Tolerance message getting through

Holocaust survivor Inge Woolf is on a personal mission to combat racism and intolerance after an attack on her husband's grave.

The 73-year-old semi-retired Wellington resident is dedicated to teaching others about the dictatorship that murdered millions of people, including Jews, homosexuals and the disabled, during World War II.

It was the desecration of the gravestone of her husband, photographer Ronald Woolf, at Wellington's Makara cemetery that spurred her into action and helped create the Wellington Holocaust Research and Education Centre, she said.

One year after the Webb St centre was opened by Governor-General Anand Satyanand, Mrs Woolf said nearly 3000 people had visited, including groups of schoolchildren, teachers and tourists.

"It's got a life all of its own. There's always something happening," she said. "It's important the world remembers the Holocaust and how terrible it is when the state sponsors a genocide. A tolerant society is what we want. We want to teach people how intolerance in the extreme can end up."

She was a young child when her parents left Austria and fled to Czechoslovakia after Hitler's troops invaded.

They later went to Berlin, and then England, where they lived as refugees.

"I was four when the Germans marched into Vienna," she said.

"I remember looking out our first-floor window and seeing the swastikas come out. The fear I felt then is with me now."

That same fear returned when the Jewish section of the Makara cemetery was attacked in August 2004, Mrs Woolf said.

Among the 92 gravestones knocked over by vandals was her husband's; he was killed during a helicopter crash on November 20, 1987, along with pilot Peter Button and developer Dion Savage.

Mrs Woolf said that for many years she did not think about the past and chose "to get on with life and business". It was only in the past few years that she had become increasingly active in spreading the message of tolerance.

"We have to get it out there. When you get bullying in the classroom or people getting ostracised because of their race, then you have to realise what can happen if that's taken to the extreme."

Based at the Jewish Community Centre, the centre is run by 30 volunteers. Its walls are lined with photographs, texts and other exhibits that tell the stories of Wellington Holocaust survivors.

- © Fairfax NZ News