Photo By Robert Shields | Dr. Steven Rosenblatt speaks at the Holocaust Remembrance Day Observance at San...... read more read more
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By Elaine Sanchez
Brooke Army Medical Center Public Affairs
JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas – Brooke Army Medical Center hosted a Remembrance Day Observance on May 2 to honor the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
“Today we gather to mourn the loss of so many lives, honor those who survived and celebrate those who saved them,” said BAMC Commander Col. Jeffrey Johnson during opening remarks.
A candle-lighting ceremony was held to honor the Jews killed in the genocide. The final candle was dedicated to the next generation, who are left to “carry the flames of remembrance.”
Dr. Steven Rosenblatt, guest speaker and the son of a Holocaust survivor, talked of Hitler’s rise to power and his mother’s bravery during that time.
His mother, Mathilide, was 15 years old and living in Vienna when German troops invaded Austria in March 1938, he explained. The Austrian people did not resist, and Hitler quickly folded Austria into the German Reich.
Nazism was thrust upon his mother and her family. In November of that year a riot fostered by Nazis spread across the Reich. Jews were pulled in the streets and beaten, their business and stores looted, synagogues destroyed and Holy books burned. This riot was later known as Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass.
Mathilide and her family moved to Warsaw to stay with a family member, but were soon pushed into a Nazi ghetto to live in squalor. The American Consulate in Vienna, spurred by her sister, sent a message that if she could make it back to Vienna she would be given papers to travel to the United States. Her father, a jeweler by trade, pounded gold into thin sheets and sewed it into the lining of her coat.
At 16 years old, she said goodbye to her family and began the more than 420 mile trek alone. She got past one guard after another and snuck across borders, watching fellow travelers get shot, before arriving in Vienna.
Mathilide’s childhood home had been homesteaded by another family, so she snuck in the basement and reported to the SS for her papers. On Feb. 3, 1940, she was granted permission to travel to the U.S., and about a week later, she was on a boat departing from Rotterdam, Holland.
His mother died two years ago, he said. “It was only after she died that I began to look really critically at what happened. I gained just new respect for her courage and for what she was able to do.”
Rosenblatt also showed photos of concentration camps and the many Jews who died there. In Auschwitz, he explained, Jews were placed in two lines. Doctors decided who could handle slave labor – the young and frail went to the left and the others to the right. The ones on the left were killed in the gas chamber.
The prisoners worked in fields and workshops and died daily from malnutrition and disease, Rosenblatt noted. Others, including children, were used by doctors for human experimentation.
A total of 11 million people – 6 million Jews and 5 million others – systematically died at the hands of the Nazis before the camps were liberated by Allied soldiers in the mid-1940s. The victims included 1.5 million children and represented about two-thirds of the 9 million Jews who had lived in Europe.
“The Holocaust was a horrific blight on the history of humanity … but also showed the sheer strength, determination and resiliency of those who lived through this appalling time of our history and those who helped liberate the concentration camps,” Johnson said. “People risked their lives and the lives of their families to save their fellow human beings.
“Many people chose to forget, others even dare to say it never happened; but we remember, because it is an unthinkable scar on humanity of which we can’t repeat,” he continued. “We need to understand what human beings are capable of and continue to constantly be on the lookout to stop these atrocities from happening in the future.”
| Date Taken: | 05.04.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 05.06.2016 09:15 |
| Story ID: | 197495 |
| Location: | FORT SAM HOUSTON, TX, US |
| Web Views: | 38 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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