Nine lives in NZ after Auschwitz

HERSTORIES: Anna Chapman (front) and Simone Gigliotti setting up the exhibition, Auschwitz to Aotearoa. PHOTO/MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

Their names are not well known but their stories are carved into history much as their death camp numbers are tattooed on their arms - nine women who survived Auschwitz before coming to live in New Zealand.

They are Hanka, Rose, Lotte, Sophie, Hansi, Katherine, Olga, Helen and Clare, whose lives are commemorated in an exhibition at Kiwi North Whangarei Museum in the year of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Whangarei is the first regional centre in New Zealand to show the exhibition Auschwitz to Aotearoa - Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps. It is curated by Victoria University history honours student Anna Chapman and her lecturer, Simone Gigliotti, on behalf of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand.

Ms Chapman came across the nine women's testimonials when she was doing research at the Holocaust Centre in Wellington and the oral Holocaust History project archives in Auckland for her thesis. Her research included contact with the Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, set up by filmmaker Steven Spielberg after he made his 1994 movie Schindler's List.

She learned that half of all the women who survived concentration camps and emigrated to New Zealand had been in Auschwitz.

"Their stories were just on CDs in the university library, " said Ms Chapman.

The timing of the deportations of the women in her study clearly shows the spread of the Holocaust (in Hebrew called the Shoah) across Europe: The first were sent to Auschwitz from Czechoslovakia, then Poland, Germany and Hungary, between 1942 and 1944.

The women featured in Auschwitz to Aotearoa were the only survivors in their immediate families. In New Zealand they went on to have their own families, except one who had been subject to medical experiments and could not have children.

From different countries and backgrounds, they emigrated at different times, in the 1940s and 1950s, one of them coming twice before settling permanently in 1969. They settled in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

Many years later they were happy to talk of their past, although when they arrived in New Zealand they shared a common experience of not wanting to speak about it, Ms Chapman said.

Ms Gigliotti said, "For various reasons - they didn't want people to feel sorry for them, or New Zealanders might not want to know or be sympathetic."

Their silence might have been a form of self-preservation, she said.

Auschwitz to Aotearoa is in Whangarei before any other centre apart from Auckland and Wellington because of the success of the exhibition, Holocaust Centre's Anne Frank - A History for Today, which the museum hosted in 2010. Auschwitz to Aotearoa opens tomorrow.