The highlight of this week was an invitation to speak at Merrimac College by Rabbi Margaret Frisch Klein who was conducting a service remembering Kristallnacht. The following is what I said...
My first experience came in Germany when I was 13 years old. My mother and I sailed into Bremerhaven in January of 1947 to join my father, an American Army Officer who was stationed in Ludwigsburg.
My initial impression was that everything was as it must have been at the end of the war—only the bodies had been removed. The bombed out buildings and the piles of rubble were not yet cleared.
It was also my initial impression of Dachau when I saw the camp. Only the bodies had been removed. The barracks and the ovens stood in stark contrast to the quaint villages of the lush Bavarian countryside. The walls of the barracks were covered with scribbling. I was 13 and I lacked the ability to fully comprehend the horror of the Holocaust.
Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany, established on 10 March 1933, It was built on the outskirts of the town of Dachau, approximately 12 miles north of Munich. It was the model and training camp for all other SS-organized camps. In the course of Dachau’s history, at least 160,000 prisoners passed through the main camp and 90,000 through the branches. The record are incomplete but they indicate that at least 32,000 inmates died there, some from malnutrition, disease, and physical oppression. Numberless more were transported to the extermination camps in Poland.
Dachau was the first and most important camp at which German doctors and scientists set up laboratories to perform medical experiments on involuntary inmates. Because of these experiments throughout the duration of the war, Dachau was one of the most notorious camps. After the war, the doctors and scientists working at Dachau were tried at Nurenberg in the "Doctor's Trial" and seven received death sentences.
Many years later, I married an Army officer and went to Germany again. He and I went to Dachau and it had been transformed into a Memorial. Although it was a very impressive memorial I thought that it might have been more effective had it been left as it was when I first saw it. My initial experience still haunts me and whenever I think of Dachau, it is the first impression that I recall.
I think my father wanted to see Dachau because his Division, the 45th National Guard Division out of Oklahoma, participated in the liberation of Dachau. My father was not with his unit at that time because he had been wounded by shrapnel exploding in his helmet, and had been returned to the States.
The third, and last time, that I visited Dachau I was with my daughter who had converted to Judaism and married a Jewish man, and my two two beautiful granddaughters, Adina and Ariela, who were 10 and 8 years old. We didn't speak much during the tour. As I watched my granddaughters I thought of all the innocent children who had been killed. It still is a memory that haunts me.
I thank Merrimack College’s Certificate of Study in Jewish Christian Relations, Reverend Gordon White, my priest at the time, and my good friend, Rabbi Margaret Klein, for teaching me and instilling in me a deep love of my Jewish roots.
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As I lit a Remembrance candle, Rabbi Margaret, called me a "Righteous Gentile," a very great honor. She also made very kind remarks on her FaceBook site and Rabbi Neil Kominsky, with whom I had participated in an interfaith discussion group for several years before his retirement replied, "Somewhere between a Righteous Gentile and an Honorary Jew!"
