Letter to the Editor

Holocaust survivors' perspective

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Dear Editor,

In 1995, while touring Israel, I visited a museum where shocking photographs of the Holocaust and the conditions in Nazi death camps were displayed.

This brought back memories of my classmates at Dora Moore elementary school in Denver. Some of them were children of Jewish families who had escaped from Hitler's domination of Europe. Their stories of relatives in those concentration camps have left a lasting impression on me.

I have read many interesting facts about people who survived calamities caused by Hitler.

A special symposium was held at UCLA April 24, 2015. The main speaker was Dieter F. Uchtdorf, second counselor in the First Presidency of the Mormon Church.

He and his wife, Harriet, are now U.S. citizens. They both experienced growing up when Hitler was in power.

Dieter was born in the German part of Czechoslovakia in Ostrava, enar Selesia. He was just a toddler when the Gestapo transported Jews to concentration camps.

Hitler wanted to increase the production of factories in East Berlin. Deter's father was a supervisor in a factory. The German government sent him to East Germany. The Uchtdorf family left Czechoslovakia very reluctantly.

Their experience in the East German territory was terrible. The Uchtdorf children and their parents fled to West Berlin. They escaped by jumping off moving railway cars and hiking over open country in semi-darkness to avoid being caught.

At the symposium, Dieter talked about how he and his wife had visited Auschwitz, the concentration camp where Jews, Gypsies and other people who displeased Hitler were killed.

Dieter Uchtdorf's solution to our problems in the world today is "to look past our differences and to recognize that we are fellow travelers walking on the same path together."

Helen Ruth Arnold,

Trenton, Nebraska

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  • Thank you. We must never forget. Perhaps forgive, but never forget. AMEN

    -- Posted by Navyblue on Wed, May 27, 2015, at 3:39 PM
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