A Quanglican journey: Paul Oestreicher on the religious background to a life of pacifist campaigning
‘Forget the labels. How about just trying to follow Jesus?’
I arrived in New Zealand in May 1939, the only child of a German-Jewish refugee family. From September of that year, we were enemy aliens. New Zealand and Germany were at war. It took some courage to befriend Germans, even those like us who had fled from Hitler. The churches in our Dunedin home were by and large friendly, but quietly and discreetly. Not so the Society of Friends, the Quakers. They publicly made a point of befriending enemy aliens, befriending my parents. My physician father, with Jewish parents, had already in Germany found a friend in a well-known German Quaker doctor. In Nazi Germany the small Quaker community stood by the persecuted Jews. Some were imprisoned for doing so.
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.