LET ME BE MYSELF

Opening night: Students explore the exhibition. Picture by Dudley Meadows

Here is an extraordinary story, one of many from the Second World War. A young Dutchman working for the Dutch resistance jumped on to an advancing Canadian tank and told the crew where the Germans were. The Canadians were advancing from Belgium into the Netherlands in 1944. That young man, Boyd Klap, emigrated to New Zealand in 1951, and on a visit to Queenstown met a Canadian man there, who happened to have been a tank commander during the war in the Netherlands when a young Dutchman jumped on to his tank . . . to tell the crew where the Germans were . . . and truth can be stranger than fiction.

Boyd was 13 when Germany invaded the Netherlands and 18 when it was liberated.

“They were my formative years,” he said.

“My involvement in anti-discrimination comes from those times.”

He is now chairman of the Anne Frank Foundation which, with the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, has brought the Anne Frank Exhibition ‘Let Me Be Myself’ to Gisborne, now showing at Tairāwhiti Museum.

Anne Frank of course was the young Jewish girl who kept a diary in Amsterdam while she was in hiding from the Nazis, only to be later discovered, arrested and transported to Auschwitz then Bergen Belsen, where she died weeks before the British liberated the camp.

And here are some extraordinary statistics: a recent New Zealand survey on anti-Semitism found that fewer than half of all New Zealanders could identify that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, nearly one-fifth said they knew nothing about it, and six percent said that the Jews had brought it on themselves.

Boyd Klap comes from Deventer, a city 40km north of Arnhem, and by the time he was 16 or 17 was forced to work digging German defences.

"I went into hiding on a farm up north. One day we were warned there would be a ‘razzia’ or raid, an attack on people in hiding. They would surround a village and find the people in hiding and arrest them. I escaped with a friend. We’d heard it was happening so we went home and he started working for the Red Cross.”

By that stage the Netherlands south of the Rhine had been liberated but he was in the north, and from September 1944 to May 1945 it suffered the worst of the war with food shortages, Nazi V1 and V2 rockets launching and retaliatory Allied bombings.

It was then he joined the Resistance.

“The Resistance didn’t particularly like young people up to that point,” he said.

“I was recruited as a courier in 1944, after the battle of Arnhem. I was very patriotic and it was a bit of an adventure.

“Someone would come to my place with documents and I would put them inside the saddle of my bike, cycle 15km to someone else and finally the information would be radioed to Britain.”

Those years shaped his life and his lifelong mission to fight against discrimination of all kinds.

After a successful career in insurance he helped develop a strategy for the Anne Frank exhibition, initially for three months, but 13 years later he is still working on it.

“I was asked if I could help and my heart was in it,” he said.

His work has included securing funding for the exhibition, organising tours and transport, contracts and venues. The exhibition has now toured to 17 venues in New Zealand and been seen by 200,000 people.

He was instrumental in getting Anne Frank’s Diary translated into te reo Māori: Anne Frank Te Rātaka a Tētahi Kōhine.

This came about when the exhibition was in Parihaka, Taranaki, and an audience member asked if the book had been translated into te reo Māori. It had already been translated into more than 70 languages.

“As a result of me being in Parihaka I got some people together and said ‘we need to do this’ and we did. I think Anne Frank, if she was alive, she would love it.”

He helped raise $100,000 to get the job done and secured the translator, Te Haumihiata Mason, who he said was the real star of the story.

No te reo speaker could be found to translate it from the original Dutch, so it was translated from English. Early translations of the diary into English had edited some of Anne’s entries which mentioned menstruation and some tricky family dynamics, but for the te reo version they went back to the original and included everything, even translating into a te reo closer to what was spoken in the 1940s.

The other organisation instrumental in bringing the exhibition here is the New Zealand Holocaust Centre, and newly- appointed Auckland-based chief executive Gillian Wess was in town last week to officially open the exhibition.

“We are the country’s national Holocaust education and remembrance institution,” she said, “to inspire and empower action against anti-Semitism, discrimination and apathy by remembering, educating and bearing witness to the Holocaust. If people understand what it was it acts as a buffer to our short memories and lack of education.”

The Holocaust Centre has had a close association with the exhibition and will take it over later in the year when Boyd Klap steps down.

“There’s a huge gap in Holocaust education,” Ms Wess said.

“The Holocaust is not taught in New Zealand schools. We have a mission to teach it. We have a range of educational materials, and the Anne Frank Exhibition is one of those.

“Education is the key and that’s why it’s so important and well recognised.”

The results of the survey into New Zealanders’ knowledge of the Holocaust are “alarming and disturbing,” she said.

“That survey indicates we still have a lot of work to do. We have to empower people to be ‘upstanders’ against bullying and racism, to know what it is and be prepared to make a difference and stand against it.

“That didn’t happen in Nazi Germany and far too many didn’t stand up to systematised, institutionalised genocide, and as a result six million people fell.

The Holocaust Centre has a comprehensive education programme providing New Zealand teachers with materials on the Holocaust and discrimination. School groups visit, educators outreach to schools and they invite groups of adults to the centre. A huge number of learning materials are online.

“We also can’t forget in the Holocaust that Nazis discriminated against others like the Roma, Sinti (a subgroup of the Roma) and the rainbow community. Anyone deemed to be different or not racially pure was considered subhuman.

“They made judgements on the ‘other’, that they were not worthy of living. They determined that Anne Frank was not worthy of having a life. She was one of 1.5 million children murdered by the Nazis.

“If we stop and think if they had lived what would they have become, what contributions would they have gone on to make?

“That’s a significant loss, and all the more reason for education so that the events of the Holocaust will never happen again.

“It’s exhibitions like Anne Frank that come to the heart of the community to learn about her experience and consider what it means for us today and how we can all make that difference.”

Even though Boyd Klap is stepping down at the end of the year and the Holocaust Centre is taking charge, he has already booked it for six months of next year.

“I like to get things done,” he said.

Speaking at the opening of the exhibition last week, Ambassador Woldberg said, “I truly hope the exhibition in Tairawhiti Museum is the beginning of new discussions in which Anne’s story is shared and linked to the challenges of today by young and old. And that we keep her memory alive by sharing her message of hope and inspiration by focusing on what binds us.

“Anne Frank wrote in her diary that human relations must not be defined by the ways in which others segregate them into groups, but only by their own disposition, their shared humanity.

“Her message is still relevant today. We must stay alert. We all have a responsibility to stand up against prejudice and discrimination, so I really hope many children, teenagers and their parents will find their way to the museum.”

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