The Holocaust - From Dachau and Israel to Salt Lake City

Ira Tannenbaum, who helps oversee three Jewish cemeteries in Salt Lake City, attended the burial of two skulls taken nearly 62 years ago from the Dachau concentration camp. Knowing they are at rest helped World War II veteran and retired U. professor Lloyd McCleary's peace of mind. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune )

By Jessica Ravitz
The Salt Lake Tribune

Salt Lake City----April 17...... The morning sun dried the dew as Ira Tannenbaum, 81, walked through the cemetery atop the Avenues, one of the three Jewish burial grounds in Salt Lake City he helps oversee. Beyond the headstones inscribed with Hebrew lettering and the Star of David, he stopped at an unmarked spot where community members had gathered late last month.

He had watched as Art Warsoff, pickax in hand, labored to help dig a hole 5 feet long, 3 feet wide and 4 feet deep. Warsoff stood at the bottom of the grave and reached for a sealed cardboard box. Inside, wrapped in tissue, were two skulls from the Dachau holocaust concentration camp.

Carefully, he placed the box in the center of the hole.
There's no knowing whether the two skulls belonged to Jews. Dachau held others, including German dissidents, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. But definitively knowing the skulls' backgrounds didn't matter to those at the grave site.

"It was the right thing to do," Warsoff, 46, said. "They could have been Jewish, could have been Gypsy, could have been anything, but at least they're in a good place."
And nearly 62 years after he took the skulls from Dachau, Lloyd McCleary can rest knowing they rest, too.

McCleary was a 21-year-old lieutenant on the road to Munich when he first learned about the concentration camp.

It was April 29, 1945.
Members of the 42nd Rainbow Division had just captured a German major. The enemy looked at the American GIs and guessed they were on their way to Dachau.
"Dachau?" McCleary remembers thinking. They'd never heard of such a place.
Another soldier radioed intelligence and passed along the command: "Get to Dachau as fast as you can," McCleary says, recalling the order. He climbed behind the wheel of his 222nd Infantry jeep and sped off.

More than six decades later, McCleary, now 82, sits in a Salt Lake City coffee shop and tells his story - parts of it for the first, and he vows only, time. In helping to liberate Dachau, the prototype Nazi holocaust concentration camp, he saw horrors he says others can't comprehend. How could they? Why would they want to?

Dead bodies the furnaces couldn't consume fast enough were roof-high, "stacked like cordwood," he says. Locked boxcars, which had sat on the train tracks for days, maybe weeks, were opened to reveal thousands of tangled skin-and-bone men, women and children - half were corpses, most of the others died in soldiers' arms.
Some surviving camp prisoners, finally tasting freedom, unleashed their pent-up rage, attacking and killing about 40 SS guards. Some they drowned in Dachau's moat, the GI remembers. McCleary watched as one prisoner beat the brains out of a guard, using a wooden leg as his weapon.

And the camp's stench? Indescribable.
Hardened soldiers retched and fell apart around him. A news correspondent vomited as he typed, balancing a manual typewriter on the hood of McCleary's jeep. His colonel, McCleary found out later, never recovered. The man cracked, would never again smell meat cooking without throwing up, attempted suicide at least once and died before turning 40.

"I'm sure I had a lot of post-traumatic stress for years, maybe still do, but it didn't incapacitate me like my colonel," McCleary says. "And he was a West Pointer."
The retired University of Utah professor somehow held it together. He's not sure why or how; he just did. Maybe he was callous from his time fighting on the front lines, in shock or numb, but the piles of dead bodies didn't faze him, he says. When he walked into what he describes as a "medical room," however, something else did. Two skulls, likely remnants of prisoners used for medical experiments, sat in the stark room. McCleary could only speculate as to what these people had been through. "Why were they there?" he wonders out loud. "I didn't know, but I wasn't going to let them get pitched into a pit."

The box in the house's furnace room, marked "skulls," always seemed a little strange.
"It was the kind of box you tried to avoid," says McCleary's youngest, Victoria "Vicki," 43, of Salt Lake City.
As a child, she remembers asking her father why he brought the skulls home. His response, she recalls: "I wanted to remember these things really happened...It wasn't a figment of my imagination."
The nightmares that woke him in the war's aftermath often left him wondering if what he saw was real. The proof, his daughter says, was in the box.

