Looking out onto Wellington Harbor, which welcomed my family on Aug. 28, 1939, as they fled the Nazis, I imagined their relief catching a first glimpse of its protective curve of low-slung crinkly green hills, its deep blue waters.
My uncle points out Queens Wharf, where their ocean liner docked almost 86 years ago, just days before World War II broke out: “It’s right there, where the sun is shining now.”
Refuge, a safe harbor.
Why We Wrote This
Our Tel Aviv correspondent, visiting relatives who sought refuge from the Holocaust in New Zealand, finds herself separated from her children in Israel, enduring Iranian missile attacks.
My family’s first years here were not easy. But unlike their relatives left behind in Europe, they were spared the horrors of the Holocaust.
A year or so earlier, my grandfather had looked at a map of the world from the café he owned in Trieste, Italy, and spied New Zealand at the bottom, in the faraway South Pacific. He saw it as the surest bet for his wife, middle sister, and two baby girls to find safety.
Exhilarating as it was to be in this place of personal history and physical beauty, my heart was racing. Just as it had been ever since my phone rang three days before and I heard my husband Gilad’s voice say, “Israel just attacked Iran.”
My stomach lurched. He was calling from a quick work trip in Boston. I had just arrived in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, to deliver lectures to the Jewish community about the Gaza war’s impact on Israelis and Palestinians and about a book I had co-written on the Holocaust.
Our teenage children were alone in Tel Aviv, but there was nothing either of us could do: Israel had closed its airspace.
We knew Iran would soon retaliate, and we were grateful when a friend swooped in to bring our kids and dog to her nearby home, which has a safe room.
I had heard the news while sitting with Andrea, an old friend. Our grandparents had met as fellow recently landed refugees, living in adjacent rooms behind the Wellington synagogue until they found their own accommodation.
A few days later, the 24-year-old visiting daughter of another New Zealand friend, Tanya, whose grandparents were also friends with mine, moved in with our kids in Tel Aviv. Together in Auckland, Tanya and I have been agonizing together over every wave of Iranian missiles fired at Tel Aviv and over our kids’ reports as they scrambled to shelter. We strategized how to get them out of the country.
Jewish refugees, like these friends’ grandparents, would gather regularly at my Austrian-born grandmother’s table in Wellington. From her tiny kitchen she produced an endless parade of Sacher tortes, linzer tortes, poppy seed cakes, cheesecakes, and yeast cakes, serving them on hand-embroidered tablecloths and porcelain tableware she had brought from Europe.
At night, I pored over the family “archive” at my uncle’s Wellington home. I scanned dozens of documents tracing my family’s escape from Europe – desperate visa requests, ship tickets, my grandfather’s CV, even the Swiss bank receipts listing the amount of money my grandmother took out to prove to the New Zealand government that they could support themselves upon arrival.
In the background I heard televised updates about this new war and constant alerts from my phone: a fire hose of frantic texts from Israel about missile barrages and friends’ discussions about how to get out of the country or how to get back in.
I wondered: Was history turning in on itself?
As I traveled around New Zealand, my phone kept beeping with real-time war updates from my kids. At the same time, my heart most often thumping with terror, I tried to take in the incongruous parallel reality in front of my eyes – some of the world’s most staggeringly beautiful scenery: fjords cut out of alpine lakes punctuated by waterfalls and rainbows; mountaintops sprinkled with powdered-sugar snow; rivers winding through valleys wrapped in ribbons of white clouds.
As Israel’s airspace gradually opened up, Gilad waited in Cyprus for a flight back to our children. On Friday, the eve of my very unbirthday-like birthday, he arrived. The photo of their reunion, faces beaming, arms encircling one another, was the best possible present. Minutes later, they were back in our friend’s safe room.
By then tickets had been purchased, and a plan had been set for the kids to leave Israel two days later, overland through the southern Jordanian port city of Aqaba. From there, they would fly to New York via Cyprus and Athens in time for our son to attend camp and our daughter to work there on staff.
Minutes before they were scheduled to catch the bus to Aqaba, Gilad texted me: “There was a very loud boom, but we are okay.”
They felt the building’s walls shake.
They emerged from the safe room to find shattered glass all over the place and books cascading down the staircase. Late for the bus, they raced to our parked car only to discover its windshield smashed, like those of most of the other vehicles on the street. Across the street, they saw where the missile had made a direct hit on our neighbors – a row of single-family homes destroyed, the collapsed remains of apartment blocks.
The kids landed at JFK just as President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire that is still fragile.
At the Museum of New Zealand, known also by its Maori name, Te Papa Tongarewa, I wandered this week through an exhibit on the history of immigration to this country.
“Jews fleeing Nazi persecution” in the 1930s are remembered in the exhibit, of course. So are other waves of immigrants, along a pathway of signs reminding visitors of “Bosnians flee[ing] genocide and siege conditions” in 1992, Iraqis and Iranians in 1988 fleeing the war between their countries, and the years that Chinese, Ethiopians, Sudanese, Kurds, Poles, Hungarians, and others found homes here.
I listened as a mother explained to her young daughter what a refugee was: “Someone who is not safe where they live so they have to leave their home.”
Such an elegant, painfully perfect distillation. I wanted to compliment the mother on her answer. But instead I quickly walked away, and found a quiet spot to cry.
