Wellington Loop – War Memorials

With the opening of the Pukeahu National War Memorial this week and the new Gallipoli exhibition at Te Papa a visit to the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand completes the loop of War Memorials. The scale of the Holocaust Centre displays of course does not compare with the massive cost no object Gallipoli displays, but although modest in scale, it poses challenging questions:

• Why remember?
• What to remember?
• What is the appropriate way to remember?

Jews were always big on remembering. The Jewish narrative is full of catastrophes that Jews are commanded to remember, from slavery in Egypt, to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD on the 9th of the Jewish month of Av, to the numerous massacres and pogroms throughout history including the Holocaust. The 2779 New Zealand soldiers who died at Gallipoli, even the 16,697 killed in the First World War, or the 11,625 casualties of the Second World War, great personal tragedies though these were, do not compare with the slaughter of a third of the Jewish population of the world during the Holocaust, 3 million in Poland, 90% of Polish Jews, 90% of the Jews of the Baltic countries, 88% of the Jews of Germany and Austria, 70% of the Jews of Hungary, about 5.600,000 altogether. Commemorating a slaughter on such a scale appropriately was such a huge challenge that for many years there was no Holocaust Memorial at all in Wellington beyond a plaque above the door of the synagogue. It was not until Ziggy Relis, who fled Germany before the war, most of whose family had been murdered, erected a public monument in the Makara Jewish cemetery at his own expense because he felt that the Holocaust needed a Memorial. The Holocaust Centre evolved from a discussion of the need to honour the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, who included members of families of every Jew, and reflect on the tragedy of the Holocaust as part of European and incidentally, New Zealand history by teaching and talking about the Holocaust and keeping its memory alive. The premises of the Holocaust Centre of NZ is a memorial in itself. Within the walls there is a display of some of the million and a half buttons collected by students of Moriah College from every corner of the world to commemorate the number of children killed during the Holocaust. There are two suitcases, one as a reminder of one half of a family that managed to find refuge in New Zealand, the other remembering the family that could not make it here. There is Clare Galambos's smock that she wore as a slave labourer in the Allendorf munitions factory in Germany during the bitterly cold winter of 1944 – 45, with her prisoner number as a substitute for her name and individuality. Clare saved this garment, brought it with her to New Zealand, and never talked about it or her experiences in Auschwitz during the 32 years that she played in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. The panels showing the lives of Hanka Pressburg and Clare Galambos record the members of their families who were killed. The stories of the Deckston children show the orphans and family members who were left behind in Poland and were killed in concentration camps or locked inside the great synagogue in Bialystok and burned to death. The image of the candle flame and the tray of stones show the Jewish way of mourning. The quote from the Ethics of the Fathers inscribed on the ceiling, 'Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.' — Mishnah Sanhedrin4:9; Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 37a. reflects the value Jewish tradition places on life and the great sense of loss experienced by the murder of every individual.