Photo By Mark Schauer | Sandra Scheller, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, shared her parents and other...... read more read more
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Discriminatory laws. Forced labor camps. Execution chambers that killed with deadly gas.
These were the escalating tools of terror the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler used in a pathological bid to eliminate Jews and others deemed ‘inferior’ from the face of the Earth.
At the height of Hitler’s 12 depraved years in power, more than six million people, representing one-third of the Jewish people in the world and two-thirds of those in Europe, were systematically murdered in camps that spread across the continent. Particularly heinous was the fact that these atrocities claimed the lives of over 1.5 million innocent children.
A fortunate few made it through, however, including Kurt and Ruth Sax, the late parents of Sandra Scheller, who shared her parents and other relatives’ experiences to a rapt audience of dozens at U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground’s (YPG) Post Chapel in mid-April during a Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony.
Although her parents and maternal grandmother survived the ordeal, her great grandmother and other relatives died in Nazi death camps. Scheller showed photos of her maternal grandparents and their pre-Holocaust life in Czechoslovakia prior to the Nazi occupation, where her grandmother ran a dress shop, and her grandfather was a traveling salesman who sold then-novel elastic socks. The photos that bore witness to their lives were saved by her grandfather’s non-Jewish sister-in-law, but nothing else of their old life made it through the horrors of World War II.
“When they were liberated in 1945, they came home to nothing: it was gone, it had been bombed,” she said.
There was a long buildup to that point, however: restrictions on movement and confiscation of property, betrayals by non-Jewish friends. She also showed the audience things like the compulsory yellow badge her mother was forced to wear, and the plain black dress worn by her maternal grandmother at Auschwitz. Her grandmother made holes in the hem where she secreted the gold caps from her teeth to protect them from seizure by the Nazis. Scheller now wears the gold from them as part of a ring.
“There are no buttons,” Scheller told the audience of the dress. “The Nazis removed the buttons because if you swallowed a button, you might be able to commit suicide, and they wanted to control that as well.”
Her family members experienced the typical horrors of the camps, becoming emaciated as the brutalization continued. They were forced to work to survive, and Scheller recounted moments of love for family that endured even in the worst circumstances. When her mother was forced to work in a bullet factory, she surreptitiously made earrings out of bullet casings as a birthday gift for her mother, which Scheller showed the audience. Some of the adaptations endured for the remainder of her life: As an elderly woman, her mother sometimes made dolls out of bread and spit at mealtimes as she did as an adolescent in the camps.
“Did she ever get out of the Holocaust? She left the worst parts behind, but she still thought about it. She didn’t have nightmares after she started sharing her story with students.”
The family’s ultimate liberation came from the hard-fought efforts of Allied troops. After the United States entered the war, 20 divisions of Soldiers trained in then-Major Gen. George S. Patton’s California-Arizona Desert Maneuver Area (CADMA), of which YPG is the last active Army installation. When the training was established, it was assumed the Soldiers would ultimately deploy to the North African Theater. In the case of the 8th Infantry Division of IX Corps, for five spring and summer months in 1943 the men trained at Camp Laguna, sweltering in uncooled tents within eyesight of what is now YPG’s Walker Cantonment Area, eating combat rations, drinking chemically-treated water, and enduring sandstorms as they engaged in intense maneuvers in the area’s deserts and mountains across months.
Within a year, the Allies had achieved victory in North Africa, and the division was deployed to Normandy. In the fall of 1944, it fought from Belgium into Germany in the Battle of Huertgen Forest, the longest single battle in the history of the U.S. Army. On May 2, 1945, the 8th Infantry Division liberated 3,000 inmates from a Nazi concentration camp near Wöbbelin, a small town in northern Germany, one of ten divisions trained in the CADMA that liberated Holocaust survivors from their cruel captors.
Scheller told the audience she believed it is vitally important that all Holocaust victims be remembered.
“We have to remember that it wasn’t just Jewish people who were killed: Homosexuals were killed, people that were handicapped were killed, military and political prisoners were killed,” she said. “It started with Jews, but it became infectious.”
“We’re losing our history with each passing year, and we can’t forget,” added Col. Patrick McFall, YPG Commander. “The day you forget is the day it happens again, and we pray it never does.”
| Date Taken: | 04.24.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 04.24.2023 16:50 |
| Story ID: | 443275 |
| Location: | YUMA PROVING GROUND, ARIZONA, US |
| Web Views: | 46 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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