Reporter Allison Rudd talks to a man who overcame the persecution of his childhood and rejected a lifetime of resentment in favour of the Biblical principle of loving his neighbours - and his enemies.
Some might say Paul Oestreicher is a dreamer.
In a world torn apart by military aggression, nuclear threats, poverty and religious intolerance, his philosophy might seem an overly simple one: treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.
But the man who has devoted his life to peace and social justice is quite sincere about his belief that love will conquer all.
"I have a deep feeling there is something, for want of a better word, called love, that sustains us and can make a real difference. So however terrible the world is, every act of love can make it better. Even in the darkest situations there is hope."
Dr Oestreicher's view is all the more surprising because of his background.
Born in Germany to a non-Jewish mother and a Christian father with Jewish parents, he experienced the persecution of the Jewish race under Hitler's anti-Semitic regime.
As a 6-year-old out walking with his mother, Emma, he watched the start of the orgy of destruction against synagogues and Jewish-owned shops which become immortalised as Kristallnacht.
His father, also called Paul, a paediatric specialist, was a patriotic German who had served as an officer in the German army in World War 1.
By the time Kristallnacht occurred in November 1938, he and other doctors deemed to be Jewish had been barred from practising and became unemployable.
Jews' bank accounts had been confiscated and life was becoming more and more restrictive for them.
The Oestreicher family had fled from a provincial town to Berlin where young Paul was hidden by sympathetic non-Jewish friends while his parents laid low and tried to stay one step ahead of the authorities.
After Kristallnacht, the Oestreichers knew they had to leave.
However, with most countries closing their doors, the choice of new home country narrowed down to New Zealand or Venezuela.
The Oestreichers were accepted into New Zealand in 1939, borrowing the required 2000 bond from a French friend of a distant relative, and obtaining a guarantee of support from the Anglican Church.
While they were now free to live and work, life was far from easy.
The medical qualifications Dr Oestreicher had held for more than 20 years were not recognised here and the family came to Dunedin so he could undertake another three years of clinical studies at the University of Otago medical school.
Dr Oestreicher jun remembers being the object of attention and ridicule at Musselburgh School where children would chase him around the playground calling him a Hun and a Jew.
His escape when sad or reflective was to escape to St Kilda beach.
"To sit on the rocks at Lawyers Head and listen to the waves crash and the seagulls cry was emotionally tremendously important to me."
He says while he was a happy child, he always felt an outsider.
"Dunedin was a very monocultural society. The only non-indigenous children I was aware of were Chinese children . . . some of whom were my friends. They were outsiders too, but in my family's case it was even more extreme.
"We were were a family hunted out of Germany - expelled. But we arrived with German passports and within two months we were legally termed enemy aliens."
New Zealand was "relatively kind" to its aliens, he says.
Unlike in other countries which interned its male alien population in camps, aliens here were allowed to remain in the community.
But there were restrictions.
"We were not to allowed to leave the town without police permission and we were not allowed to possess a camera or a shortwave radio.
"There was an alien officer at the Dunedin police station whose job it was to keep an eye on us and to check my parents and others."
Oddly, given the Nazi regime's many other inhuman dictates, Jews who had served in the German army were entitled to have their furniture freighted to them in their new home countries.
The Oestreichers lived in a boarding house until their furniture arrived, then rented a large house in Queen St, St Kilda, where they lived in two rooms and sublet the rest to university students to make ends meet.
By 1942, when his father graduated again, many of Dunedin's young doctors were away at the war and Dr Oestreicher sen was in demand.
He established a general practice in the city and worked there until he retired in 1971 at the age of 75.
Being uprooted and replanted affected his parents tremendously, Dr Oestreicher recalls, and their ways of coping were quite different.
"My father loved the medical profession and loved his work . . . But apart from his medical practice he always felt an outsider and a stranger.
"My mother came from a peasant family who loved the soil. She loved her music, her garden and her friends and became a new New Zealander and put down roots, something my father never managed to do."
His parents had a difficult marriage, he says.
"Both were very strong people, but very different people. They couldn't do without each other but found it very hard to be with each other.
"But for all their differences, what they had been through was a very strong bond between them."
It was not until four years ago that Dr Oestreicher discovered his father might have found it even more difficult to adjust to life in Dunedin than he thought.
In 1940, his father had an affair which produced a daughter.
Adopted into a Dunedin family, the child, Beverly (Beby) Bergen went on to become an accomplished opera singer.
Dr Oestreicher found out about Beby's existence through a letter written by a close friend of Beby's who was also an acquaintance of his.
"Beby had known about me for years but was too afraid to approach me herself, thinking I might reject her and wouldn't believe the story.
"But when I got the letter the evidence was too strong not to believe it. There was no doubt at all about it."
Growing up as he did without siblings or relatives, Dr Oestreicher says discovering he had a half-sister was "wonderful".
"It was a sheer joy. I had always wanted a sister. I wish I had known about her a lot earlier. We're very different, but we like each other."
He does not believe his mother ever knew about the affair or the child.
"It would have made [her sad], but that's life. My father was obviously under a lot of pressure. We all do funny things in our lives. Who doesn't go off the rails in one way or another? There are not many people who don't."
