Holocaust Survivor of
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau,
and Lódz Ghetto Writes Letter
Pleading for Support of MRFF
July 17, 2009
Dear national leaders and friends,
At the age of 80, my time on earth is limited and so I feel an urgent need to share what is in my heart about the frightening and historically similar conditions in today’s U.S. Military to those I had to live through during the Holocaust. These ominous trends were brought to my attention by Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). I applaud Mikey’s tenacity and bravery in his efforts to expose the stealthy fundamentalist takeover attempt of our armed forces, a strategy all too reminiscent of what brought the end of my family’s life in pre-war Poland. If there is one gift I can hope to leave my three daughters and five grandchildren, it is that their father and grandfather, in joining forces with MRFF, did his part in standing up to this clear and present danger...a danger which the greater population sadly seems all too willing to ignore. My words are motivated not only by a lifelong anger towards the perpetrators who annihilated my family and my people, but also towards those who knowingly sat by and watched the horrors of the Holocaust unfurl and did nothing to stop them. It is my determined hope that when you help MRFF’s cause, neither my children nor grandchildren will ever have to experience the things I went through during my youth in the Nazi death and concentration camps.
America is different from other nations thanks to our magnificent Constitution, which specifically prohibits any sort of “religious test” for all Federal offices, and that most certainly includes the military! Our founders understood the need for a distinct separation between Church and State because of the things they had witnessed in Europe and the new American colonies. As James Madison so often and eloquently wrote, it is precisely the manifest separation of Church and State that strengthens our citizens' most fundamental religious rights. In the America to which I so gratefully immigrated, all religions were allowed to flourish and NONE were permitted to be specifically, or even indirectly, favored or "recommended by the state.” Personally, I have lived through the Inferno that sprang up in a country that rejected such separation.
My memories of the Holocaust remain all too vivid in my mind. The dark red and black columns of flame and smoke that I saw upon my night-time arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau haunt my dreams even with the stench of burning human flesh included. I remember not saying goodbye to my mother upon hearing the SS and the Kapos, dogs at their side, command, "Men right! Women left!” My father had previously explained to me that any woman with a child was as good as dead in Auschwitz. I remember not being given a tattoo because, by the summer of 1944, the Nazis no longer deemed it economically worth the ink; the average life expectancy there being but two weeks by then.
Prior to Auschwitz I spent 3 1/2 years in the Lódz ghetto, actually an urban concentration-camp. In less than three years the Jewish population there went from approximately 200,000 to no more than 30,000 by the time the ghetto was being "liquidated" in June 1944. My family and I were among the last to give up our hiding place on the edges of the ghetto when we surrendered to be transported to Auschwitz in early August 1944.
Regardless of the horrors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps that I lived through, I still consider the Lodz Ghetto to have been the more emotionally difficult one to live through. In the ghetto, we still lived in family units, visited relatives and friends, and continued some social interactions with acquaintances, even though we existed on 600 calories a day if we were lucky. Deaths from tuberculosis, dysentery and typhus were daily occurrences as were frequent, random German military shootings in the streets. Mothers were forced to watch their children die of starvation and spouses watched each other starve. I remember seeing the bodies of some of my school friends lying still on the sidewalk. But at least in the ghetto, I could still feel. At least here, tears still ran down our faces, we cried for our loved ones and felt sorrow for strangers. Such personal grief disappeared completely in the concentration camps.
After surviving Auschwitz-Birkenau for almost 6 weeks (three average life expectancies for there!) my father, my brother, and I managed to find our way onto a transport to the "work camps in Germany," a statistical miracle, since the Birkenau regulations were that no one under the age of fifteen was to leave alive. The next punishment we suffered for being born of the ‘wrong’ religion consisted of stays in seven Dachau sub-camps (where in one, Riederloh, my father was beaten to death with a shovel by the camp's commandant in January, 1945). In the main Dachau-1 camp I narrowly escaped death from becoming a guinea pig for malaria experiments.
After one unsuccessful escape attempt, my brother and I finally managed to escape in mid-April 1945 from Dachau-2 (Karlsfeld), were "captured" by an American infantry patrol and taken to their battalion field headquarters. There a Polish-speaking sergeant from Chicago explained our origins to the GIs and we were "issued" fatigue uniforms, making of us instant micro GIs, or mascots of U.S. Army.
My brother came to United States in early 1946 while I remained a U.S. Army mascot and civilian employee until the spring of 1947. I had had a belly full of Europe by then and stowed away successfully from Cherbourg, France, on a freighter headed for New York. After spending six months on Ellis Island, I was eventually released and "legalized" by an Act of the United States Congress “in recognition of my services to the U.S. Army in Europe.” After President Truman signed this Act, I finally became a free man in America. I volunteered for United States Air Force one year later, spending about four years in the service during the Korean Conflict. After my honorable discharge I embarked to pursue the American Dream. I am now retired after a career in several private industry firms, extended civil service with NOAA and eventually owning my own company in Boulder, Colorado. It should be clear to all who read this why I love America.
The Plywacki family of Poland is no more. Of the 200 members of my extended family only four survived the de-Judaizing German rule in Poland. Of those four, only my brother William and I remain alive. The other survivors were two maiden aunts who eluded the Germans in Warsaw with falsified "Aryan" (i.e. Christian) identity papers. They were ultimately denounced to the Gestapo for $20 by a bounty-hunter for hidden Jews. Somehow they managed to survive many months of torture and died in Poland after the war by 1963.
Like every society, the United States has its own extreme fundamentalists and bigots, just as some dogs have fleas. Most frighteningly, there has been a concerted drive to infiltrate the military by these very fundamentalists who believe in the superiority of their very dangerous brand of Christianity. It is a brand that, in its evangelism, telegraphs a Crusader agenda abroad while attempting to coerce the rank and file to adhere literally to their Bible. Just as in caring for your pet you would immediately deal with the fleas, so too must we, as a society, stand firmly behind the Constitution in ferreting out those who wish to eradicate the wall of separation between Church and State.
If my words have convinced even one of you to stand up and take note, then please give Mr. Weinstein all the financial support you can, become his advocate with friends, neighbors and most important of all, the media, then perhaps what I had to endure in my youth will not have been in vain. I, who have seen the takeover of a country, and have seen humans go mad with hatred and bloodlust, can only hope that Americans will awaken to this danger and put an end to the usurpation of power in our military by today’s Christian fundamentalist fanatics who want to turn it into a Christian Army and therefore their own tool. It matters not if those who would take over our military call themselves Christian, Jew, Muslim, or Devil worshipers; what matters is that a democratic society cannot possibly hold onto its freedoms under the guns of a militarized theocracy.
In conclusion, I cannot urge strongly enough - in fact I beg you - to help the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to defeat the onslaught of fundamentalist Christian theocratization of the Armed Forces of the United States. If things continue to proceed as now, our military will all too easily begin its descent into the American equivalent of the brown-shirted SA.
History has shown all too consistently the extreme danger that religious militarism imposes upon secular democratic societies when those societies cede their exclusive right to bear arms and enforce the law without racial or religious prejudices. This time, please, let's not wait until it's too late.
Most sincerely yours,
Walter Plywaski, previously Wladyslaw Plywacki
Formerly of Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and Dachau
