Monday, April 26, 1999

Holocaust scenes retold

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Despite lessons, hatred still not wiped away

BY DANA DiFILIPPO
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Henry Carter, of Clifton, a Holocaust survivor and former prisoner of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, participated in the commemorative candle ceremony at Florence Christain Church Sunday. (Jeff Swinger for the Enquirer) | ZOOM |

        FLORENCE — When George Newsom crawled through the concentration camp's front gate at Buchenwald, Germany, he had his camera ready to record the carnage.

        But there were some things that couldn't be caught on film.

        Like the crematories that were still warm. And the starving survivors who dropped dead after eating dried bread crusts their digestive systems couldn't han dle. And the nausea that rose upon the realization that found shoes, lamps and belt buckles were made of human skin.

        “Inside the compound, no one was stirring,” said Mr. Newsom, who was the first American soldier to enter the camp to liberate survivors. “After about a half hour or so, they realized who we were and they started coming out. It was a pitiful sight.”

        Mr. Newsom, 78, of Bridgetown, spoke Sunday at Florence Christian Church as part of the Northern Ken tucky Interfaith Commission's fifth annual Yom Ha Shoah, a Holocaust remembrance service.

        The service honored those who liberated the Nazi death camps and remembered the 6 million Jews who died during the Nazis' 12-year “Reign of Terror.” More than 200 people attended.

        Mr. Newsom served as part of the Army's civil-affairs unit, securing European towns as the war ended. In April 1944, his unit arrived “by accident or because we were sent there, I don't know,” in Buchenwald.

        Fifty-five years later, Mr. Newsom has piles of graphic, black-and-white photos with such unnecessary labels as “Human bodies” and “A leg sticking out of a mass grave.”

        He talks about such horrors, he says, in hopes of convincing people hate kills.

        Hate left unchecked escalates into catastrophe, just as mass murderers have terrorized Rwanda, Kosovo and Littleton, Colo., said Cor Suijk, the service's keynote speaker and international director of the New York-based Anne Frank Center USA.

        Mr. Suijk urged listeners to encourage their children to embrace outcasts and toil for peace. “Walk up to those people and make them understand that we do care,” he said. “The solution is in our own hands.

        “Never fail to ask yourself what the price will be if you do not do something.”

       

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