Howard Melton, 74, remembers the day of June 22, 1941, very clearly.
That was the day he said Germans came to Kaunas, Lithuania, where 10-year-old Melton lived.
“Of course the Germans put the Jews in the ghetto right away,” which was set up in the poorest suburb of the city with no sewer system or running water, he said.
Another date that remains clear in his memory is Oct. 28, just four months later. He remembers the SS soldiers assembling the 10,000 residents of the ghetto and standing before them with machine guns, deciding immediately who was “to live or die.”
Melton was 13-years-old when he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp. He said he never spoke much about what he saw there, until the early 80s, when he read an article in the Milwaukee Journal, in which a woman claimed the Holocaust never happened.
“It got me mad, angry,” Melton said. At that point he realized he needed to talk about what happened.
“When I retired,” about 10 years ago, he said, “I started to talk.” Since then, Melton has shared his story at schools, churches and synagogues throughout the state.
“At first it was hard for me,” Melton said. “I think I consider myself a shy person. It doesn’t bring back pleasant memories.”
But, he said, “I think it’s very important for young people to become aware of what hatred can do to people.”
Melton was one of the several Holocaust survivors who shared his experience with students from the Milwaukee Jewish Day School and area public schools, as part of one of the projects for the upcoming “Portraits in Courage — Honor the Memory” fundraising event, slated for June 29 at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
The community-wide event, which commemorates the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, is being organized by the Holocaust Education and Research Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Coalition for Jewish Learning.
The event is sponsored by Time Warner Cable and supported by the Jewish Community Foundation, the endowment development program of the federation.
The event will highlight the contributions of both the concentration camp survivors and liberators to the Milwaukee community. Keynote speaker will be Holocaust scholar and writer Dr. Michael Berenbaum, president and chief executive officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Steven Spielberg. He was also the first project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
An armed services color guard will launch the event, which will include performances by cellist Jane Hollander and singer Joel Ekhardt; the presentation of 10 portraits of Holocaust survivors painted by Milwaukee native, artist Leo Neufeld; and the screening of videos of 18 Holocaust survivors being interviewed by Milwaukee Public School students, (see sidebar) which were taped by Time Warner Cable.
‘Raise awareness’
According to Betty Chrustowski, event co-chair with Bill Appel, “We felt that this was an opportune time to thank and honor” Holocaust survivors in the community.”
“They have been quite successful,” she said, in “adding to the economy and also in general to the community.”
In addition, “We felt this was the right time to thank the liberators and people in the armed forces who fought to free them.”
Daughter of two survivors, Chrustowski said that HERC “desperately needs funds” to continue to educate the 3,000 school children they currently serve, and their goal is to eventually reach 12,000 children.
“This is an opportunity to raise awareness” about HERC, she said, and to “raise funds.”
Like Melton, Abraham Ugent also didn’t talk about his experience for many years. Ugent served as a sergeant in the 9th armored division in the 14th battalion of the U.S. Army, where he found himself one of the first soldiers to liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp.
“But as time went on,” said Ugent, 83, “I wanted to make sure people knew” about what happened. In addition, he said he still meets “people every day that think Hitler was a good man and did great things,” he said.
Being one of the few Jewish men in his group to liberate Buchenwald, Ugent said that coming to the camp survivors aid “was like Moses coming to them. They held on to me. It was devastating.”
Ugent and his men did what they could to help the survivors “until others who were more qualified” could come, he said.
One discovery Ugent remembers clearly was finding “several young boys” hiding in a boxcar. He estimated there were about “40 to 50, all about eight, nine or 10 years old.
They hadn’t eaten or had water for several days.”
After assisting them, Ugent “gave the boys little pieces of paper” with his mother’s name and phone number on them. “She started getting calls,” he said, and some of those survivors eventually moved to Milwaukee.
Ugent also passed though Dachau and other smaller concentration camps before he was sent to work in Paris as part of an intelligence unit.
Since then, Ugent has visited Europe many times and seen some of the places he has been and people he met. He took his grandsons there in 2000 to show them also.
Appel echoed the high value on educating our children about the Holocaust. “We have a responsibility to pass on from our generation” what happened during the Holocaust, he said.
“We want our young people to understand…. [Often] they are quite surprised when they come into contact with it.”
By organizing such events, “the Holocaust can never be forgotten. By remembering, we make the world a better world and these events will not be repeated again,” he said.
Couvert for the event is $50, and reservations are due by June 15. For more information, call Joyce Gutzke at 414-967-8322.
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