Warsaw Ghetto Uprising shows young people can lead the fight against racism in Aotearoa New Zealand
Eighty years after Jewish youths fought for their lives on the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, the family of an Auckland Holocaust survivor is calling on New Zealanders to reject hatred and treat everyone with dignity, no matter their background.
Alicja in 2010. She is standing next to one of the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto
Alicja Newman was only 10 when her mother forced her to walk out of a Warsaw Ghetto gate while a complicit guard turned his back, saving her from certain death. She never saw her immediate family again and was forced to hide in war-torn Poland before working as slave labour until the end of the war. After years in Displaced Persons camps, she came to New Zealand with other Polish refugees in 1950.
The story of Alicja, who is now in her 90s, will be told on her behalf by her daughter, Lisa Newman, at the Auckland War Memorial Museum tomorrow (January 27) as part of the United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Alicja – whose real name is Sala – will be at the museum, along with some of the original cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto where Jewish families like hers were forced to live in squalid conditions from 1940 onwards. The cobblestones were gifted by the United States Holocaust Museum to the Auckland Hebrew Congregation.
The Holocaust Centre of New Zealand chair Deborah Hart says more than 400,000 Jews were forced to live in the Warsaw Ghetto, but by 1943 only about 50,000 remained; tens of thousands had died of starvation and disease, and the rest had already been sent to the Treblinka death camp.
“When the Nazis came to round up the remaining Jews, a group of youth leaders, roughly 2,000 men, women, and teenagers, refused to go quietly to their death. For a month they fought the Nazis street by street with few weapons.
“Their courage showed the Nazis and their collaborators that they were willing to choose their own deaths and fight for the Jewish people. At least 7,000 Jews in the Ghetto died fighting or in hiding and another 7,000 were captured by the SS and deported to the Treblinka death camp where they were murdered. But their heroism and sacrifice inspired other uprisings in ghettos and in camps around German-occupied Europe.
These brave young people show us that we all have to stand up to antisemitism, racism and hatred. The next generation has the power to change the society they are inheriting from their parents.
Sadly it is our young people today who are most exposed to hatred, rising antisemitism and Holocaust denial largely through social media by influencers such as US rapper Kanye West.
That is why it is so important to hear stories such as Alicja Newman’s. We must teach future generations that allowing hate to grow can normalise racism. When communities stop standing up to ethnic hatred, atrocities such as the Holocaust and other genocides can occur again,” Deborah Hart says.
Lisa Newman says her mother has never forgotten the heroic people who hid her and helped her after she escaped the ghetto. “They were ordinary people who acted on their own principles rather than being bystanders.
“My mother can’t bear seeing people rejected or treated as less than others, particularly children. She related very strongly to the Auckland street kids in the 1970s. She often says wryly that so many people walk past and ignore a beggar with their hand out, but would eagerly reach for that same hand to pull them from a building after an earthquake.
We all bear a moral responsibility to reject hatred and act decently to others, particularly the vulnerable and marginalised. The Holocaust teaches us what can happen; we have no excuse to behave otherwise,” Lisa Newman says.
Cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto will be at United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day events throughout New Zealand.
