest sister, Esther, (Essie), married Ascher Wiener, from Krakow in Poland. He reached New Zealand thanks to the heroic Japanese consul in Vilna who saved thousands at peril of his own life.

Essie and Ascher had a circle of Polish Jewish friends in Wellington and I learned things that have never left me. Most vivid was a story told to my mother by a beautiful, then young Zosia Galler, who became the mother of the esteemed physicians, Les and David Galler. The story Zosia told is also told in her memoirs, “As It Was”, compiled by her son David and his wife, Judge Ema Aitkin.

Zosia was a child of 14, who had lived a comfortable, middle class life before the German occupation, the murder of her father in front of her eyes, her transport to Auschwitz with her mother, and her mother’s death, following Mengele’s amputation of her gangrenous foot, without anaesthetic. Zosia recounted an SS woman coming in to the barracks, holding a white bread sandwich with meat hanging out of it. She held it out, enticing the starving Zosia. When Zosia moved hesitantly towards it, she beat her savagely and fed the sandwich to her dog.

That vignette from Hell has stayed with me ever since.

Over the years I’ve read so much more, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Edith Eger, memoirs of less known survivors, and the more I’ve read, the less I know, because it is, essentially, unknowable.

I’ve had the great privilege of having come to know, to a greater or lesser degree, a number of survivors, principally of Auschwitz.

Our son, Gerard, married into a family of survivors. Three of his wife’s aunts, as children, were in Auschwitz. One was murdered there. Two others were taken for twins and survived Mengele’s diabolic experimentation. You’re probably familiar with the photos the Russian liberators took. Eva, then about 13, looks like an old woman.

Eva Slonim is still alive, and deeply admirable. Her recent memoir, “Gazing At Stars”, is probably, alongside Elie Wiesel’s “Night”, one of the most significant memoirs of child survivors and witnesses to emerge, though sadly it’s not well known at all.

I think of Sara Kardosh, also a Mengele twin, who survived the death march that killed her beloved twin sister. She is the late mother of a good Israeli friend of ours. Sara became the matriarch of a large family, who were raised on a kibbutz and thus, I think, spared some of the damage suffered by second generation people elsewhere. I will always remember her, smiling, cradling a baby grandchild, the tattoo on her arm, in the heart of her family, who came virtually every evening to spend time with their parents.

And I think of Susi Geron. Some people here may remember her, because she lived for many years in Auckland. One day, out of the blue, she came to see me. I knew her only as an attractive, vivacious woman, mother of two daughters. She decided, in middle age, that she wanted to tell the story she had never spoken about, and she wanted me to write it.

We met twice and made a start, but the project never progressed because her family moved to Melbourne. Her story was very similar to that of Edith Eger, whom I met in her first visit to New Zealand. It is the Auschwitz story, the desperate attempt to pass as healthy enough to continue to be worked to death, for another day or another week, rather than to be sent straight to the gas chamber.

Susi told me that when she arrived in New Zealand, she was working in a factory in Wellington. She said nothing to her female workmates about what she had suffered. But one day, at morning tea, one of her workmates said, “Oh, we suffered during the war.” Susi was alert, wanting to know more, wondering if there could be some shared experience.

“Yes, it was awful. We couldn’t even get sardines.” Susi remained silent. Just as Edith Eger told me she was silent when one of her psychotherapy patients years later in the USA came to her office in great distress. Her husband had bought her a Cadillac but it was the wrong colour.

Yesterday, I watched the incredible testimony of Susi Geron’s husband, Stan. If there’s anyone here who knew him, please come and talk to me later.

It’s always with us, never far from our consciousness, we who are here tonight. I remember, in my life, the times when the horror of it was particularly intrusive, such as when we had babies and small children and then grandchildren. Putting our children on a train to go away to Bnai Akiva camp in Wellington. The imagery.

Then these days there’s the History Channel, called by some the Hitler Channel. I don’t find it exploitative on the whole. But so many of the images are so hard to see. Whether it’s mounds of skeletal corpses, or family groups on the selection platform – mothers holding babies and small children – we knowing what they did not, that they have hours to live. I struggle to look at the doomed children, not wanting to look, but feeling it’s the least I can do, to look and to somehow acknowledge.

In our age, despite the availability of so much documentary material, Holocaust denial, revisionism, diminution and even ridicule, is ever more worrying.

