Feature
‘I was nine & wanted to go on a train trip …’
by Mary Jane Boland
Decades later, children of the Holocaust share their harrowing stories.
Tucked inside a wrinkled brown wallet at Bob Narev’s Auckland home are two snippets of fabric. Time has not faded the putrid colours of the Star of David that Narev, now 72, wore as a boy. The word “Jude” remains as clear as it was in 1941. And so does his concentration camp number, XII/ 1 618, printed in black on the other scrap of fabric.
Nor has time erased the memories Narev has about the extermination of so many of his relatives during the Holocaust.
Yet his wife, Freda, who also lost family members in the Nazi camps, has taken New Zealand secondary school students on visits to Auckland’s Orthodox synagogue, and discovered that some of them didn’t know much about World War II while others had never even heard of the Holocaust. And the Narevs are used to being approached by some Holocaust deniers – or reading about David Irving and others who argue that the Nazi atrocities never occurred.
“I can’t prove that six million were killed, but it was probably a lot more than that,” says Bob, a semi-retired lawyer, in his typically measured manner. He has agreed to speak because of the two important anniversaries this year – the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power, and the 60th anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel.
“I do know my father, my two grandmothers, my uncle, his wife and their child, and Freda’s parents and sister were all killed. Then you go to my extended family – we run into dozens just in our little circle. One thing the Germans were particularly good at was keeping records.”
Robert Narewczewitz (he later abbreviated his name) was born in 1935 in the German town of Eschwege. He was the only child of Erich and Gertrud. His schoolteacher father was ousted from a state secondary school in 1936 after the Nazis decided they didn’t want Jewish people teaching Aryan children. His mother, an opera singer, had her career cut short because of her faith.
So the family shifted to Frankfurt, where Erich taught at a Jewish school and by 1941 Bob was forced to wear the Star of David pinned to his shirt. He was six.
“I remember walking from the school to our home and being vilified on the street because, by then, we were wearing the yellow star and were readily recognised as being Jewish. We weren’t physically attacked. I don’t really recollect being frightened, but I suppose I must have been.”
By then, the Allies were bombing Germany. One day, his father came home with his face bloodied by a shrapnel strike.
Then, in August 1942, Bob and his parents, and two grandmothers, aged 68 and 90, were transported to Theresienstadt concentration camp – now in the Czech Republic. His grandmothers died within a few months. His father also died, after complications from surgery.
“We might have got some preferential treatment because my father had been a soldier for Germany in the First World War.”
Narev’s mind has erased most memories of Theresienstadt – on a later visit with his family, he says, it was like he had never been in the camp. Just as well, perhaps; of the 10,000 children estimated to have been there, only about 100 survived. Most were shifted further east, to camps like Auschwitz.
In February 1945, Narev says, the Nazis wanted some of the camp’s residents to travel to Switzerland. “Nobody believed we were going to Switzerland; we thought it was another ruse to get people on trains to the east. But I was nine years old and wanted to go on a train trip, so I pestered my mother and we finished up in Switzerland.”
His childish desires saved him and his mother. He still doesn’t know why the Nazis shifted them west rather than east. Swiss embarrassment about German atrocities could be one reason, but there was also the growing realisation by the Red Cross that it needed to do something to save the few Jewish people left in eastern Europe.
Appalling as it sounds, Bob Narev was one of the luckier ones. He and Freda are among the youngest of the handful of Holocaust survivors still living in New Zealand.
Like Freda, Fred Silberstein, 80, has spent much of the past few years trying to educate youngsters about his horrific past.
In her book, The Voyage of Their Life, Polish-Australian author Diane Armstrong recalls interviewing Silberstein at his Auckland home. In 1945, doctors had warned him not to expect to live beyond 40 because of the atrocities inflicted on him during the war.
For three months, in 1944, 15-year-old Silberstein was experimented on by Josef Mengele and his colleagues. Without anaesthetic, the teenager had his groin cut open and chemicals injected into it. The wound was reopened to test the chemicals’ healing powers. In 1945, he was sent to Nordhausen camp to die. There, he saw prisoners desperate enough to eat one another – and he later relied on eating snow to keep himself alive.
Silberstein told Armstrong that he used to tell people the tattoo on his arm was his telephone number because he didn’t want to talk about his time at Auschwitz, and didn’t want people to feel sorry for him.
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