Bob and Freda Narev have just celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary, the roses marking the occasion still fresh in their Auckland home. But their remarkable love story didn't have a happy beginning.
"I was born in Germany in 1935, just around about the time that Hitler really came into power, and my parents and I, together with my two elderly grandmothers, were in 1942 taken to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia," Mr Narev recalls.
Theresienstadt was a transit camp, where his father and two grandmothers died. Mr Narev and his mother spent two-and-a-half long years there.
"We were fortunate enough - if one can be fortunate enough in a camp - not to be taken further to Auschwitz and to extermination," he says.
At the end of the war Mr Narev and his mother made it to Switzerland where they lived for two years, until they managed to get permission to move to New Zealand.
Speaking little English, his mother worked in a chocolate factory in Auckland, while Mr Narev went to school for the first time.
"As a 12-year-old child I adjusted very readily. My mother found it a little more difficult because she couldn't follow her original profession of an opera singer," he says.
It was at a youth group in Auckland that he met Freda, and they discovered they had very similar stories.
At the age of about four, Ms Narev's father was murdered by the Nazis and the rest of her family went into camps and the Vilna Ghetto in Poland.
As a blue-eyed, blonde-haired little girl, she was hidden by a Catholic family where she remained for three years until the end of the war.
Her only surviving older sister came back to get her, and after sometime they made their way to New Zealand for a new life.
These are the stories the Narevs have told many times, as they teach younger generations about the Holocaust and the 6 million Jewish people who were slaughtered at the hands of Adolf Hitler.
Mr Narev still has the fabric star patch he was forced to wear, with the word "Jude" which translates to "Jew" neatly written in the middle.
Today, on the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Narevs, along with dozens more survivors and their families gathered at the Auckland War Memorial Museum for the United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Mr Narev says it's a day not only to remember the Holocaust, but to learn from it.
"There is the slogan 'never again' which arose from the Holocaust and that's therefore really chilling for us to see what is happening in countries like Syria where there is persecution of minorities, people are being slaughtered for no good reason other than their religion or whatever."
He says the unrest in places like Syria brings back haunting memories of what he and his family went through.
"The main difference is that the Holocaust was really a state sponsored event - they were determined to get rid of the Jews of Europe. Whereas here [in Syria] it's not quite as government directed. There are terrorist groups which of course cause a great deal of mayhem."
At today's service, Dame Sylvia Cartwright spoke of the genocide in Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, who slaughtered more than a quarter of Cambodia's entire population.
Dame Sylvia was one of two international judges appointed to the Cambodia Tribunal, and told of the horrors she heard from the Tuol Sleng concentration camp.
"The court in which I was a judge found clear evidence that more than 12,000 people died in Tuol Sleng in less than three years. The total actually slaughtered, usually with agricultural tools, is probably actually closer to 20,000."
She questioned what the world had actually learned from WWII and the Holocaust, given the many genocides and conflicts which have affected countries since.
"I think that what we have achieved is to write a manual on how to overwhelm an enemy and ignore completely the safety of the civilians caught up in it," she told the audience.
Mr Narev had the last word at Friday's ceremony - a message he and other survivors want future generations to hear and act upon.
"Remembering is not the past, remembering is the future."
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