The Lost Children of the Holocaust found again in memorial

Thursday, 15 November 2018

One thousand kilos, one metric tonne, 1.26 cubic metres; whichever way you measure the 1.5 million unique buttons gathered by the children of Moriah Jewish Day School, the emotional weight is crushing.

In 2008, Justine Hitchcock, principal of the Wellington primary school, and her pupils began collecting the buttons in an attempt to comprehend and illustrate the sheer vastness of the number of children murdered in the Holocaust.

They collected them from all over the world. Each represented a child who perished.

A decade later, the buttons have been made into the Children's Holocaust Memorial, which will travel throughout New Zealand, starting at the National Library in Wellington this month.

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​Over the years the collection mounted, propelled by a publicity campaign the pupils undertook. People sent letters with their buttons telling the story of their lost loved ones. Others sent buttons from soldiers' uniforms, wedding dresses, children's clothing.

The buttons came pouring in. The children got counting.

COUNTING THE COSTS OF WAR

Benya Klapaukh was 10 when his school started the collection.

'In the beginning I thought there was no way we could actually do this. I remember counting buttons, first in the tens, then the tens turned into hundreds and the hundreds turned into thousands.

'Towards the end, when all the buttons were in barrels, we saw how different they all were – simple ones, expensive ones, all of them unique. It dawned on us that these represented each unique child who lost their life.'

The children were astonished by the support they got over the years from New Zealand and around the world.

'All of a sudden you'd get 10,000 buttons from a church up north which had collected and counted on our behalf. With them came letters from the button donors saying 'this is for my daughter, my son, my mother, my brother'.

'Even to this day it baffles me how far they came from and how many we got.'

Klapaukh, now 20 and a Victoria University student, says there was another, unexpected, aspect to the project.

'That fact that 20 kids with the help of our teachers, actually achieved something so big, so seemingly impossible, makes me realise if I can do that as a kid what could I achieve now when I put my mind to it?'

After the school's closure in 2012, the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand took on the button project to see it through to its end.

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AN EERIE REMINDER

Matthijs Siljee, assistant head of School of Design at Massey University, was brought in to turn the collection into a mobile memorial.

He set about incorporating a selection of 12 variously sized 'nesting tables'. The first and smallest table holds a single candle, the next a single button, representing one child. Each table increases in size and in volume of buttons, forming an emotional and poignant display of the magnitude of lives taken during the Holocaust, says Siljee.

'There are so many buttons [that] we had to place buttons on top of each other so you get a mound of buttons. Then you find a mound won't do it so we filled up to the top of the glass. They get larger and larger.'

Viewers will be able to interpret the memorial for themselves

but there's no getting away from the perception of mass graves. The memorial  is industrial with its steel boxes atop toy-like red wheels.

Siljee has his own personal connection to the project.

Born in the Netherlands, he grew up on the stories of what happened in wartime. 'I grew up thinking we just have to move on. I tried not to engage with it too much.

'Wartime presents huge complexities and difficult choices for people and it was the same with my family. I had thought that was then, this is now, but these things move down the generations. We learn from that.'

He was further provoked by reading the autobiography of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and for most of World War II, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany.

Speer later took responsibility for his actions.

'I was intrigued by his book. His description of the 1930s is almost literally what is happening in the United States of America. That was a bit of motivation for me – to play with this bit of history that might not be just history.

'It all comes back to the children, who know nothing of world politics. The essence of the memorial brings it back to the most essential human qualities that children have.'

UPSTANDERS, NOT BYSTANDERS

Inge Woolf, a child survivor of the Holocaust and co-founder of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, says the memorial design symbolises the systematic and industrial killing of children during the war.

The Holocaust is particularly important today, she says. 'There are similarities as to what happened then and what's happening now. Refugees on the move, immigration policies, emergence to the far Right, racism, anti-semitism. I never thought in my lifetime I would see such a resurgence in these behaviours.

'What we can do around this memorial is to emphasise to young people how important it is to stand up and be heard, to be upstanders and not bystanders. To start in a small way by preventing bullying in the playground because small hatreds grown into large hatreds.'

People ask why we dwell on the Holocaust, says Woolf. 'We are a long way away from what happened in distance and in time, but it's important for people to learn the lessons, recognise the signs like the ones we are seeing now. It's important for them to stand up and be counted.

'My mother used to say that children need to be taught not to follow an evil leader so I say to children, use your vote, question your politicians. Vote.

BUTTON BOOK

The button memorial project became a story in itself so children's author and patron of the project Joy Cowley set about writing it.

Cowley has protested through her anti-war children's literature in the past with The Duck and the Gun and The Yellow Overalls.

She was a child during World War II and remembers the 'fear' it instilled into her.

'I remember that fear. I remember the barbed wire spread along Lyall Bay beach, the blackouts and sirens at night. At one stage children were given numbered discs to wear around their necks when there was an imminent threat of invasion.'

'So many children who perished during the Holocaust could not be identified – we call them the Lost Children and they are found again by these buttons.'

The project was not about dwelling on the Holocaust, she says. With a focus on the children who collected and counted the buttons, there's an emphasis on peace. 

There is a darkness in the book, she says, but the tragedy of children being lost to war is an ongoing heartbreak.

'This is still happening around the world – in the Middle East, Asia, Africa. Children are killed every day in wars. This book is a message about world peace and that's what these 1.5 million lost children will do towards that. The buttons represent them.'

SURVIVORS LIVED IN STATE OF FEAR

Vera Egermayer wears a curious ring on her little finger. It's a refashioned thimble that her father used when he sewed the Jewish star on to her mother's coat when the Nazis came to power.

Her non-Jewish father married her mother three days before war broke out. That marriage saved her Jewish mother and ultimately, it saved Vera.

