Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 22, 1993 TAG: 9304220196
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL HENDRICKSON and LAURIE GOODSTEIN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
It was a ceremony paying tribute to the armies that went into hellpits named Dachau and Buchenwald, a ceremony giving honor to ordinary citizens. Citizens in the Polish and Danish and Hungarian undergrounds, in the hills of south-central France, who 50 years ago found the courage to be something other than morally neutral.
Even if the courage in question, as one speaker noted, was just to feed a child. To open a door. To heed a stifled cry. In many cases it was a courage that was enough.
The observance in the amphitheater was called "A Tribute to Liberators and Rescuers." As Army Chaplain Alan C. Hendrickson said in his invocation, it was dedicated to "men and women whose lives penetrated the darkness . . . who chose to take a stand, regardless of the cost."
There was some marching in of old military divisions. There was presentation of colors by aging vets. There was a dramatic reading by actress Liv Ullmann. There was the awarding of liberation medals for acts of rescue. There was music by the U.S. Army Band. The secretary of defense was present. The son of Dwight Eisenhower was present. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was present. The minority leader of the House of Representatives led several choruses of "God Bless America."
You might say what was being offered up was a kind of muted pomp and somber pageantry - in and amidst all the starker images of death engraved on the world this week.
Indeed, in a week in which mysteries of the human heart have seemed newly and inexplicably on display - from a cult's apocalyptic end in Texas to the capture in Washington of an alleged shotgun stalker - it was fine to sit in a national military cemetery and be reminded that, yes, for all our history of depravity, there's also no overestimating the human capacity for decency.
A woman named Isabella Leitner walked up to a reporter. She looked like anybody's grandmother. This was the first sentence she spoke: "I was taken away from Auschwitz when it was falling apart."
She said she'd been taken away in the late fall of 1944. Her mother had been sent to the ovens. She and other members of her family were shipped to another death camp. Leitner gave the name of this other camp several times and then, in small exasperation, took a pen and said, "Birnbaumel! Like this." She printed it out in large letters in the reporter's notebook. And then she said, "I am so happy. I am so sad. If anyone told me I'd outlive Hitler by half a century, I'd probably have said - "
She sputtered to a stop. "What would I have said? I'd have said you were the most insane person who ever lived. But I'm here, I'm here half a century later, to tell the story." Leitner, who has written several books about her experiences in the camps, and who's down from New York for this week with her husband, said the opening of the Holocaust museum is "not a dream come true. This is a yearning come true so profound I cannot say. I'm a writer, but I do not have a single word to describe."
An old soldier from the 42nd Infantry Division named Robert Jecklin didn't buckle when the dark rainy weather came. He's 76. His division helped liberate Dachau. He's from New Mexico and traveled to Washington this week with his wife. "We thought we understood what we were fighting for, but when we saw the horror and the terror . . . ," he said. Said Yvonne Jecklin: "He didn't know why he was being honored. He said all he did was drive up and walk into the camp. I told him, `Think of the friends you lost trying to get there.' "
Courageous acts of rescue by Zegota, a Polish underground organization, were recounted, as was the heroism of the Danish underground, as was the collective resistance of a village in France named Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Not one of the 2,500 inhabitants of Le Chambon betrayed a Jewish refugee during four years of German and Vichy rule.
Hilda Wolf from Chicago watched the ceremony in the rear of the amphitheater. She brimmed with tears. She escaped to the United States in 1939, but so many others - aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents - never got out. "This was the bad thing," Wolf said. "Nobody helped. Believe me, we would have gone anywhere, even the jungle, to find them. But we needed help and nobody bothered."
Yet here she was at a ceremony honoring those who did help. There are never enough acts of decency.
by CNB