Holocaust survivor's story told through art

Bob Narev, of Auckland, is one of six Holocaust survivors featured in an exhibition now showing in Whangarei. Photo / John Stone

Bob Narev wasn't really frightened during more than two years he spent in a Nazi concentration camp, starting when he was 6.

Mr Narev, a German Jew, was taken to Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1942, along with his parents and two grandmothers. Of the five, only himself and his mother survived.

"I wasn't frightened, but had I known what my mother had known, I would have been," the 80-year-old said.

Theresienstadt was a kind of holding camp, he said, and nearly everyone who went there was eventually taken to Auschwitz.

"When you are in that situation as a child, your memory turns off," Mr Narev said.

His story forms part of an exhibition which opened in Whangarei last night, Shadows of Shoah, which tells the stories of six Holocaust survivors using simple, candid photography, music and the subject's own words.

Mr Narev and his wife Freda - also a Holocaust survivor - made their way to New Zealand after the war through family connections.

Mr Narev lives in Auckland and is a semi-retired lawyer.

He spoke at the opening of the exhibition, which is showing at The Hub on Dent St until August 31.

Photographer Perry Trotter said he started photographing Holocaust survivors in 2008 and had since worked with more than 45.

He said he had become captured by the "antagonism over thousands of years" experienced by Jewish people, and the many and varied reactions to living through the Holocaust.