“Let’s hope this never happens again.”
That’s the plea from an Auckland woman who escaped Nazi rule as a child more than 80 years ago, ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day tomorrow.
Alicja Newman – whose real name is Sala - was only 10 years old when her mother forced her to walk out the gates of the Warsaw Ghetto, while a complicit German guard turned a blind eye.
“Mum had no idea what was going to happen on this particular day,” said Alicja’s daughter, Lisa. “The gendarme, as mum describes him, who was standing just outside the gate, apparently under his breath, very annoyed, said, ‘szybko!’, which means quickly, and her mother shoved her and she walked out.”
By the summer of 1942, nearly half a million Jewish people were crammed into a portion of Poland’s largest city, just over three square kilometres in size.
Looking at old family photos, Alicja, now in her nineties, recounts the horrors of life in the Warsaw Ghetto.
“They could do very little,” she says. “A lot of people were hiding, but in my case, I had to have hope.”
After escaping the ghetto, she spent years in Displaced Persons camps, before coming to New Zealand with other Polish refugees in 1950.
Deborah Hart, chair of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, said she’s one of the few Holocaust survivors left in Aotearoa.
“It’s a reminder to us all that hate starts small and can end up in the most horrific of places.”
Research from the US earlier this month suggests there’s been a spike in antisemitic beliefs.
Hart says it’s creeping closer to home.
“Antisemitism in this country and internationally is on the increase,” she told 1News. “We’re seeing and hearing some quite disturbing examples, including in our schools, and that’s really really concerning.”
She said social media doesn’t help, particularly following rapper Kanye West’s recent antisemitic remarks online.
“When you have people with huge followings, people like Kanye West, who are saying the most obscene antisemitic things, it has real world consequences.”
Alicja’s daughter, Lisa, thinks society is moving in the wrong direction.
“They seem to have forgotten the story of the Holocaust, that it wasn’t a movie, with six million extras. You know, they were all people who were killed.”
Alicja will be at Auckland War Memorial Museum tomorrow, along with some of the original cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto.
The cobblestones were gifted by the United States Holocaust Museum to the Auckland Hebrew Congregation and will be at International Holocaust Remembrance Day events throughout New Zealand.
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