Ceremony recalls Holocaust horrors

George Massad goes silent.

The 86-year-old Oklahoma City resident taps his right hand against a loose left fist.

Tears push against the lenses of his wire-framed glasses and then find their way down his cheeks.

The question that brought this on was: What did what you witnessed at the Buchenwald, Germany, concentration camp do to your heart?

Each year the Jewish Federation of Greater Oklahoma City holds a Holocaust Remembrance Program.

For the past 15 years, the organization has held the program, which is dedicated to honoring and remembering the more than 6 million Jews and 5 million other victims murdered as part of the Nazi regime, said Cathy Pettijohn, director of the Holocaust Education and Community Resources program at the Jewish Federation of Greater Oklahoma City.

This year, they have chosen to also recognize and honor World War II veterans during the Holocaust Remembrance Program, 2 p.m. April 23 at the Freede Wellness Center on the Oklahoma City University campus, NW 27 and Florida. This program is free and open to the public.

This year's honorees include those soldiers, who like Massad, helped liberate concentration camps.

Massad, a member of Gen. George Patton's Third U.S Army division, was a captain when he reached Buchenwald in 1945.

What he saw stuck in his heart and memory for a lifetime.

"I had gone through combat and had lost men, he said. "But what I saw shocked me.

"I threw up, and I'd never done that.

Some prisoners, starved and emaciated, charged the watchtowers on April 11, 1945 and took control of the camp, according to information from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Later that same day, the Third Army found more than 20,000 people in the camp, including 4,000 Jews.

"Approximately 56,000 people were murdered in the Buchenwald camp system, most of them after 1942, according to the museum.

Men emaciated

Outside, Massad said he saw ditches with bodies of the dead.

Inside, jars with gold teeth in them and other horrors.

Some prisoners, who hadn't been there as along, were alert.

Others were much worse.

"I saw men lying in bunks that weren't any more than this far apart, he says, holding his hands less than 24 inches apart. "They were laying there with no fat on them.

"I would walk around to them so they could see me, because some couldn't even look up.

Pettijohn listened to Massad's accounts. She said that hopefully by recognizing these soldiers the community and especially young people, who are tomorrow's leaders, will learn from the "timeless lessons of the Holocaust.

She said she thinks this gathering will help communicate the reality and immediacy of what happened so many years ago "as we see and hear from people who were eyewitnesses to one of the darkest periods in our world's history.

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