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.

An Interview With The Last Nazi Hunter: Part II

The hateful attack on Jewish worshippers in a Chabad-Lubavitch center in Poway, near San Diego, has forcefully underlined the fact that bad ideas have tragic consequences.

The nineteen year old shooter, who in many respects appears to be an ordinary citizen with the same aspirations as other young people, had adopted a twisted view of Jewish people. The gunman’s letter, reminiscent of the antisemitic fabricated text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, drew on many of the traditional antisemitic stereotypes about power, money and control, blaming Jews for Society’s ills.

Efraim Zuroff shows what these entrenched stereotypes can lead to, by highlighting the role of local communities in the violence perpetrated on European Jews during the Holocaust. The Nazis were able to carry out their murderous goals on a grand scale, because they found willing helpers - ordinary citizens with deeply entrenched antisemitic views.

The sad reality is that in every European country, even Denmark, the Nazis were able to recruit volunteers to help carry out mass murder. However, the difference between the Western and Eastern Europeans was that collaborators in the East became part of the mechanism of mass murder. 

Zuroff points out that until the fall of the Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe had little opportunity to appropriately confront and process their role as collaborators in the Holocaust. An attempt to deal with an unconscionable history, combined with rising nationalist sentiment, has seen the narrative of the past rewritten in many of these countries and resulted in wholesale historical revisionism and Holocaust distortion.

Part II of our interview with Dr Zuroff at King David Hotel, Jerusalem.

Eli Saar was the first of the more than sixty Holocaust survivors we have interviewed over the last decade. The pleasantness of our surroundings, a sunny porch at our friend’s home at Gan Shmuel Kibbutz, created a harsh juxtaposition with the shocking story we heard that day in 2008.

We were warned, “Eli is a hard man”. He was reluctant to talk about the Holocaust and our friends weren’t sure that he would turn up. 

As I listened to him tell his story, I didn’t see hardness. I saw pain, etched on lines of his face as he recounted memories almost impossible to imagine. A child taken by the legs and smashed against a wall. Corpses propped up in the street. As a child, he didn’t understand and played a game, jumping over the dead.

Eli was six years old when he and his family, along with all Jewish residents of Warsaw, were forced to live in an area sealed off from the rest of the city, enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet tall, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. At one point over 40,000 Jews were imprisoned in an area just over 2 square kilometres.

It is remarkable that any recover from such horrendous events. Many do, move forward and thrive. But we don’t hear so much about the ones who fail to thrive. In the period following the war, survivors were given little in the way of emotional or psychological assistance in dealing with their trauma. Many felt guilty that they had survived. In Israel, there was seldom time to look back. A new state was formed in 1948, and energies were galvanised to fight for the new state, and then to build. 

However, the trauma of the Holocaust didn’t disappear. 

Many survivors have preferred to keep the memories locked in the past, and refuse to speak of their experiences. Others have found that sharing their stories has helped the healing process. One survivor, Sarah, told us that during the Holocaust she would dream every night of feasting on all kinds of delicacies and rich foods. After the Holocaust, she had nightmares every night of being chased and in danger. In the 1980s, she began sculpting and the forms she created of grotesque and yet stunning figures told a story that words could not. She was able to heal to some extent. Several survivors have said that they didn’t start talking about the Holocaust until their grandchildren began asking questions about their past and the many missing relatives. Another found that writing memoirs brought release from the past. 

Still others believe it is an obligation to speak of what happened. To remember in order to learn. 

Eli explained that he made a great effort to forget and suppress his experience of six years of terrible fear. “A person who hasn’t experienced it, cannot understand.  They can sympathize,  but they cannot understand. Terrible fear, day & night.  You feel like an animal threatened by a predator. It took tens of years…I can’t say something is left in me from this”.

Sadly, a recent survey has shown that one-third of all Americans believe the scope of the murder of Jews in the Holocaust has been exaggerated, 45 percent of Americans could not name any of the 40 ghettos or concentration camps erected by the Nazis… and 58 percent said a Holocaust or similar catastrophe could occur again.’ Even more disturbing is that in Europe where the tragedy took place, a recent poll found that a third of Europeans knew little or nothing about the Holocaust. The poll also found "a worrying increase in the number of people who believe traditional anti-Semitic tropes or hold anti-Semitic views…”

Eli’s story is tragic and deeply moving - and in light of these disturbing trends, it is increasingly important.

More on the Warsaw Ghetto:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/warsaw

Last year we had the opportunity to interview Dr Efraim Zuroff at the historic King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Known as The Last Nazi Hunter, Efraim has spent much of his life tracking down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to trial. I remembered seeing Efraim on a documentary about Nazis who had found their way to New Zealand and his attempts to bring them to justice.

Efraim made the point 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 enquiry into the presence of Nazis in New Zealand.

A 2008 story in the Otago Daily Times addressed the New Zealand government’s decision not to take further action:

New Zealand set up a two-person unit in 1991 to investigate allegations that perpetrators of war crimes settled in this country.

The unit spent $190,000 investigating the claims in New Zealand and overseas, narrowing the suspected list from 46 to 17 known to be alive and living in the country.

The Wiesenthal centre had supplied 42 of the 46 names.

Fifteen were cleared and two were further investigated, with the unit finding it was "possible" one of the suspects was involved in war crimes.

The finding of the unit was presented by the then attorney-general, Mr Paul East.

"We feel we've discharged our obligations to the international community in the steps we've taken and that we will now only respond if we are given something far more substantial than individual names," Mr East said in 1992.

Dr Zuroff said the centre tried to convince successive New Zealand governments to take legal action against suspected Nazis, but to no avail.

"New Zealand was the only Anglo-Saxon democracy which faced this problem and chose to ignore it," he said.

"There was absolutely no political will to take legal action against the Nazi war criminals who emigrated to New Zealand in the late 1940s and early 1950s, posing as refugees fleeing communism."

"By the time that I found these people, many were no longer alive.

But one who was alive and living in Auckland was Jonas Pukas, a Lithuanian who served in the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion, which murdered tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania and Belarus," Dr Zuroff said.

Given recent events in New Zealand, not only the massacre of Muslims by a terrorist, but the concerns of university students regarding far-right elements on campus and the casual attitudes of shopkeepers towards Nazi paraphenalia, it is timely to consider New Zealand’s relationship with the far-right.

A number of historical events give cause for concern. The New Zealand government’s reluctance to bring Nazi war criminals to justice was not the first questionable decision over the handling of the Holocaust. Our government was also reluctant to allow many Jewish refugees from the Holocaust to immigrate. In more recent times we’ve seen the University of Canterbury granting academic credentials to a Holocaust denier and TVNZ’s uncritical glorification of a Nazi Waffen-SS soldier.

The government’s poor response regarding Nazi war criminals raises uncomfortable questions.

Why were these Nazi crimes minimised?

How would we feel about Tarrant’s crimes being minimised in his old age?

Why is there a casual attitude toward Nazi symbols and paraphenalia when they are associated with genocide?

Is antisemitism taken seriously in New Zealand and is it opposed with as much passion as other forms of racism and hatred?