FORT SILL, Okla. (May 2, 2013) -- Fort Sill memorialized the Holocaust with its National Days of Remembrance ceremony April 25 at the Patriot Club.
The annual event was sponsored by the 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade, and hosted by Joe Gallagher, Fires Center of Excellence and Fort Sill deputy to the commanding general, on behalf of the CG.
In her invocation, Marilyn Rumsey, Reynolds Army Community Hospital health consultant, said: "Eternal God ... help us remember the 11 million victims of Nazi atrocities and the American Allied Soldiers who liberated the survivors. May we always be ready to fight for liberty and justice."
This year's theme is "Never Again: Heeding the Warning Signs," said master of ceremonies Capt. LaTondra Paoli, 31st ADA assistant S-1 administration.
In a brief history of the Holocaust, Paoli said by World War II's end, the Nazis had killed two out of every three European Jews, about 6 million. They also targeted gypseys, homosexuals, the disabled, Poles, communists and socialists.
Guest speaker Michael Korenblit, a writer originally from Ponca City, Okla., said when the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they started discriminatory laws against Jews. They were very similar to Jim Crow laws in effect against blacks in the United States.
African-Americans had to ride in back of the bus, they could not live in certain neighborhoods and were prohibited from white restaurants, Korenblit said.
Korenblit went on to tell the story of how two Polish teenage friends survived concentration camps. They would later marry and become his mother and father, Manya and Meyer Korenblit respectively.
One night, Manya and Meyer snuck out of their separate Polish ghettos to see where the Nazis where taking a group of Jews.
The Nazis led the group of about 25 Jews and Christian sympathizers to a large hole dug into the ground. They were forced to strip then they were shot, Korenblit said.
"After those holes had been filled up with dirt, they could still see the ground moving up and down,"
Korenblit said, "because everybody who had been shot had not been killed. Those who were alive were trying to dig their way out."
The Earth still moving was the most vivid image his parents had of the Holocaust, he said.
Korenblit also spoke about Christian Poles, who helped his parents and their families survive.
Joseph Wizniewski, a farmer, hid Jews in his haystack from Nazis. Another young man, Henrik Gorski, 20, warned Meyer that the Nazis were planning to round up Jews in the ghetto the next day and offered to hide them at his father's house.
John Salki, who worked for the Polish underground, also hid members of Mayna's and Meyer's families. Salki's son, who was 13, at the risk of death warned Jewish families of planned Nazi deportations.
Later Wizniewski, Gorski and John Salki were murdered by the Nazis for helping to hide Jews, Korenblit said.
When Manya, age 20, was liberated by Russians from a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945, she weighed 65 pounds.
Meyer and some friends had escaped from a death march from their Dachau subcamp. A young German farmer discovered them sleeping in his barn April 19, 1945. The farmer provided them food, but said they would have to leave because he and his family would be killed for harboring Jews.
The next morning they were awoken by rumbling sounds of tanks and jeeps, Korenbilt said. "My dad and his four buddies were liberated by the American forces."
Meyer, then 19, weighed 78 pounds.
"My dad has a very special place in his heart for the U.S. military and what they did," he said.
Though the Remembrance theme is Never Again, Korenblit gave example after example of how genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass killings of people have been going on since the Holocaust.
In 1994, in Rwanda, 800,000 ethnic Tutsi were murdered by the Hutu government in 93 days, Korenblit said.
"That's 8,602 people a day, that's 350 people and hour, that's six human beings murdered every single minute, and the world sat back and watched," he said.
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