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The Holocaust Is My Heritage: Bearing the Scars and Stories of Survivor Grandparents | Haaretz

My last photo with my Zayde

NZFOI: Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah

My Zayde told us about his childhood in Kazimierz, and about burying half-alive bodies in Buchenwald. What it means to be the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, and to lose them.

He and his father were imprisoned in Plaszow concentration camp, where he said every day brought a new tragedy. He would tell us, in unadorned language, that he saw young boys being hanged for stealing bread, and that’s when he learned you say the Shema prayer before you die. He piled earth over bodies, after they were shot dead, and was haunted by watching the soil shiver – the victims were still alive, and slowly suffocating.

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→ 25 March 2021
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Mountain steps out from Nazi shadow, mostly | Newsroom

Willi Huber

After months of pressure, a ski run and restaurant at Canterbury’s Mt Hutt are being renamed. David Williams reports

A ski field has quietly wiped a Nazi officer’s name from its slopes – but not from the entire mountain.

Willi Huber, a pioneer of Canterbury ski field Mt Hutt, lauded as the ‘father of the mountain’ in a 2017 TVNZ Sunday programme, died in August last year, aged 97.

However, the ski field’s promise to continue to honour him with the name of its restaurant and a ski run hit a swastika-shaped snag. The Austrian volunteered for the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the notorious SS, and became a decorated officer.

(SS is an abbreviation for Schutzstaffel, meaning “protective echelon”. It was founded by Adolf Hitler in 1925 as his personal bodyguards but grew with the rise of the Nazi movement, to 38 combat divisions comprising 950,000 men. Heinrich Himmler headed the SS from 1929.)

News of Huber being memorialised at Mt Hutt sparked a wave of outrage, especially in light of his comments to Sunday – the link to which was deleted last night – that Hitler was “clever”.

A petition was launched asking for Huber’s name to be scraped from the ski field was signed by thousands of people. The story was also picked up by the Jerusalem Post.

Last September, members of the NZ Jewish Council and the Holocaust Centre of NZ discussed the issue with Paul Anderson, the boss of NZSki, the company that operates Mt Hutt, and Queenstown fields The Remarkables and Coronet Peak. After the meeting, Mt Hutt’s manager told Stuff the names of the restaurant and ski run would only be changed if evidence was presented linking Huber to war crimes.

Nothing has been said publicly since.

But a search of Mt Hutt’s website this week revealed Huber’s Run has been removed from the ski field’s trail map and the restaurant had been renamed Ōpuke Kai. (Ōpuke is the Māori name for Mt Hutt. NZ Ski has asked iwi Ngāi Tahu if it’s comfortable for that name to be used.)

Anderson, the NZSki boss, confirms the changes. The decision was made early this year and the changes were implemented a month ago, he said.

“We’ve had to take care on the way through to respect the views of a wide range of people and recognise that there were diverse opinions on the issue. We’ve just come to our decision that it’s time to move forward.”

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→ 28 February 2021
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Relatives of Holocaust survivors connect with Wellington woman, whose father hid 16 Jewish people in Poland home | Stuff

Eva Woodbury

Eva Woodbury​ has been going through a “kaleidoscope of emotions” after relatives of Holocaust survivors her father hid in his Poland home for two years have contacted her.

Now, they are campaigning for her father, Wladimir Riszko​, to be a Righteous Among the Nations, a title used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jewish people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. They’re also hoping to find descendents of other people he saved.

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→ 4 February 2021
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Holocaust survivor accidentally discovers ‘hero’ who hid her relatives from the Nazis | TheJC

Wladimir Riszko

NZFOI: A Holocaust story with a New Zealand connection.

A Holocaust survivor has accidentally discovered after 75 years who hid her relatives from the Nazis – and she wants him posthumously recognised as a righteous gentile.  

The man, Wladamir Riszko, is believed to have hidden 16 people in a cellar in the Polish city of Przemysl between 1942 and 1944 – including the woman who later became his wife. 

Rosalie Hart’s uncle and cousin, Meyer and Regina Dornbusch, were among those hidden by Mr Riszko.

Ms Hart, a 91 year-old Krakow ghetto survivor in Maida Vale, had heard snippets of her relatives’ time in hiding over the years. But she never had enough to piece together a full picture.

Then this year, just days before Holocaust Memorial Day, the identity of the man who saved her relatives emerged on Facebook. 

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→ 7 December 2020
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NZFOI deeply troubled by Ngarewa-Parker’s use of the Holocaust

Maori Party co-leader, Debbie Ngarewa-Parker

Maori Party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Parker’s claim to be a holocaust survivor diminishes the Nazi Holocaust and causes further pain to those who have lost loved ones in that attempted genocide.

