A holocaust survivor and one of the last remaining Jews to be saved by Oskar Schindler hopes her story can help prevent the horrors she witnessed happening again.
Eva Lavi, 76, was in Dunedin yesterday and spoke to pupils at St Hilda’s Collegiate School as part of a national speaking tour to raise awareness about the horrors she and millions of other Jews went through during World War II.
She described how, thanks to the efforts of her mother, Fela Rac, and Mr Schindler, she was able to survive the horrors of the war when so many others – including six million Jews – perished.
Mrs Lavi was aged 2 and living in Krakow when the Germans invaded in 1939.
Her life changed drastically and she and her family shifted into a ghetto, where 15,000 Jews were crammed into an area which had housed about 3000 people before the war. She was 8 when the war finished.
She described how, at first, she enjoyed being round so many relatives in the ghetto, but it did not take long for things to change.
Her grandparents were killed by the Nazis for being “too old”, less than a week after the family moved there.
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