We’re living in an age in which opinions are decreasingly formed through the understanding of facts, but more through emotions and ideologies.

So a video circulating on social media of what purports to be an Israeli soldier mistreating a Palestinian child – and likely to be a fake – assumes a moral weight equivalent to the whole Shoah.

There is a hunger to shake off the burden of the Holocaust. A cynic might say, to enable one to be free to hate Jews again. As the Roman philosopher Seneca put it, “They hate those whom they have injured”.

Apparently we can attribute much of the malevolence to our assigned place currently in the victimology hierarchy. We have privilege. White privilege. Wealth. Though paradoxically the white supremacists don’t see us as white, but rather as working to destroy the white race.

Yet can even that status explain the volume and intensity of hate that spews out of comment threads in Stuff or TVNZ or other websites beneath an item about Jews?

As an example, Juliet Moses’ excellent comments taking Golriz Ghahraman to task over her comments about Jesus and his family being Palestinian refugees.

Commenters attacked on the basis of the Holocaust. There were jokes about trying to read it but ‘losing my concentration’. There was even, despicably, a ‘joke’ about Zyklon B. And these comments, from apparently normal New Zealanders, are rewarded with applauding, laughing emojis by other apparently normal New Zealanders. Can there be greater moral bankruptcy? Four months after Christchurch.

The way I see it, such people are either shamefully ignorant, in that they don’t know what it is that they’re mocking, or else they are wicked, because they do know.

Yet such wickedness is apparently not considered shameful in today’s New Zealand, because people are happy that their names and their occupations – some are even teachers – are public.

The Shoah IS unfathomable, however. I went to the opening of the Children’s Holocaust exhibition on Monday evening. I also saw the exhibition in the National Library in Wellington. It’s very well done. It’s imaginative in its use of a million and a half buttons to represent the million and a half children, the great majority Jewish, who were murdered.

Yet it is still unfathomable. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend. I measure numbers of children in relation to the capacity of the assembly hall at Takapuna Grammar School, where I was a pupil. We were about 1000 pupils. How do I mentally compute or envisage one and a half million children?

I heard today on National Radio an interview by the superb Kathryn Ryan of an author who has written a history of the efforts of an heroic Polish man to convey to the allied leaders the extent and the horror of what was happening at Auschwitz – the industrialised murder of Jews.

He was unable to get the Allies to bomb Auschwitz or even to make public what was happening. In trying to understand why, the author has come to the conclusion that it was a combination of anti-Semitism and a failure of imagination.

And it is a test for the imagination. Even a fraction of the information we have is too much to comprehend – the depthless cruelty of packing human beings, including children and babies, into rail wagons and depriving them of water and food for several days.

Yet we must strive to comprehend. It’s the moral duty of we who were spared that suffering.

We can comprehend best, perhaps, through a combination of facts – numbers, maps, historical summaries - and personal stories. I personally do not like Holocaust fiction, no matter how well intended. I think it’s a dangerous medium. It is no substitute for lived truth.

I think Perry and Sheree have developed a unique means to reach people in our age.

There are no appalling images. There are unthreatening and relatable elderly people. The photography, the lighting, conveys the depth, the reflectiveness that these people manifest.

The music calms us, enabling our cognitive processes to absorb the carefully edited words on the screen.

Through these stories, we are enabled to honour the lives of these survivors, the bereaved remnants of destroyed families.

And they should be honoured. Every story of a survivor is a story of multiple losses, hazards, strokes of luck, chance, infinite suffering and infinite endurance.

And they should be honoured for the lives they have lived since that hell – productive lives, creating a home, raising children, contributing to their community and the wider community, conducting themselves with dignity and restraint, despite night terrors, never demanding any special consideration. So absolutely admirable.

The telling and recording of these stories is holy work.

Thank you, Perry and Sheree and all those who enable this holy work to be progressed.”

A Survivor Encounters David Irving

Last week we staged the first in a series of meetings entitled Saving The Shoah: The Holocaust in an Age of Denial and Distortion. Holocaust memory is under assault and it is distorted in a variety of ways, both by its friends and its foes.

Our event opened with a new Shadows of Shoah story, that of Alice Newman. Eleven years old when the Nazis invaded Poland, Alice and her mother were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. Alice was able to escape and spent many months hiding, moving from place to place. Having assumed a false identity she was eventually sent to Germany as a slave labourer.

