Class of 1954
This biography is compiled by Rennae Taylor from an interview with her daughter Eva Tamura on 23 October 2025 conducted by Prof Cindy Farquhar. Eva also supplied the photos.
Childhood and Medical School
Irene was born on 26 February 1913 in Berlin, Germany to a Jewish father Albert George Abrahamson and a Gentile mother Margaret Goern. They were agnostic but her father would occasionally go to synagogue services, and the mother celebrated Christmas in the home. Her brother Ewald Abrahamson was born two years after Irene. They were a close and happy family until the Nazi years started.
The desire to become a doctor occurred when Irene was a young girl. She had a large birthmark on her back and her mother took her for treatment. Here she saw her first female doctor and the seed was planted. Years later during the 1960s she was treated for a melanoma in this same area.
Irene completed her medical training at Charitie University in Berlin around 1938, but due to the rise of the Nazi regime was never given her graduation papers or allowed to practise medicine. She believed she was the last Jewish student to graduate from medicine at her university. Other Jewish friends just disappeared, some probably managing to escape possibly to the UK and USA.
Prior to World War 2, the family left their multi-storey apartment building, which their father owned and after Kristallnacht in November 1938 they moved to a house in a small village about 30 km from Berlin called Woltersdorf. Only Irene’s father was required to wear the star of David, and he kept within the confines of the house and garden. He was quite a lot older than his wife, was unwell and died of natural causes sometime during the second world war years. Irene worked at a nearby prisoner rural work centre but lived in the house with her parents. She recalled that kind neighbours including a next-door butcher would sometimes leave food in the hedge of their home for them.
Prior to the war her brother Ewald, who had trained as a bricklayer, left Germany in 1938 and worked in the UK until eventually making his way to New Zealand. He was artistic and met his artist wife Olive Hayne, who had attended the School of Art at Canterbury University, at a Christchurch art group. In addition to their artwork, they became orchardists and both died in 1983. They lived most of their lives in the Rangiora and Amberley area.
Eva’s knowledge of the war years and the details around her own birth and coming to NZ are limited but she knows it was a very painful time for her already traumatized grandmother and mother. Irene in these early post war years, with the help of one of her professors, was able to get work in a laboratory performing post-mortems and Eva thinks in time her medical training would have been recognised. But with the partitioning of Berlin, they became afraid of being stranded within the Russian sector of Berlin and Irene felt they needed to move quickly.
During this time, Irene had a relationship with an older dentistry professor which resulted in the birth of Eva in Berlin University Hospital 20 October 1947. Eva is unsure of the details but thinks with the help of friends, Irene, her mother Margaret and baby Eva were able to flee to the west of Berlin, then were flown to Frankfurt in the British air lift. They then travelled via rail down to Naples, Italy where they were able to get on a ship for Sydney, then by air to Auckland, and finally a train and boat to Lyttleton. Eva knows that the Quakers sponsored them to come to NZ but doesn’t think they ever met. They arrived at the end of 1948 as she had her first birthday on the ship.
No one met them at Lyttleton, so they arrived at Ewald’s home by taxi. By this time, he was married with their fourth child on the way. He and his wife eventually had eight children and life was not easy. With three extra family members, relationships were probably stretched. To earn some money, Irene made jam doughnuts, selling them to local shops.
The Jewish Council loaned Irene money to attend Otago Medical School. Her English was fairly good as she had a very kind German-English tutor at high school in Berlin who remained a lifelong friend. However, Eva recalls her mother failed year one at Otago due to her language difficulties so thinks she commenced her studies in 1950 and like many other qualified refugees was required to complete the three years training and graduated in 1954.
Initially Irene went to Dunedin on her own, stayed in a large room with a tiny annex in a student house on Columba Street and cooked her own meals. However, living arrangements in her brother’s Christchurch home were difficult, so Eva and her grandmother were put on the train to Dunedin and lived in the Columba Street room with Irene. Eva recalls having her third birthday in this room. Her next memory is of her grandmother being taken on a stretcher to Seacliff Hospital where she remained until near the end of her life. A kind couple with a daughter of their own provided foster care for Eva for about six years and she recalls the wrench she had when the times for exchange would come after spending holiday time with Irene. This family wanted to adopt Eva, but Irene was not in agreement. One person that Eva recalls with great fondness due to her kindness to them was Senga Florence Whittingham class of 1953. She recalls Senga coming to visit her at the hospital when she was admitted with scarlet fever as a young child.
Following graduation in 1954, Irene spent her two years as a house surgeon at Cornwall and Greenlane Hospital and Dr Newman was very supportive of Irene. Around this time, she changed her surname from Abrahamson to Valentine to help alleviate the stigma of being a single mother as well as leaving her Jewishness behind. As far as Eva knows her mother never had another relationship. Irene’s mother died at Cornwall Hospital in 1954.
Career
Irene bought a general practice in Te Kauwhata in the Waikato from Dr Willoughby and as she was often on callouts to outlying areas including going to deliveries in Huntly, she had to hire a housekeeper for Eva who lived with her permanently from 1956.
The Māori people respected Irene and knew she would come if needed, in her little blue Morris Minor convertible. The community was very good to her and if her patients couldn’t pay she did not insist. Often, they would pay in kind with produce.
She eventually sold this practice back to Dr Willoughby and left with less money than when she purchased the practice. She worked very hard with little professional support, and in retrospect Eva believes her mother was probably totally exhausted and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Irene and Eva moved back to Auckland in 1960 where she bought a practice on Newton Road at the top of Symonds St, through German contacts. Initially this was in dingy rooms and quite a poor practice with few patients and again she worked very hard for little gain. She no longer had a housekeeper but had some home help. Irene eventually bought a house at 50 Malvern Road, Mount Albert. Eva attended Auckland Girls Grammar and would walk to her mother’s rooms after school.
Eva said her mother built up a good name in the community, her patients loved her, and she would call the police if she felt she needed to when visiting someone at night. Money was not a priority for her. She was a good diagnostician but was something of a misfit among her peers and rarely attended meetings with her colleagues. She eventually moved her practice to pleasant rooms next to St David’s Church in Kyber Pass and retired shortly after she was sixty-five.
Eva had done her nursing training at Auckland Hospital and went overseas for some years to work. She married a Japanese man in 1974 and later lived in West Auckland. She had a son and daughter. Eva said her daughter reminds her of Irene.
During the 1970s Irene spent four or five years doing locums in both England and Berlin and did some art and sculpture classes at this time.
On her return she moved back into her Mount Albert home, but with the building of the motorway she lost half her garden which she loved. She bought a small home in Titirangi but had mental health issues, probably due to PTSD and spent some time in Carrington Hospital. Dr Laurie Gluckman was very good to Irene at this time.
She stayed in a number of rest homes but eventually found the Dutch retirement village “Ons Dorp”, where she found stability, enjoyed her garden, the village cat and her grandchildren Emma and Mark. In 2006 at the age of ninety-three, she died of heart failure.