But not before they all found themselves interned.

Egermayer, a founding member of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, has been involved in the Children's Memorial project from its inception.

The story of the buttons is also her story, the story of her family.

Born in Prague in 1940, Egermayer's first five years were fearful ones.

'When my aunts came to our apartment there was a constant whispering: 'Have you got your marching orders? When are we leaving? What shall we take with us?'.'

She witnessed horror and hunger during those war years and was in a constant state of fear.

She recalled quite vividly the discrimination she felt as a Jew during the war: 'Walking along the street with my mother and seeing our neighbour cross to the other side to avoid you because you were wearing the star – they didn't want any truck with you.

'Having the playground gate being closed in my face because Jewish children weren't allowed in. Some of the older children had to play in the cemetery, on the roof of the synagogue.'

Her father, a tailor by trade, had been encouraged to divorce his Jewish wife but when he refused he was sent to a hard-labour camp. Her mother was next, sent off to Terezin, a transit camp in Czechoslovakia, in which more than 30,000 people died.

She had been denounced by the concierge in their building for feeding Jewish people on the run.

When her mother got her deportation order she was faced with the heartbreaking dilemma of what to do with young Vera.

'The remaining relatives didn't want me so she put me in a little Jewish home where I spent a few months before going on the same journey as her, unaccompanied as a four year old, to Terezin on 16 March, 1945.

'It's highly significant that they would transport a four-year-old child to a camp at that time when Auschwitz had already been liberated – the writing was on the wall but they went to the bitter end. That's what makes the Holocaust unique – the [Nazis] wanted to wipe out every single specimen of the 'Jewish disease' as they saw it.'

More than 70 years on, Egermayer recalls the smell of smoke from the crematorium, the soot in the air.

'They were building gas chambers there but didn't manage to finish them. People weren't murdered there but so many people died because they became so sick. I remember the funeral carts drawn by people transporting dead bodies. Disease was rife. Many people were dying of typhoid.

'I was only there for about seven weeks. I used to be very shy talking about these dates because I thought I hadn't suffered enough.'

After liberation, her father came to fetch them from the camp. He was a shell of the father she had known. 'He looked like a hollow man because he had lost so much weight. Everything was sunken.'

Egermayer and her family emigrated in 1949 to Wellington, where they had relatives.

The family here had married out and were raising their families as Kiwis. Being Jewish was not something celebrated throughout her young life.

'When I found myself back in Prague in my 50s, meeting Jews, walking those streets, seeing the synagogues – I assumed the identity of a Jew.

'I started going to their cultural events and attending lectures about Judaism. But I was still reluctant to join formally and make myself part of an identifiable Jewish community. I am particularly sensitive about putting my name on a list, as all my relatives had done during the Nazi occupation, and thereby making myself an easy target for a round-up.'

Back in Prague she found her way to the Holocaust survivor world and started meeting women who told her about events that had happened to her, things that marked her formative years but which she was too young to remember.

Egermayer, who splits her time between Prague and Wellington, is philosophical about what she hopes people in New Zealand will take from the Children's Memorial.

'I don't want people to be crying all over the place. I just want them to be grateful for what they have. To make the most of it. To give. To try not to judge or condemn. Be open to change your mind. Be kind.'

'IT COULD HAVE BEEN ME'

Buttons are different as children are different – big, small, some a little bit damaged. They all represent a life lost, says child Holocaust survivor Inge Woolf.

'I identify with them myself. Every last one of them. When I show schoolchildren the buttons I show them one blue one and I say, 'That could have been me'. I was alive at that time and if my parents hadn't saved me I could have been that child who perished.

Woolf was born in Vienna in 1934. In March 1938, when the Germans annexed Austria, she recalled seeing the swastikas rolled out over nearby buildings. She remembered the fear they instilled in her young mind.

She lost many relatives in the Holocaust. Some went to the death camps, some went to labour camps. Her grandfather died after being beaten up by the Nazis who had queried an audit of his home.

'My parents tried to protect me from what was going on but I picked up from my family how terrible all this was for Jews. I was scared. So much so that whenever I talk about it, even now, my stomach goes into knots, my skin goes clammy. I relive that time all over again.'

Woolf's father was Czech and the family managed to escape to Prague, where they spent a year getting their papers together. They eventually made their way to England, where they got refugee status in 1939.

'We were poor refugees. We arrived with nothing except what we could carry.'

When war broke out, her father joined the Czech Brigade of the British Army. He ended up in a camp in communist Czechoslovakia, unable to get back to England.

'My mother kept writing the Czech embassy trying to secure his release. One day she said to me, 'Dress yourself nicely, we're going to the Czech embassy and when I start shouting and banging on the table, you start crying.'

'So we went to the embassy, she shouted at them, telling them they were worse than the Nazis keeping families apart, she banged on the table. I started crying and my father came home.'

The family spent 20 years in London, where her mother worked as a seamstress and her father as an odd job man.

'We were always poor. We couldn't get out of that refugee trap. We lived in a house with three other families all sharing one bathroom.'

Despite the horrors of war it never occurred to Woolf that she was deprived. 'My mother was very good. She knew how to get happiness out of any situation. I always thought I had a happy childhood. They always shielded me from the bad stuff.'

The family eventually moved to New Zealand in 1950s, finally escaping the class system that had kept them rooted in poverty.

More than 50 years later Woolf helped set up the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. 'To me it is like a rounding off of my life. It's about coming back to what I should be doing – remembering and honouring my grandparents who perished.'

To her, those 1.5 million buttons that make up the Children's Memorial are very real. 'They are my children. I feel very protective of them. It's very personal and they are very precious to me. They'll be precious to a lot of people when they are finally shown.'