Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, an Auckland woman whose father survived the notorious Nazi death camp is urging New Zealanders to keep learning about the Holocaust.

Monday 27 January is International Holocaust Remembrance Day and events will be held around New Zealand to remember the six million Jews killed by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Esther Haver’s father Sol Filler was born in the small Polish town of Brzozow and spent years in labour camps, and later death camps, before incredibly surviving the Nazi-led death march from Auschwitz as the Allied Forces approached In January 1945.

Thousands of more than 30,000 emaciated camp inmates, mainly Jews, who began the march died or were shot by the Nazis en route because they were too weak to keep up.

Sol Filler’s miraculous survival inspired Esther Haver to get involved in Holocaust education,
taking youth groups to Poland for more than a decade to walk her father's same steps to life and freedom.

Esther Haver says many New Zealanders are unaware of the horrors of the Holocaust and misinformation, particularly on social media, leaves them confused about what truly happened.

“With fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors alive to tell their eyewitness accounts today, we must keep telling their stories. We must keep teaching our children about the dangers of hating people because of their religion or race,” Esther Haver says.

Holocaust Centre of New Zealand chair Deborah Hart says hatred towards Jewish New Zealanders is now at record levels.

New Zealand Jews only account for 0.2% of the population, yet reported hate crimes directed against the Jewish community have surged, 13% of all reported hate crimes in Auckland alone. About 40% of the physical assaults have been on Jewish children at school. Some have had to change schools and hide their Jewish identity.

“Jewish people have been sent cockroaches and I’ve been told my family should have been murdered in the ovens of Auschwitz. I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

“Jewish art exhibitions and public events like Hannukah in the Park have been cancelled, often by civic institutions citing security concerns. Jews are going to ground. Many in the Jewish community are scared,” Deborah Hart says.

Victoria University of Wellington historian and Holocaust expert Giacomo Lichtner, who lost his grandfather and seven other members of his family at Auschwitz, is one of the speakers at this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day events and explains antisemitism is hatred and racial stereotyping of Jewish people.

“New Zealand is not immune from antisemitism. We have witnessed its re-emersion into the public arena, via internet memes suggesting the Jews control the media or the banking system. We’ve seen it in schools, refusing to teach Holocaust history and looking the other way when Jewish students are bullied, assaulted, or have their uniforms marked with Jewish stars or prisoner numbers.

“This is a dangerous development as it suggests that antisemitism is leaving the fringes of society and re-entering the mainstream, through racist stereotypes learnt in families, schools and universities, in our locker rooms and our boardrooms,” Giacomo Lichtner says

Deborah Hart says the Holocaust Centre calls on New Zealanders to stand up against hatred. “Fight ignorance with education, prejudice with empathy and xenophobia with the celebration of difference,” she says.

Notes:

· The Holocaust refers to the genocide of six million Jews carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies between 1933 and 1945, particularly the establishment of unprecedented Death Camps, such as Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz.

· The Roma people and the disabled were also exterminated by the Nazis while many others were oppressed on the basis of their ethnicity, political ideas, religious beliefs or sexual orientation.

· Speakers at this year’s events include Deputy Prime Ministers Hon Winston Peters and Hon David Seymour,Finance Minister Nicola Willis, Chief Human Rights Commissioner Stephen Rainbow, Race Relations Commissioner Dr Melissa Derby and Jonathan Crawford, Acting Chief of the Political and Economic Section, Embassy of the United States of America

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