Survivor recalls Holocaust with reading, movie

  ED RHEE Holocaust survivor Dario Gabbai
speaks with first-year math student Rose Tseng at
a screening of "Auschwitz ““ The Final Witness," a documentary
on his life.

By Dharshani Dharmawardena
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

From age 13 until he was almost 17, Samuel Goetz, a 1955 UCLA
graduate, never saw his own face.

“They didn’t have any mirrors in concentration
camps,” he said.

Removed from his home by Nazi soldiers in 1939, forced into a
ghetto, and shuffled from one concentration camp to another, Goetz
inhabited a world dominated by fear and arbitrary violence.

“When they kicked us out of our house, a Nazi soldier put
a handgun to my head. I was 11 years old,” he said.

A survivor of the Nazi atrocities during World War II, Goetz
read excerpts from his autobiography, “I Never Saw My
Face,” to an audience of about 50 in Meyerhoff Park Thursday
to commemorate Yom Ha’Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The day’s events, organized by UCLA Hillel, also included
the showing of “Auschwitz ““ The Final Witness,” a
documentary featuring survivor Dario Gabbai.

Gabbai is one of three Sunderkommandos alive today. The
Sunderkommandos were members of death camp inmates responsible for
transferring dead bodies from the gas chambers to the
crematoria.

Al Tsarovsky, president of the Jewish Student Union, said events
like the Holocaust are not confined to that point in history.

“It happened to the Jews, but genocide is not an uncommon
thing. In every part of history there’s genocide,” he
said.

When Nazi forces took over Poland in 1939, Goetz found himself
excluded from school and barred from public parks.

While Jewish citizens of occupied Poland found themselves
stifled in more ways than one, Goetz’s parents were
determined he should have his Bar Mitzvah.

His parents and their friends secretly educated him and other
children in their living rooms as part of their efforts to preserve
some semblance normalcy in a chaotic time.

But even these remnants of a normal life quickly disintegrated,
as many of Goetz’s classmates began disappearing. In 1942,
Nazi soldiers herded his parents into a cattle car that transported
them to their death.

“Everyone, my parents, aunts and uncles were all killed
(simply) because they were Jewish,” he said. “I fell
through the cracks. I was on the list, and when they came for my
father they came for me, too.”

But Goetz’s Catholic nanny provided him her own
son’s papers as identification, thus saving his life.

While the Nazi regime conducted mass murders which killed not
only Jews, but millions of others, Goetz said the Allied Forces
““ comprised of the United States, France and Britain ““
knew about these events.

According to Goetz, Jan Kinski, a member of the Polish
Underground forces, came to President Franklin Roosevelt and Felix
Frankfurter, a respected Supreme Court Justice of Jewish
background. He described to them the atrocities taking place in
Europe, but neither could fathom the horror of his
descriptions.

Articles detailing the same news appeared in The New York Times,
but were buried in inside pages, according to an article in the Los
Angeles Times.

Until January 1945, when he first saw allied planes, Goetz had
never known the level of their involvement in the war.

“And what a relief it was,” he said. “I
didn’t mind being bombed as long as (the Nazi soldiers) were
killed with me.”

In 1949, after years of trying, Goetz secured a visa to the
U.S., where his only remaining relatives lived. He attended high
school and graduated from the UCLA School of Public Health and
earned a doctorate in optometry.

During the 1970s, Goetz became concerned when people began
denying the Holocaust ever happened. This movement inspired him to
found the UCLA Chair of Holocaust Studies and to begin collecting
video documentaries and testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

“The chair is permanent ““ the teachings will
continue, and they will serve as sorts of living stories,”
Goetz said.

With such means, he hopes not just to remember the past but to
prevent the same tragedies from occurring.

Sacha Bodner, a UCLA alumna whose grandparents were Holocaust
survivors, said memorials are not enough to fight genocide.

“It’s not good enough to only remember that
it’s happened,” Bodner said. “You have to do your
part to make sure this never happens again, not just to Jews, but
to everybody.”

Emphasizing the importance of education, Goetz cited severe
human rights violations and genocides in Cambodia and Africa as
examples of how little people may have learned from the
Holocaust.

“Has it stopped atrocities in other countries? No, it has
not. Have we done anything? I don’t know,” he said.
“But we have learned that holocausts and genocides can be
prevented.”

With reports from Robert Salonga, Daily Bruin Reporter.