This blog is the introduction to the story of 24-year-old Jew Egon Schoenberger’s flight from the Nazi Holocaust of World War II to New Zealand.
Table of contents
1. Egon’s story: Introduction
2. Egon’s story: The family champagne factory is confiscated
3. Egon’s story: The Nazi state steals the family silver
4. Egon’s story: Schonberger Cabinet
5. Egon’s story: Family life and Hitler's rise to power
6. Egon’s story: The innocents of war
7. Egon’s story: Worship is held on board
8. Egon’s story: The New Zealand connection
9. Egon’s story: Modern day Mainz gets involved
10. Egon’s story: Finding work in New Zealand
11. Egon’s story: First encounter with Oriental world
12. Egon’s story: Arrival in Sabang, Indonesia
13. Egon’s story: Singapore, the Gibraltar of the East
14. Egon’s story: Passing through Hotel des Indes
15. Egon’s story: A change of ship
16. Egon’s story: The search for Doris and Johanna
17. Egon’s story: The search continues
18. Egon’s story: The letters of Dr Bacharach
19. Egon’s Diary: Family reunited
20. Egon’s Diary: Coming of age in Camp de Gurs
21. Egon’s story: A last handshake and a kiss and then they left
22. Egon’s story: Hope dimming out more and more
23. Egon’s story: the librarian
24. Egon's story: A twist in the (final) tale
In a government typing pool in Wellington, November 1938, an official piece of paper was pulled from a typewriter and placed in a tray for onward movement. Stamped, signed and posted to Switzerland, it would save the life of a young Jewish man. Egon Schoenberger kept the permit to enter New Zealand as long as he lived.
On 6 March 1939, in the German city of Mainz, a smartly uniformed postman delivered a letter to Egon’s family home, where his mother, sister and uncle lived. Sent from the office of the Economics Minister, it informed them of the latest anti-Jewish law, requiring them to hand over their jewellery and silver to the Nazi state.
In the months that followed the letters, Egon completed his law studies and arranged his passage to New Zealand, while his uncle, mother and sister fled to France. Europe was about to be engulfed in slaughter.
Over the next six years industrial scale war would turn cities to rubble and lives to ruin. Behind the front lines the Nazi regime would commit genocide against the Jews on a scale previously unfathomable.
Auckland Museum is telling the story of Egon Schoenberger, his flight from Europe, the fate of his mother and sister, his new life in New Zealand and his efforts to restore what was left of the family legacy after the horror of the Holocaust.
Egon’s story will be told through the diary he kept on the journey to New Zealand and the extraordinary papers his daughter Michele Schoenberger-Orgad gave to Auckland Museum Library’s manuscript collection.
Seventy three years ago today Egon’s boat was steaming towards Salamaua on the coast of Papua New Guinea when he wrote in his diary:
Sunday 3 September, 1939
The news from Europe sounds very bad; for a while the mood is somewhat depressed. In the evening we hear on the radio that England and France find themselves in a state of war with Germany.”
Next blog: Leaving Europe