By Andrew McKenna for The Gisborne Herald…
The Anne Frank Exhibition is now showing at the Tairāwhiti Museum, and Andrew McKenna caught up with some of the organisers. They are united in their belief that education is crucial to ensure the horrors of the World War 2 are never repeated.
Here is an extraordinary story, one of many from the Second World War. A young Dutchman working for the Dutch resistance jumped on to an advancing Canadian tank and told the crew where the Germans were. The Canadians were advancing from Belgium into the Netherlands in 1944.
That young man, Boyd Klap, emigrated to New Zealand in 1951, and on a visit to Queenstown met a Canadian man there, who happened to have been a tank commander during the war in the Netherlands when a young Dutchman jumped on to his tank . . . to tell the crew where the Germans were . . . and truth can be stranger than fiction.
Boyd was 13 when Germany invaded the Netherlands and 18 when it was liberated.
“They were my formative years,” he said.
“My involvement in anti-discrimination comes from those times.”
He is now chairman of the Anne Frank Foundation which, with the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, has brought the Anne Frank Exhibition ‘Let Me Be Myself’ to Gisborne, now showing at Tairāwhiti Museum.
Read the full article on The Gisborne Herald here.