About 20 years ago, Vicki joined her dad on a trip to Dachau, one of a few return trips he has made since World War II. He complains about how "sterile" the camp is today. Most of the barracks are gone, there's no remnant of the moat, and visitors would never know about that trainload of corpses and dying people, he says. He'd always spoken about his wartime experiences, Vicki says, but he had skimmed over his time at the concentration camp. Even so, Vicki - the youngest by 12 years - knows more than her older sisters. For some reason, she says her dad began to open up as he got older.

The skulls no longer scared Vicki by the time she got to college. In fact, they sort of came in handy. She was studying anthropology at the U. and brought them to her osteology class. Her father, incidentally, had done something similar when he returned from war.

McCleary was a student at the University of Illinois and enlisted in the reserves when he was called up for service in 1942. He arrived in southern France in September 1944 and would not return from Europe until June 1946. Right after he left Dachau, on April 30, 1945, he was sent - without his jeep, his belongings and, consequently, the skulls - to regimental headquarters outside of Salzburg, Austria, where he became a staff officer. But members of his regiment had held onto his things, and "six months later, the skulls caught up with me," he says.

He had no idea what he was going to do with them but says he knew he had to do something. Once back in school, he enrolled in a physical anthropology class, specifically to learn more about the skulls, about these two people who had died at the hands of Nazis. The one with a bullet hole above the left brow, he explains with his finger cocked to his forehead, belonged to a woman in her mid-30s. The other was a male, likely in his late-50s. The anthropology department wanted to keep the skulls, but McCleary maintained they deserved more - "a ritual, a religious ceremony or something," he says.

He sought counsel from Methodist preachers, including his brother, as well as a Catholic priest, but no one seemed to have answers or adequate interest. So he wrapped the skulls in tissue, tucked them in a box, sealed it and went on with his life. In 1970, he moved to Salt Lake City, where he became a professor and chairman of educational administration at the U. until 1994.

As the years passed, McCleary thought about the skulls from time to time. The responsibility never left him. In the past couple of years, the urgency to act grew. He didn't want to die without taking care of this business.

The Rev. Ivan Cendese was instrumental in helping him move forward. The former Catholic priest, longtime educator and administrator, and, as of 1989, Episcopal priest has known McCleary for years. He was a doctoral student of the professor's in the late 1970s and early '80s, and the two became friends. During a 2005 teaching stint at Salt Lake City's Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School, Cendese invited McCleary to speak in a Western civilization class about his service in World War II.

During that speech, McCleary says he mentioned the skulls in front of Cendese for the first time. He turned to his friend for advice. The two met for coffee, and Cendese promised to help McCleary figure this out. The skulls that had followed McCleary for nearly 60 years were now in Cendese's hands.
The call from the priest was unlike any Rabbi Tracee Rosen, of Salt Lake City's Congregation Kol Ami, had ever received. Six decades after the Holocaust, how was she to know what to do? She didn't have the answer, but she was certain she could find one. The skulls, still in their sealed box, became hers.
On a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., several months later, Rosen asked around. She was told the most respectful and responsible thing she could do would be to give the skulls a Jewish burial. Now it was just a question of figuring out the right time and place.

Every year or so, members of Salt Lake City's Jewish community cull together materials for a special ceremony. It's customary in Judaism to bury damaged sacred items or text containing God's name in Hebrew. Holy words, it's believed, deserve the same respect as departed individuals.
The Dachau skulls, it turned out, would not rest alone.

Rosen explained it once was common to bury sacred text and items with righteous people, as an act of added tribute. So as the group placed around the box of skulls the community's damaged prayer books, prayer shawls and copies of Torah readings, they gave the two from Dachau extra blessings.

The impression in the Jewish community was that the anonymous veteran was ashamed of his actions, that he'd taken the skulls as "souvenirs" and had confessed - on his deathbed - to a priest. With his gym bag beside him, having just finished one of his regular workouts, McCleary wants the truth to be known.
"I don't want anyone to think I did this on a whim. . . . I have no regrets," he says. "I was trying to do the right thing all along."

