A DAY TO REMEMBER

On Tuesday, a group of people gathered at the Pasadena City Hall to remember the victims and survivors of Holocaust. Following are excerpts of two speeches made at the Day of Remembrance ceremony, which was sponsored by the Pasadena Human Relations Commission.

John Weidner of Monterey Park was a leader of the Dutch Underground, which helped hundreds of Jews escape to neutral countries during World War II.

I was born in Holland, the grandson of a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church and the son of a minister of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

During my father’s lifetime, he taught me, my family, his parishioners and the community that the most important quality in a human being was to love, respect and treat our fellow man as we wished to be loved, respected and treated.

Not only did he teach this lesson, my father lived it as well. When the Nazi Holocaust swept Europe, my father protested the inhumane treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. For this, he was placed in prison.

My sister Gabrielle protested the cruel action of the Nazis against the Jews. For this, Gabrielle was placed in the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. There, she died one day after the liberation of the camp by the Russians.

I was a witness to the barbaric treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. I personally observed the crushing of the skull of a Jewish infant who was torn out of the arms of its mother.

I was determined to heed the teachings and example of my father and I did everything that I could to save as many lives as possible.

As I have reflected on the Nazi Holocaust, I have come to realize that many of the Germans and other Europeans that led and participated in this genocide against the Jews were seeking scapegoats for their problems rather than taking the responsibility of solving the historical, social and economic problems of life with intelligence and compassion.

The lesson that I have learned as an active participant in the struggle against the Nazis is that each of us, be he Christian or Jew, has the responsibility to honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. We need to teach our children that life is beset with problems that must be faced courageously, honestly with intelligence and understanding.

We must teach the younger generation that we are all God’s children and are in the hands of a loving God. We need to honor and treat each other so as to bring respect upon ourselves in the eyes of God and in the hearts and minds of all humanity.

Abe Cheslow of Pasadena was one of the first soldiers to liberate survivors of the Dachau Concentration Camp in 1945.

It is important that there be a constant reminder that there was a Holocaust and that it must never be allowed to be repeated. If more mayors, boards of directors and legislators on every level acted as did ours, it would go a long way to ensure that it would not happen again.

When I was asked to take part in this ceremony, I thought that it was not my place. A survivor, or a member of a survivor’s family should stand here and relate the horrors and the stupidity that engulfed Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

But then I realized that the remembrance of the Holocaust is not the private domain of the victims. The horror of what happened 40 or 50 years ago touches us all, whether we came from Krakow or from Kansas . . . whether we lived through it, or were not yet born, or whether we believe in the Old Testament or follow the New. . . .

In early 1945, I was a 20-year-old corporal in the U.S. Army, . . . part of the 20th Tank Battalion of the 20th Armored Division, fighting our way through southern Germany and Bavaria. As we approached Munich, our orders were to take the city and continue into Austria. . . . We were not given much information as to what we would find. We were, therefore, totally unprepared for what we encountered when we went through a quaint, picturesque and neat town in Bavaria, and continued down the road to the abomination called Dachau.

Dachau was a collection of buildings, visible from the road, set in the pines, and could have been a college campus. But, as my tank approached and entered the compound, not even . . . viewing the scene through a periscope could shield me from the enormity of what I saw, and the horror of the scene.

Even though I was used to viewing violent and ugly death in combat, this was a hundred times worse. The buildings were littered with corpses. The bodies were stacked in piles and were lying in random collections on the ground. There were some 40 cattle cars on the railroad siding with bodies. And, worst of all, these bodies, clothed and unclothed, had match sticks for arms and legs.

And then there were the living who lay there without animation, without emotion and very close to death. Their eyes, bulging from their gaunt faces, followed us as we moved around the camp, and we, the liberators, felt a deep sense of shame that we were so healthy, so well-fed and so alive.

I saw hardened battle veterans who thought that it was unmanly to show emotion--who were stoic and controlled when they lost friends in combat--get down, gather a survivor in their arms, and cry unashamedly. . . .

Of all of God’s creatures, only man makes war on its own kind, and to that, let me add only man is capable of great cruelty and inhumanity against one of his same species.

We know that these people were murdered for no good reason. We cannot permit society to forget or deny their deaths, for then they would have died for no good reason. It is time for us to remember and time to tell our children and hope that they will tell their children. Only then can we feel sure that mankind will be vigilant to prevent it from happening again.