Holocaust survivors return to Goodfellow Published April 15, 2008 By Senior Airman Stephen Musal 17th Training Wing Public Affairs GOODFELLOW AIR FORCE BASE, Texas -- For the third year in a row, Goodfellow Air Force Base hosted three survivors of one of the most tragic events in human history, the Holocaust. Visiting Goodfellow Monday through Thursday were Walter Feiger, who survived work camps and concentration camps; Lilly Brull, who fled with her family across Europe scarcely one step ahead of the Nazis, and Wanda Wolosky, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust in World War II. During a series of discussions at the base theater, Mr. Feiger, Mrs. Brull and Mrs. Wolosky related their remarkable stories to Goodfellow Airmen, Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and civilians. Additionally, Dr. Gail Wallen, director of Holocaust Services for the Jewish Family and Children's Service of Southern Arizona, gave a presentation on the Holocaust as a whole. All spoke of the importance of remembering what happens when, as Dr. Wallen put it, "the abnormality of hatred is allowed to become the norm of society." All three survivors saw that hatred first-hand. For Mr. Feiger, it began on his 12th birthday, just seven days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland. That was the last time he saw his father, an officer called for duty in the Polish reserves. His brother, three years older, was ordered to "volunteer" to work for Germany in a forced-labor camp. "My mother feared I might be next," Mr. Feiger said. He was enrolled in an infrastructure repair program, fixing roads and digging ditches for the Nazi occupiers. Six months later, he was sent to join his brother at the forced-labor camp. Mr. Feiger learned later that the entire small town he had lived in was deported eight months after he was sent to the forced-labor camp. His mother was sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. 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." Nevertheless, Mr. Feiger and his brother survived the camp until it was evacuated ahead of the Russian Army. The Nazis marched them to satellite camps where many, including Mr. Feiger's brother, contracted Typhus. "He died six weeks before liberation," Mr. Feiger said. After his liberation by the Russians, Mr. Feiger traveled to Palestine and became an Israeli Army officer. He spent two years in the army, and then six more in the Haifa Police Department training police officers to use small arms. In 1950, he moved to France and spent the next six years in Paris, marrying a French girl. Six years later, they came to America. Despite his ordeal, Mr. Feiger is a cheerful man, determined, like the other survivors, to pass on his experience so that no one else has to go through what he did. "I cannot live the Holocaust all my life," he said, "But there's a difference between living it and keeping it alive."