Sixty-two years ago, amid the mayhem that was Dachau's liberation, countless tangled corpses unceremoniously filled ditches. For the two skulls left in a medical room, McCleary wanted more. And now that they've been buried, dignified with a ritual and prayers, he can finally let go.

JESSICA RAVITZ can be reached at jravitz@sltrib.com

YOM HASHOAH: HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY

Of the estimated 15 million people killed by the Nazi regime, 6 million were Jews. The Jewish people were the only ones targeted for complete extermination. By the end of the war, about two-thirds of European Jewry, or a third of world Jewry, were gone.

This evening marks the beginning of Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day, which is observed on the 27th day of Nissan, the first month on the Hebrew calendar. Israel law established this day of remembrance in the 1950s. There are no fixed rituals for observance, except in Israel, where a two-minute air-raid siren will sound throughout the nation Monday at 10 a.m. Wherever people are - at work, in traffic, on the beach - they will stop to stand in silence and honor the dead. Pedestrians freeze in their tracks, buses stopped on busy streets, and cars on major highways pulled over as the country paused to pay respect to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

All day, television stations devoted their broadcasts to historical documentaries and movies, and radio stations played sombre music and interviews with survivors.

The State of Israel marked the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day yesterday evening in memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their helpers, as well as those who rose up in revolt against the Nazi barbarism.

The annual state ceremony begin at 8 p.m. at the Israel Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem..

The solemn hour-long opening event, was broadcast live on national television channels and radio, and was attended by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Acting President Dalia Itzik, as well as scores of dignitaries and ambassadors from around the world.

The Israel government, in cooperation with the Israel Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem stated that the central theme for this year’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day would be Bearing Witness. The Official Opening Ceremony for Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day took place at 20:00, at the Warsaw Ghetto Square, Yad Vashem, Har Hazikaron in Jerusalem.

Israel’s Acting President Dalia Itzik and Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the participants. Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem Chairman, kindled the Memorial Torch. Joseph (Tommy) Lapid, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, spoke on behalf of the survivors. He said simply, “I was there.”

Pointing out that the "People of Israel are One," he added, “All of us were there. All of us were in the Holocaust,” and he warned that anti-Semitism is rampant in Europe, Japan and Muslim nations. He also exhorted the Jewish nation notto "sit with hands folded” while other people, such as those in Darfur, are being threatened with mass extermination.

Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Israel celebrates its 59th independence day next week.
"The renewal of the Jewish people, its shaking off the ashes of the Holocaust for a new life and national rebirth in its historic birthplace, is the pinnacle of its victory," he said.

The Israel Holocaust ceremony was broadcast live on Israel television on Channels 1, 2, 10 and 33 and by Israel radio on Kol Israel and Galei Zahal, and on www.yadvashem.org.

INSIDE THE DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP

The Dachau concentration camp, located northwest of Munich, Germany, opened in 1933. Initially, it was intended to house political dissidents such as communists and trade unionists. In subsequent years, however, an ever-increasing number of Jews - as well as Gypsies, homosexuals and others - also were imprisoned there.

Dachau, which included scores of subcamps, was the model for future camps, explains Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Los Angeles headquarters of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization. He says that while people point to Auschwitz when they think of horrors such as medical experimentation, Dachau was where experiments began.

As the Nazis ramped up efforts to systematically exterminate the Jewish people, after the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, some 2 million Jews were gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, two of the death or extermination camps. Dachau was different in that the gas chambers were never used, Breitbart says.
"It was not a death camp in the sense that it had a mass murder machine," he says. "It was a death camp in that that's what you were supposed to do there."

Officially, 206,000 prisoners were registered at Dachau, and 31,591 deaths were recorded on the books, Breitbart says. But the researcher adds that verifying numbers is impossible and that these figures fail to tell the whole story. More likely, he estimates about 50,000 died at Dachau by way of, for example, sickness, starvation or shooting. At the time of liberation, the Associated Press reported that 32,000 prisoners were freed.