90-yr-old Holocaust survivor honoured
90-year-old Auschwitz survivor Clare Galambos-Winter has received a Hunter Fellowship award from Victoria University of Wellington…a recognition of her support for the NZ School of Music.
Victoria University of Wellington Chancellor Ian McKinnon pins the badge of the Hunter Fellowship on Auschwitz survivor Clare Galambos-Winter.
The fellowship is an honorary award that recognises a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of the university.
It was awarded to Mrs Galambos-Winter for the donation of her violins and violin bows to the NZ School of Music, the endowment of two scholarships for violin students, and other support over the years.
She played first violin in the Wellington-based New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for 33 years, after arriving from Hungary in 1949.
Clare was a music student in Budapest when the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944, and was soon confined to the ghetto in her home town before being transported in a cattle wagon to Auschwitz. Managing to survive there, she was subsequently sent to a munitions factory in Allendorf (Germany), where she worked as a slave labourer manufacturing bombs until being forced on a death march in March 1945 as the liberating Russian Army advanced into Germany.
Her life story, written by Sarah Gaitanos, has been published by Victoria University Press with the title “The violinist
