Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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than her, on the train to Jerusalem during the war while she was serving in the British
army. 215 After their marriage at the end of the war, she came to New Zealand to live.
In an interview for this thesis, Judy Ward reflected on the difficulties she and Pat
encountered when they arrived in New Zealand, and on the harshness of the
environment. She recollects they were in a very difficult situation: “Pat’s parents had
given him a small piece of land, but it wasn’t enough to make an economic unit, and he
was trying to buy surrounding area which was owned by an absentee landlady”.
Eventually the government Rehabilitation Department responsible for assisting returned
servicemen, after some bureaucratic delays, bought the land for them, but initially they
lived in “a shack” which was on wheels and had to be towed onto the site with a tractor.
Judy recalls that: “It had no water and it had no toilet. I was pregnant and it was winter
and we used the gorse bushes for a toilet. Pat carried the water in two buckets from
across the paddock and the creek”. 216
The picture she presents of life on a farm in the Wairarapa is a very different one from
the life she had led as a privileged girl, growing up in Germany in a middle-class Jewish
family. She had been born Edith Rosenbacher in Hamburg in1923, but later took the
name Jehudit (Hebrew for Judith) when she went to live in Palestine. Her father was a
businessman and her mother, a professional classical musician, who spent her time at
the Conservatory in Hamburg, teaching and studying singing and piano. Judy and her
sister had been looked after by a Kindermädchen (nanny) and when they were older, by
a cook. The children “lived in the kitchen with Ilma” (the cook) and had a lot less to do
with their parents than most New Zealand children do. According to Judy the children
“were allowed to have dinner with the parents at night, but our lives were quite separate.
We inhabited the back part of the apartment and the grown-ups inhabited the front”. 217
The Rosenbacher family was not wealthy, but they were comfortably-off. However,
their lives began to change as the Nazis gained power in Germany prior to World War
Two. As Ward recounts: “Like many others, the Rosenbachers considered themselves
more German than Jewish – indeed, Edith’s father had won the Iron Cross in the Great
215 At that time, Jewish leaders were encouraging young people to join the British Army in the hopes that
their support for the war effort would lead to the Jews having a greater say in the fate of Palestine after
the war. (Ward, Edge of the Earth: Stories and Images from the Antipodes 46.)
216 Lynette Read, interview with Judy Ward, 15 April 1999.
217 Lynette Read, interview with Judy Ward, 15 April 1999.