Holocaust survivor shares powerful message

The most powerful experiences often blindside us, walking up out of nowhere under a deep blue sky.

That was the case last month, at The Holocaust Memorial in Miami, when a stranger approached our group at a wall memorializing the victims.

My wife explained to her Aunt Laney how Denmark’s scientists had mixed cocaine and meat to throw the search dogs off the scent of escaping Jews.

Aunt Laney turned to the stranger and asked, “Did you know that? Did you know what Denmark did to save the Jews?”

“I was there,” the old man answered. “I am on that wall.”

He held out his arm to show the blue tattooed number, the first sign of a concentration camp survivor that we had ever seen.

In the background the museum’s most striking feature towered over us and cast its reflection in a blue pool.

The 42-foot bronze sculpture depicts an arm with a tattooed number like the one on the stranger who walked into our lives.

The stranger, who called himself Joe, showed us a photograph of himself as he was being released from the concentration camp, Buchenwald, as an 18-year-old boy. He pointed to face after face and named his companions, who were liberated by Patton’s 3rd Army.

Years later, Joe said, he made it to Chattanooga and the Army drafted him for the Korean War.

In perhaps the greatest irony of his life, the military sent him to Germany.

“But this time I had a gun,” he said, smiling as he pretended to march with a weapon on his shoulder.

Before the holocaust, he said, a Jewish father would have protested if his son had carried a gun.

“But we have learned,” he said, reminding us that Israel is armed, but is greatly outnumbered by its enemies.

Joe took us back to when he was first forced to work for the Nazis as a farm boy cleaning out horse stalls.

In his slight Polish accent, he told us that a Nazi soldier tried to shoot him with a bolt-action rifle, but it wouldn’t fire.

“Someone put a finger in it,” he said, pointing toward the sky.

As he spoke, a musical recording played behind us, the haunting voices of children singing songs from the holocaust.

Joe pointed to our children and told them the memorial was for them, so they would know.

So it would never happen again.

Scott Morris is managing editor.

On the Net

www.holocaustmmb.org