1998

Holocaust Survivors Recall Terror at Half-Century Anniversary Talks

by Tracy Toh

Images of the Holocaust were recalled Thursday night, not only in slide presentations but also in the words of three people who survived it.

A commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Holocaust was organized by the University of Nevada's Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Peace Studies. The center officially opened Thursday.

Viktoria Hertling, the center's director, said the meeting was a testing ground for the center's future projects. One of the center's commitments is bringing Leopold and Mila Pfefferberg to the university. The principal characters in "Schindler's List," a top-grossing movie of 1993, were modeled after the Pfefferbergs.

During the presentation, Hertling introduced several survivors and liberators from the Reno area, one of whom is Yoshi Hendricks, a Nevada faculty member and library employee.

Hertling said that she had learned of the three speakers, Willem Houwink of Reno, Ann Milhollan of Sparks, and Jud Allen of Reno, by word of mouth.

Willem Houwink, a Dutch native who was arrested in 1942 for falsifying passports for Jewish people, spent three years in various concentration camps after he was betrayed by a countryman.

"I lived each day not knowing whether I was going to live or die," Houwink said.

He said that he drew inspiration from Gandhi during his time in the concentration camps. He said the singleness of his purpose to survive kept him alive.

Houwink, a retired economics professor, gave an account of the atrocities he had witnessed at Dachau in Germany.

Milhollan, a retired blackjack dealer, was born in Frankfurt, Germany and fled to England in 1939. She recalled being grilled by the Gestapo as a child over a picture that she appeared in because a boy in the background was mimicking Adolf Hitler.

She said the Gestapo threatened to send her to concentration camps and took away her passport which they later returned when she left Germany. Although she was released, her nursing training in Berlin later was cut short when she was forced to flee the country when persecution of Jews began to intensify.

Seven members of Milhollan's family were killed in the Holocaust.

The third speaker, Jud Allen, was a U.S. Army officer who survived the Battle of the Bulge. He said that the United States involvement was not completely altruistic because it sought to protect relations with Europe.

"We, ourselves, were passively anti-Semitic - the only difference between us was that Nazi Germany was actively prejudiced," said Allen, recalling that even before the war, Jews in America were not admitted into fraternities.

While recounting how he had seen naked bodies piled up like logs, Allen remembered how he had felt the ultimate loneliness when he began to feel the guilt of having been even passively prejudiced.

Allen, who is now a member of the Reno City Ethics Commission, managed the Greater Reno Chamber of Commerce from 1959 to 1982.

Earlier when asked why a genocide research center was needed in a small city such as Reno, Hertling said that Holocaust awareness in Nevada was not on the forefront and therefore she felt the center could play a vital role in cultivating this awareness against hatred for reasons such as ethnicity and sexual orientation.

"It is necessary to remember the past and from learning these crimes against humanity and taking them as warning," Hertling said. "By talking about the past, we hope to prevent this from recurring in the future.

She said that she hopes the center will be an extension of the university's commitment to diversity and research.

Hertling felt that the media had exposed the public to a psychic numbing through television and other forms of broadcasting and that one of the center's objectives was to break through this numbing at the grassroots level by addressing high school and university students.

"When you are aware of an issue, it is only then that you can ponder upon it and take action - awareness is crucial," she said.

Hertling said she had envisioned such a program when she was teaching Yiddish literature as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After seeing parallels between a coup by the Pinochet government in Chile and the situation in Germany during the 1940s, she envisioned a center that could examine the early warning signs of racism or fascism.

Hertling, who was born in Germany, said that her parents were involved in the resistance movement against Hitler.