So that we never forget: Holocaust survivors visit Goodfellow

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Stephen Musal
  • 17th Training Wing Public Affairs
GOODFELLOW AIR FORCE BASE, Texas --  On April 20-23, Goodfellow Air Force Base was host to two powerful living reminders of the horror humanity can cause and the joys of freedom.

Walter Feiger, a survivor of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Germany during the Holocaust, and Wanda Wolosky, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, spoke during several sessions at Goodfellow as well as a memorial service at the base chapel and an off-base session at Angelo State University.

"You're the last generation that will hear these stories in person," said Dr. Gail Wallen, the manager of Holocaust Services at the Jewish Family and Children's Service in Tuscon, Ariz. Dr. Wallen called the visit a gift and a burden, because it is up to our generation to keep the stories alive.

After he was sent to a forced-labor camp with his brother, Mr. Feiger learned that the entire small town he had grown up in on the border between Germany and Poland had been "liquidated." His mother was sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz; those who were not sent to the camps were deported. Meanwhile, Mr. Feiger toiled at the forced-labor camp.

"Work was hard, food was small and our people would die from exhaustion," he said. "If you reported sick, they would send you to Auschwitz, so we avoided the sickroom like the plague."

His stay in the forced-labor camp lasted just one year before the workers were told to assemble before an SS officer holding a cane.

"He just looked at you and pointed left or right with the cane," Mr. Feiger said. "Right, you went to the concentration camps. Those who went to the left just disappeared." He and his brother went right, and with a column of 50 others they found themselves at Gross Rosen concentration camp.

"I had the distinct impression of great fear," Mr. Feiger said. "As we entered camp, we all moved to a central place and were greeted by a camp officer, who said something like 'Welcome, you S.O.B.s. I give you six months to live. With luck, some of you might make it a little longer.'"

Mr. Feiger said that was the beginning of a long period of demoralization.

"The goal was to make you no longer feel like a human being," he said. "If they didn't like you, they beat you to death. We didn't know if we were going to make it or not." As it turned out, Mr. Feiger did make it, but his brother was not so lucky. Six weeks before the Russian army liberated the camp, Mr. Feiger's brother died of typhus.

Mrs. Wolosky's entire family (with the exception of her father and an uncle, who fled to Russia) were interned in the Warsaw Ghetto. By the end of the war, only she, her mother and three cousins survived. Mrs. Wolosky said hope and strength of will were what got them through their darkest hours.

"I didn't want to die without first living," Mrs. Wolosky said. She said the hope to live her life rather than merely survive, added to a healthy dose of her mother's strong will, were what kept her going. "What really saved me after the war was that I went to Israel," Mrs. Wolosky added. "Nobody was interested in hearing my story, because everyone had a story. I took the story and put it on a shelf, then tried to build a life."

Now, she said, telling that story is more important then ever. It is all of our responsibility, she said, to make sure that genocide on this scale never happens again. Dr. Wallen agreed.

"You are the gatekeepers and safeguards of democracy," Dr. Wallen said to the servicemembers in the audience. It is our generation's duty, she added, to keep these stories alive so that there will never be another Holocaust.