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Leaving the world a better place

Victims of the Holocaust say that by teaching young people, it gives meaning to their own survival.

By RICK GERSHMAN
Published January 25, 2005

	[Times photos: Bob Croslin]
	World War II veteran and former U.S. Rep. Sam Gibbons of Tampa visited Dachau after it was liberated. “No one had told us of the horror when we got into those camps,” he says.
	Philip Gans of Clearwater wears a replica of the jacket he had to wear during his internment at Auschwitz. “Not a day goes by I don’t think about it,” he says.
	[Photo courtesy of Philip Gans]
	A young Philip Gans, left, with his brother Ben and sister Beppie in Holland before the war. Twenty-one members of Gans’ family, including Ben and Beppie, and his parents, died during the Holocaust.
	Helen Fagin of Sarasota is a Holocaust survivor and served as chairwoman of the education committee for the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. “When you face life and death, nothing else matters,” she says.
	Go to photo gallery

Philip Gans still lies awake at night reliving the terrors he experienced at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps when he was a teenager. His mother, brother and sister all died in the camps; his father died of dysentery on the day Gans was liberated.

Sam Gibbons saw death at every turn during World War II as a captain in the Army's airborne infantry. He parachuted into Normandy on the eve of D-day and witnessed the deaths of more than half his unit. But his most haunting memory is of a brief stop at the just-liberated "extermination camp" of Dachau.

Helen Fagin began her teaching career, unofficially, as a young woman interred by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. She went on to be a college professor who helped create Holocaust memorials to educate future generations. But even she says her personal Holocaust experiences remain too painful to share.

They live, respectively, in Clearwater, Tampa and Sarasota. They are from, respectively, Holland, the United States and Poland. But they forever are bound by World War II and the Holocaust, where the Nazis systematically killed 6-million Jewish men, women and children.

To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Florida Holocaust Museum is presenting the "To Life and Liberation" dinner, Feb. 12 at A La Carte Pavilion in Tampa. The fundraiser is dedicated to honoring Tampa Bay area World War II liberators and Holocaust survivors.

Even 60 years later, the experiences remain vivid to Gans, Gibbons and Fagin. In a world where Britain's Prince Harry wears a swastika at a costume party, they are dedicated to ensuring the lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten.

'We had no idea'

Gibbons' combat experiences in Normandy and other theaters earned him a Bronze Star and a French Medal of Honor. His post-war career is legendary in his native Tampa, where he became an influential Democratic congressman.

But in early May 1945, Gibbons was a young captain helping attend to the details of Germany's surrender. He and a driver were on the autobahn when they passed a sign for Dachau.

Gibbons, now 85, recognized the name from months earlier through his work in coordinating the takeover of German prisoner-of-war camps. A British colleague had advised him: "That's not a POW camp; that's an extermination camp."

At that time, Gibbons said, "No one had told us of the horror when we got into those camps. We American soldiers didn't know much about what was going on. We knew the Germans were playing rough with the Jewish people, and the French people too. We knew they were being used as laborers in the German Reich. But we had no idea."

The young officer was about to get a lesson in why he had been fighting.

Gibbons told his driver they were making a brief stop at Dachau. It was just a couple of miles off the road, he recalls. It was mid morning, and it had snowed.

"There was still snow on the ground," Gibbons recalled. "And in the woods before we got to the gate, there was snow on what looked like all these cords of wood. Then I realized those were human bodies.

"They were neatly stacked, six or seven high, just stacked up like cordwood. When we got to the gates, the stench was just terrible. It (turned out) the Germans had not been able to incinerate them. The Germans had run out of food, everything.

"We got in, and it has just been liberated. There were these emaciated people everywhere. American soldiers were there, they said (they had) control of the place."

Gibbons and his driver left the men to their work. Though he has been thanked by Holocaust survivors, he's feels no need for such platitudes.

"I wouldn't call myself a liberator," he said. "I'm a (war) participant and an observer of Dachau."

However, Gibbons fought in such turning points of the war as D-day and the Battle of the Bulge, and not long ago, he met a local man who considers Gibbons a liberator.

"It's because of soldiers like you that I'm alive today," the man told Gibbons.

The man was Philip Gans.

'You'll never know'

For years, his wife and daughter said, Gans would not talk about his Holocaust experiences. Now they can't get him to shut up about it.

That's a good thing, though. Gans, 77, is happier now, having written a memoir about eight years ago. He volunteers at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg and speaks to groups of children and teenagers about his experiences. He figures he might as well share them: "Not a day goes by I don't think about it."

As Holocaust survivors pass away, Gans said, later generations must pick up where they left off, to ensure the lessons are not forgotten.