Years later, in New Zealand, Alice had an encounter with Holocaust denier David Irving. Please watch her story, below.

Dame Lesley Max was a young journalist at the time of Alice’s encounter with Irving and was witness to their exchange. Our next post will feature Lesley’s account.

Alice 4k50 from Perry Trotter on Vimeo.

Guest Post: Challenging the Distortions

(Dr. David Cumin’s speech at the New Zealand opening of ‘River of Tears’, 2018)

17 years ago I visited Auschwitz as part of a two-month backpacking trip around Europe with a friend. It was the only day that we were both completely silent. Not a word was uttered between us the whole day but our personal rivers of tears spoke volumes.

Visiting a place like Auschwitz, with knowledge of what happened there, is powerful. 

But listening to survivors tell their stories brings a level of reality to the unimaginable that is even more emotional than seeing the artefacts of the places where they occurred. Shadows of Shoah brings humanity to the statistics and that is so important for learning and understanding. This event is made even more meaningful, given that it is just over one week since Tisha B’av - the date we remember the destruction of the first and second temples and a day that some kinnot (poems) recall the Shoah.

It is this recalling that is so important. Because we cannot understand if we don’t remember, and without an understanding of history we are ill-equipped to learn lessons and impotent to prevent further lamentations. We must be challenged by this material and confronted by the truth to be better equipped to deal with what seems like a rising tide of consequences from forgetting.

Unfortunately, the work of Shadows of Shoah is needed now more than ever. We exist in a world 54% of Americans have ever heard of the Holocaust and 32% of those believe the event has been greatly exaggerated or is a myth. Those are disturbing statistics and I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were similar here, given the lack of Holocaust education in New Zealand schools. A knowledge gap is relatively easy to plug but it is no guarantee that “never again” will actually be so. Sadly, today there are worrying signs in Europe from groups that can’t honestly claim to be ignorant.

We are seeing a resurgence of Nazi-esq language in some democratic countries:

The Croatian Jewish community boycotted the Holocaust memorial day event this year because the government erected a memorial plaque that includes the phrase “For Homeland Ready” - a rallying cry by the Ustaša, the fascist organization that collaborated with the Nazis. And Croatia’s former president, Stjepan Mesic, was caught on video questioning the death toll of 60,000 at Jasenovac - so brutal was that camp that Nazi officers referred to it as being like Dante's Inferno.

And just a little bit north of Croatia, Austrian Councillors have been caught sending each other WhatsApp messages glorifying Nazi Germany and singing songs in fraternities with lyrics including “Step on the gas you old Germans, we’ll manage the seventh million”.

While not being outright neo-Nazi, there is denial seeping into legislation in Poland. The government want to prohibit people from accusing the Polish state or people of involvement or responsibility in the Holocaust - essentially rewriting history.

Having neo-Nazis in government is one thing, outright denying responsibility is another, but distorting or minimising the Holocaust by comparing it, for example, to the crimes of Communism is far more pernicious. The Czech government, for example, initiated the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, which minimises the genocide of the Jews by diminishing the uniqueness of the Shoah and deeming it to be equivalent to the deaths under Soviet Communism.

And in the UK, the Labour Party has rejected the full definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. One of the parts they consciously omitted was the example of comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. This is a form of the new antisemitism that also falls into the category of what Prof Lipstadt calls “softcore Holocaust denial”.

And this is something we must be alert to as it is sometimes hard to spot. The National Front wanting to wear SS uniforms is easy to stand up to, but the politician comparing Israel to Nazi Germany can be considered reasonable by those without a good understanding; just as Holocaust “revisionists” can be persuasive. Especially when there is no challenge.

Unfortunately, we are not immune from any of these forms of antisemitism in New Zealand.

Pamphlets and posters circulated only last week encouraged people to read a book denying the Holocaust. While we can possibly explain that incident as a few people needing some mental health interventions, we cannot so easily dismiss the fact that Canterbury University still has a Masters Thesis in their library which was awarded first class honours and concludes that “...the Nazis did not systematically exterminate Jews in gas chambers…”.

And the more modern form of antisemitism and ‘softcore Holocaust denial’ - for example, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany - may not be easy to dismiss as a relatively small group of people at one end of some spectrum of a phenomena in a psychiatric handbook, no matter how loud they might be.