One of the groups which befriended the Oestreichers was the Dunedin Religious Society of Friends, whose members included the Baxter family.
Archibald Baxter was New Zealand's most famous conscientious objector, refusing to join the army when called up in 1915 because of his pacifist and Christian beliefs.
Imprisoned in this country, he and 13 others, including two of his brothers, were shipped to Britain and the front line.
There they endured harsh field punishments including being tied to posts and left out in snow and rain, being beaten and being denied food.
In 1918, Mr Baxter was diagnosed as having "confusional insanity" because of his determination not to fight and was sent to a military hospital until the war ended.
By the time the Baxters and Oestreichers met, Mr Baxter and his wife Millicent had two sons, Terence and James (poet James K.
Baxter, who was two years older than young Paul) and were living in Brighton.
Mr Baxter had not long published his classic World War 1 memoir We Will Not Cease.
Mrs Baxter and Mrs Oestreicher became close friends and Paul was often sent to stay with the Baxters at weekends.
He remembers Mrs Baxter as the talker and her husband as "a very quiet character who sat smoking a pipe".The Baxter household was "unusual", he recalls.
"Their house was total chaos - Millicent was no housekeeper. I can't claim to have always enjoyed staying there. I remember one weekend . . . it rained solidly and I never left the house.
"But they were lovely people, and that's what mattered, and, of course, you couldn't help but be influenced by people of that kind."
He has dedicated his speech to University of Otago graduands today to Mr Baxter, a man he describes as "an outstanding New Zealander of huge moral and spiritual courage".
"I talk about the duty of the citizen not just to go with the flow but to have a conscience and to say no to certain things.
"In Christian terms I call it holy disobedience.
"In other words, there are times when it is our duty to disobey, when it is our duty to be critical of power for the sake of humanity."
Growing up the child of a persecuted family in Germany and of refugees in New Zealand was a major factor in the sort of adult he became, Dr Oestreicher says.
"I felt an immense sense of responsibility to try and overcome that start in life.
"I felt I had to make up for all that my parents suffered, and I had to build a world that was different."
He recalls an "extraordinary" conversation with his father when he was about 12.
"My father said: `When you grow up, I want you to be like Adolf Hitler, but the exact opposite.
"In other words, Hitler changed the world for the worse and I want you to change it for the better'.
"You know, it was an incredible pressure to put on a child, now I come to look at it.
"It coloured my future. It was the reason I studied politics. I wanted to understand why the world was the way it was."
After he had studied politics, he says a need to find out what sorts of beliefs people needed to make good political decisions led him to become an Anglican priest.
"Here was somewhere that was a base for me from where I could branch out and do things to help people.
"Anglicanism is a very tolerant, open kind of religion where no-one dictates to you what you should believe."
What followed was a lifetime of activism and speaking out - practising "holy disobedience" and trying to fulfil his father's wishes for him.
It was his work with Amnesty International which led him to his second wife, Barbara.
Her background was almost identical to his own; her Jewish parents came to New Zealand as refugees in 1939 and settled in Wellington, where Barbara was born in 1942.
She also graduated from the University of Otago and moved to the UK, spending many years studying and writing about Jewish refugees and women living in Eastern European communist countries.
Although they knew about each other they had never met.
In December 1983, Dr Oestreicher received a telephone call.
Dr Einhorn was missing in East Germany and had probably been imprisoned along with members of the Women for Peace group who were protesting against the presence of Soviet nuclear weapons on East German soil.
Dr Oestreicher alerted the New Zealand and British governments and the media.
"New Zealand lecturer disappears in East Germany. It was a big story. We got quite a campaign going.
"Eventually, after five days of day and night interrogation in an East Berlin prison, she was released . . . and expelled from the country."
But her friends remained in prison.
Dr Oestreicher called a meeting at his home in January 1984, to plan their rescue and Dr Einhorn attended.
"That is when we met for the first time. We were close friends for years. Barbara's marriage ended some years later and my first wife, Lore, died in 2000. And so in 2002, we married. It is an amazing story, isn't it.
"How did you meet your wife? By getting her out of an East German prison."
• Oestreicher observations
On loving your neighbour
"It's about loving your neighbours - and also your enemies . . . Jesus said it is the outsider, the different person, the person who actually threatens you who is also your neighbour."
On pacifism
"Pacifism is no easy option. It is not the obvious answer. It requires real spiritual maturity to see that violence begets violence."
On poverty
"Eliminating poverty is possible, but the will to do it is not there."
On making a difference in the world
"There are times when it is our duty to disobey. It is our duty to be critical of power for the sake of humanity."
On his hopes for humanity
"If the resources that go into the military-industrial complex were used to feed the hungry and save the environment, we, as a human race, might just survive."
On accepting gays and lesbians in the church
"If you have yourself experienced persecution, it is not a very long journey to side with others who have also experienced persecution."
On being a Quaker and an Anglican priest
"Why confine ourselves to narrow cages when we can identify with different groups?"
On James K. Baxter
"He was never typical, but he was always interesting."
On his honorary degree from Otago
"That I should be a doctor of divinity at [my old] university is a bit ironic and a bit wonderful."