In Parliament, newly elected Maori Party MP, Debbie Ngarewa-Parker said:

“I stand here as a descendant of a people who survived a holocaust, a genocide sponsored by this House and members of Parliament whose portraits still hang from the walls—members of this Parliament who sought our extermination and created legislation to achieve it. They confiscated all our whenua, imprisoned us without trial, murdered and raped our women and children, and deliberately engineered our displacement for generations to come. What William Fox, George Grey, John Bryce, and many others did to my people was unforgiveable. Fortunately, their one-generational plan was outlived by our forever-generational resolve: such is the strength of my whakapapa. But the trauma of what they did lives with us.” — Hansard

NZ Friends of Israel finds her comparison to the Nazi Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s deeply troubling.

For her accusation to hold true, then the NZ governments of the day must have intentionally set out to and organised to build and operate an infrastructure to systematically incarcerate and eliminate all Maori from New Zealand. There is no historical evidence of such a plan or endeavour.

By using the Holocaust in such a way to dramatize her community’s historical pain and suffering, she diminishes the original Holocaust, causes more pain to those who have lost loved ones in the Nazi Holocaust, undermines her own credibility, promotes division in NZ society, distracts from her cause and potentially curses her followers to perpetual victimhood.

NZFOI

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→ 20 October 2020
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Following Facebook, Twitter will now ban Holocaust denial | JTA

Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO

Twitter will now ban posts that deny the Holocaust.

Bloomberg News reported Wednesday that a Twitter spokesperson said posts that “deny or distort” violent events including the Holocaust would be banned.

Twitter is the second major social media network to ban Holocaust denial this week. Facebook announced on Monday that it would ban posts that deny or distort the Holocaust, two years after Mark Zuckerberg said Holocaust denial should be allowed in the name of free speech.

“We strongly condemn anti-semitism, and hateful conduct has absolutely no place on our service,” the Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. “We also have a robust ‘glorification of violence’ policy in place and take action against content that glorifies or praises historical acts of violence and genocide, including the Holocaust.”

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→ 3 September 2020
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Problematic Legacy | ODT

Huber (Left) Zuroff (Right)

Mr Huber was very young — just 17 — when he volunteered for the SS. His contribution to New Zealand skiing, Mt Hutt especially, since moving here in the 1950s has been hugely significant. He has a large family living in this country.

But those are not “mitigating factors”, and they do not prevent us asking one salient question: Should anything in New Zealand be named in honour of a member of a group responsible for some of the worst atrocities in history?

The answer, surely, is that never, in any circumstances, is that appropriate. Nothing, anywhere, should carry the name of a cog in the Nazis’ genocidal machine.

Mt Hutt representatives should have acted sooner. But it is not too late. They can still recognise the contribution made by Mr Huber to the ski area and not carry open, public reminders of a Nazi link.

There was a similar case in Akaroa earlier this year when the Bully Hayes restaurant was called out for honouring an American whose deeds in the Pacific included human trafficking, and abducting and raping young women and children.

We can’t change history. We can’t erase it. But we can recognise when it is very obviously not right to just ignore it.

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→ 8 June 2020
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Why Did Women Vote for Hitler? Long-Forgotten Essays Hold Some Answers | Conversation

A trove of essays in the archives of the Hoover Institution provide some insight as to what attracted everyday women to extremist ideology.

The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in the 1930s came on the back of votes from millions of ordinary Germans – both men and women.

But aside from a few high-profile figures, such as concentration camp guard Irma Grese and “concentration camp murderess” Ilse Koch, little is known about the everyday women who embraced the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, known more commonly as the Nazi Party. What little data we do have on ordinary Nazi women has been largely underused, forgotten or ignored. It has left us with a half-formed understanding of the rise of the Nazi movement, one that is almost exclusively focused on male party members.

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→ 18 May 2020
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Coronavirus: Brothers who survived Holocaust die weeks apart in New York | Stuff

The Feingold brothers in 2015: Alex (left) and Joseph (right)

The brothers didn’t have a chance to say goodbye.

As young Polish Jews, each came out of World War II with scars that forever shaped how they viewed the world, and each other.

One survived Auschwitz, a death march and starvation. The other endured cold and hunger in a Siberian labour camp, then nearly died in a pogrom back in Poland.

Alexander and Joseph Feingold chose New York City as the place to start over. It is where they became architects, lived blocks from each other and lost their wives days apart. It was there that they died four weeks apart, each alone, as the coronavirus pandemic gripped the city.

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→ 21 April 2020
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Yom HaShoah 2020 Memorial Service | ZFNZ

Last night the Zionist Federation of New Zealand organized a memorial service to honour the victims of the Holocaust.

In case you missed it, you can catch the service here:

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