In the past month we have seen a Member of Parliament, a senior TV current affairs producer, and a University professor all accuse Israel of committing “genocide”. And in so doing, not only do they unfairly disparage the Jewish nation, but they also disparage the memory of real genocides. They invoke an obscene moral inversion by falsely accusing victims of a unique genocide last century - where industrial scale machinery was invoked and many ordinary people in a civilised country participated in attempts to murder every last person only for being of a certain bloodline - of committing a similar crime against humanity.

As we know from the excellent record keeping of the Germans and the hard work of numerous expert historians, the success of the German National Socialist enterprise was that 6m Jewish lives were taken. When a learned and sane person attributes similar intention, let alone outcome, to Israel we must challenge it.

And when people try to compare the Holocaust to other historical events, to contemporary policies of some countries, or even to “microaggressions”, it is incumbent upon us to be clear that such a comparison distorts history and diminishes the memory of the Shoah.

As Elie Wiesel famously said:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”

Shadows of Shoah is a great example of love, art, faith, and life. The humanity of the stories are captured and curated with all those virtues in mind. It is the respect, concern, compassion, and hard work that has gone into this exhibit that speaks the loudest and helps protect us all against hate - whether, to paraphrase Rabbi Sacks, it is the old hate of Jews based on religion or race, or the new hate manifest as opposition to a Jewish nation state.

The Shadows of Shoah works do not try to trivialise the memory of the murdered by comparing the systematic Nazi demonisation, boycotts, and eventual murder of Jews and others with everyday racism, discrimination, or provocations. While we must be aware of such societal ills, invoking the Holocaust is absurd.

There are few better ways to challenge the distortions, the rising neo-Nazism, and the softcore denial than to bring the stories to the people in a way that celebrates the survivors and honours the memory of those who were taken.

Manager appointed for Shadows of Shoah

Shadows of Shoah is delighted to welcome Deb Levy as manager.  Deb is a third generation Holocaust Survivor with a background in not-for-profit management and education.

In May, as the MC at the Yom Hashoah Holocaust Memorial Service at Auckland Hebrew Congregation, Deb was captivated by the effect that Shadows of Shoah had on the 200 strong audience. "I've been an admirer of Shadows of Shoah for a long time, but standing on the stage as MC meant that I was literally in a position to see the impact that the screening of just one excerpt of one story had on those watching".

"Perry and Sheree's work captures survivor stories in such a remarkably powerful and succinct way.  I have seen first-hand the way the three-minute stories can transform those who are somewhat apathetic about Jews and the Holocaust into committed advocates".  

A few short weeks later Deb and Sheree met about the possibility of Deb getting more involved.

Requests and opportunities for Shadows of Shoah have been steadily developing. "There are requests coming in locally and internationally.  We need to seize these opportunities as they come in to combat the growing issues of Holocaust distortion, denial and antisemitism," Deb explains.   

There is the added challenge that while founders Perry and Sheree Trotter are busy with Shadows of Shoah’s administrative tasks, as well as their other advocacy and research work, they are not able to capture more stories. This was one of the things which attracted Deb to a Manager role. "I am really concerned that there is such a limited time window to capture survivor stories and Shadows of Shoah desperately needs manpower and funding to do this while the survivors are still with us".

Deb’s family story also motivates her to do all she can to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten. This year marked 80 years since Deb's maternal grandparents arrived in New Zealand, having escaped Nazi Europe. They were met at the boat by a righteous gentile family who, despite being total strangers, took them and their two small children into their home.  

Three generations later the descendants of both families gathered to celebrate the long-standing family friendship which continues until today. Deb's aunt, who was a child at the time, spoke about the terrifying journey they had escaping from Nazi-occupied Vienna.

Deb has been supporting the Shadows of Shoah Trust as a regular small donor since the launch of River of Tears last year.

"I set up an automatic payment to make fortnightly donations. I couldn't afford a lot but I knew it was important to do something to ensure that this vital work continues".  Deb has worked extensively in not-for-profit management and knows how significant these kinds of donations are as they provide regular income instead of lurching from donation to donation.

Deb's aim is to start by raising funds, from generous stand-alone donations, through to 'small but mighty donors' like her who give what they can on a regular basis. She hopes that her work will not only honour those who perished and those who survived, but will also honour righteous gentiles like the Stormont-Morpeth family who took in her family.

If you would like to support Shadows of Shoah with a donation or to set up an automatic payment, please click here.