470th MI Brigade recalls Holocaust

By U.S. ArmyApril 10, 2012

Dr. Paul Samelson
(Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

The 470th Military Intelligence Brigade will recall the Nazi horror and glean lessons from it with a special presentation by Holocaust survivor Dr. William Samelson from 10:30 a.m. until noon April 19 in the brigade classroom.

This year's theme for the Holocaust Days of Remembrance is "Choosing to Act: Stories of Rescue." A state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945, the Holocaust consumed six million Jews and millions of others, including the handicapped and political and religious dissidents.

Samelson was born in Poland and lived there until the age of 11 when he was interned in various Nazi labor and concentration camps in Poland and Germany. He escaped to join a group of partisans at 13 but was recaptured by the Nazis and taken to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where he spent three and a half years. He was liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945, and emigrated to the United States in 1948.

He holds a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, and has taught at Kent State University, The University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Texas at Austin. He is visiting professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Texas in San Antonio and Trinity University.

Samelson has written extensively on the Holocaust and lectured widely on a variety of topics relating to it. His published works include "All Lie in Wait," "One Bridge to Life," "Warning and Hope" and a six-volume series of English as a Second Language (ESL) texts.

He has served as ESL consultant in the Dominican Republic, and he is presently consultant and translator at the Mazal Holocaust Library and a board member of The Holocaust History Project, Inc. He is a contributing editor of "The Voice of Piotrkow Survivors."