Professor shares Holocaust experiences

Professor shares Holocaust experiences
By Ryan Johnston

Issue date: 3/23/07 Section: News
Originally published: 3/22/07 at 5:38 PM CST
Last update: 3/22/07 at 5:37 PM CST

The entire nation of Germany took part in discriminating against minorities during the Holocaust, especially Jews, who were considered inferior and unworthy of living, a Holocaust survivor said March 6 at the Methodist Student Center.

Dr. William Samelson, professor emeritus in the foreign languages department, lectured on his experience during and after the Holocaust in a session titled "Anti-Judaism, Political Racism and Final Solution."

This was the first of four lectures in a series at the center, "The Holocaust: Let Us Remember!"

"Nobody knows how they were convinced on how we were at the bottom of the ladder," he said.

"They believed racial purity existed."

He was born and reared in Poland until age 11 when he was captured by Nazis and taken to Buchenwald concentration camp where he spent 3 1/2 years.

He was liberated by the U.S. Army in 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1948. He and his brother are the only survivors from his family.

He also has written books on the Holocaust including, "Warning and Hope: The Nazi Murder of European Jewry" and his memoir titled, "One Bridge to Life."

Samelson told the group Hitler thought a "super-race" was composed of blond, blue-eyed, 6-foot-tall men. The Nazis used measurements in the skull, nose and cheeks to determine the superior from the inferior.

He recalled that he still has a textbook from high school that shows how they made the measurements to determine superiority.

"Genocide is political racism," he said.

On the topic of genocide and how it started, he said that in 1913, Turkey decided Armenians were inferior. More than 1 million people were killed, including women and babies. Columns of 50 to 60 people were brought into the streets and shot with machine guns.

During World War II, more than 52 million noncombatants were killed, he said. More than 6 million of those were Jewish, and more than 1 million were children.

He recalled that propaganda films and photographs of people being brought to gas chambers and killed were shown to prominent figures in the Nazi party.

"These people were clapping during the films," he said. "They thought they were doing away with the vermin. What do we do with vermin? We kill them."

After his years in the concentration camp, he said he distrusted society and that his tutor brought him to think otherwise.

"She injected that you cannot live with hate," he said. "That hate is not a good reason for survival, but that love is."

Following his studies, he decided that he wanted to teach German language and literature.

"There was a lot of beauty in German culture," he said. "All of that was banished by Hitler."

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