When he speaks to the children, the "most important thing is that they be witnesses to the witnesses. Children (born today) will never have the opportunity to meet a survivor."

Perhaps, Gans said, that's the reason he didn't die with the rest of his family.

"Someone told me I had a guardian angel on my shoulder," he said. "Someone said they must have kept me alive to tell the world what happened."

Gans' family was hiding in a farm in northern Holland when the Nazis discovered and arrested them. It was his father's birthday. The family arrived in Auschwitz a few weeks later.; Gans, just 15, later learned his fate was determined with the flick of a finger. He explains in his memoir :

Gans, his brother and father were sent to work a few miles away at the camp named Monowitz. Those men considered too old, young or weak to work, the children and the women - including Gans' mother and sister - were killed in gas chambers within days.

His memoirs included tales of desperate hunger and violence, of excruciating work conditions and terror. Death marches where prisoners died of exposure and exhaustion. Rides in closed cattle cars in the summer and open cattle cars in the winter.

Gans took part in an impromptu march after Allied forces attacked the train he was in, mistaking it for a German troop transport. Days later in the woods, Nazi soldiers began to flee as planes dropped leaflets reading "SURRENDER." Gans was in a small town where U.S. troops soon arrived. He later moved to the United States and even joined the Army.

He still has nightmares. He sees a counselor paid for by the Dutch government. But he relishes the opportunity to provide younger generations with a firsthand account of genocide.

"If you read about it, it's watered down," he said. "If you imagine 10 times worse than what really happened, you'll never know."

'Tikkun olom'

"I don't as much care if (people) remember the dates properly, the locations," Helen Fagin said, "as long as they remember the lessons of the Holocaust."

Even at 82, she's all about teaching them.

In the Warsaw ghetto, Fagin taught preteen girls the lessons they were missing. It was a clandestine school, she said, that signified spiritual resistance.

"My objective was to take the girls' minds off of survival."

Fagin taught about 23 girls. Then she recalled another number.

"About four or five survived," she said. "That's all."

Fagin continued her teachings in the United States after Russian soldiers liberated her from a displaced persons camp in Austria. She had five years each of Latin, German and Hebrew in her studies, and though she had not learned English, the language lessons would help when she settled in New York.

"I learned English in an interesting way," she said. "They didn't have an English-Polish dictionary, but they had an English-German one. I knew German well, so I picked up the New York Times and read it all. I became a voracious reader."

She quickly earned degrees, including a doctorate. She began a Holocaust Literature course at the University of Miami. Her passion eventually drove her to help create the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach.

Fagin served as chairwoman of the education committee for the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and helped determine its content. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the site and design committee for the National World War II Memorial, also in Washington, D.C.

All of the work has a singular objective: teach people the values of freedom, of tolerance, of humanity.

"For me, human dignity is the most important asset that a person can possess, and that it should never be taken for granted," she said.

Fagin was among many dismayed by Prince Harry's Nazi costume.

"To those of us who are survivors, we are very sensitive to what the Nazis represent," she said. "What the Nazis represent is death. Especially anti-Semitic death. Especially death to innocent men and women and children.

"If Harry - even as a young man of 20 - had received some kind of education in the history of World War II that included the perpetration of that evil, he would have had second thoughts about putting his arms into that uniform. If only Harry had a teacher who could have imbued him with this kind of responsibility.

"There is no fun in (a Nazi uniform). There is no frolicking in it. There is only death and hatred."

Like Gans, Fagin's continuing involvement in Holocaust education reflects a hope to use their experiences to positively influence the world.

"There's a Jewish phrase, "Working toward tikkun olom ,' which means working toward the betterment of the world," she said. "It's the crux of what everybody should commit to - that we have left the world in a better place than we found it. (Doing so has) given meaning to my survival."

Fagin survived 5 1/2 years of Nazi persecution. Her parents perished in death camps. Through her teachings, she provided others hope. And she received it in return.

"When you face life and death, nothing else matters," she said. "That's why we feel we have to give gratitude to liberators. They gave us hope that we could live to see another day - to give us hope, and freedom."

To Life and Liberation dinner

The Florida Holocaust Museum will host its annual "To Life and Liberation" dinner at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 12 at A La Carte Pavilion, 4050 Dana Shores, Tampa. Award-winning actor Jon Voight will be the master of ceremonies and actor Charles Durning is the guest speaker. The event is open to the public. Liberators and survivors should contact the museum for specific ticket and transportation information. Call Stacey Rosenberg at (727) 820-0100, ext. 243.

[Last modified January 24, 2005, 13:30:55]