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Play Movie7 - Caring for Inmates & End of War
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Did you encounter any German soldiers at any of the camps?
Yes, in Ebensee. I also was in charge of a first aid station. We had German POWs working for us at that time doing menial work. They put me in charge of this first aid station and they gave me three German soldiers to work for me to clean up the place. It's funny how you can make contact talking to them and telling them what to do in Yiddish and English and German. I had them scrub down this one room - floor, wall, ceiling. They got through doing it and I said "Es ist nicht gut, do it again" and they scrubbed it down and scrubbed it down and I said "that's not good, ich ben ein Juden. I'm a Jew. Do it again." They did it again and then I threw them out.
In this camp we were giving IVs to the people who were liberated lying on these cots. One day I worked with one doctor who I was very close to. He said "try to give him an IV to get some plasma in him." I worked on him and I worked on him, starting in the afternoon. I tried to get it in his arm and the back of his hand and the other arm. The veins were so small by that time from all this malnutrition that I couldn't hit them. I tried his arms and legs and feet - on the top of the foot there's a place that you can do it. Finally at about one or two in the morning he died in my arms. I went up to my room and I just cried.
Then there was another man coming through and he had a bad cut across his hand. The apex between the forefinger and the thumb. There were so many people coming then. This captain (Vetersee) said "sew it up, Colvin." I had never done any suturing."Okay." I sewed it up. I gave him Novocain and cleaned it up and then started to sew it up. All of a sudden I saw his eyes go up and he fainted and I took one look at him and I fainted. The doctor came over and put some ammonia under my nose and I woke up, and "What do I do about him?" "Leave him alone, he's better off. Finish the job." Some place in Russia - if he's still alive - there's a man walking around with my handicraft!
While I was going on, they brought in another prisoner who had gotten hold of some kind of alcohol that they made in the camp, underground. Some prune juice or something. He had drunk it and he was dying from it. He had such cramps. I get all through suturing this up and another doctor there said to me "Colvin, you just killed a man. You should have pumped his stomach." First of all I didn't know how to pump a stomach, but he made me feel guilty that I killed him. You're not too well equipped at nineteen to do things like that under those tremendous odds, so many people.
Can you think of another example of working with anything? Another one that comes to mind?
They all meld together in trying to help them. You didn't form these personal relationships with everybody. It's just, they're too many, and they just came pouring through, and I did what I could do. I wasn't the whole United States army or the medical corps and I was still nineteen.
Post War
When you started to feel, you were saying how it came slowly for you to be able to feel. Were you able to relate with the other soldiers or did you keep to yourself? How did you try and deal with what you were feeling?
There's a very good example of how I started to feel again. Living at this little hotel that we commuted back and forth to, I found a typewriter. I could type from junior high school. I wrote a letter to our Rabbi in San Francisco. His name was Rabbi Elliot Berstein. He was at the Geary and Fillmore, at the Beth Israel Temple, which is now combined with West Lake Temple. It's called Beth Israel Judea. But at that time he was my Rabbi. I wrote a letter to him, what I was seeing and what condition that these men were in, and that I know I had been a problem when I was in religious school because I always asked too many questions and I questioned miracles and questioned stories. I just didn't take things as they were presented to me. I guess I was a little problem. I told him that seeing what I had seen, that I would devote the rest of my life to helping the Jews get a homeland of their own. If we had had one, maybe they would have gone there and not the concentration camps. Later, on my fiftieth birthday, I was Chairman of the Israel Bond Organization in San Francisco and the bond director read this letter. He had this original letter. For my own birthday I had specified that people could only come to my birthday party if they bought an Israel Bond. He said "Colvin's still keeping his promise."
We're getting to the point now. What I learned in working with these people and starting to feel again, was a very strong feeling for a homeland for the Jews. I swore in that letter that I would work for it when I got out of the army and came back to San Francisco. I've spent the rest of my life involved in mostly Jewish activities, knowing that if you have a strong Jewish community here, you can have a strong Jewish community in Israel. It didn't happen - I got out of the army in '46 and the state of Israel wasn't formed until May of '48. The idea was to work both for a strong Jewish community and a strong Israel.
Since that time, and I'm saying this very modestly if I can, that I've been on twenty-two boards, Boards of Directors in San Francisco and in Israel working for the Jewish people. My wife Thelma and I have made twenty-eight trips to Israel working for this, knowing that anything I can do as one person to contribute towards the Jewish people I was doing for Niso and for the Polish man and for all those people we helped put in graves. I don't say that as a hero. This is an obligation I have. Maybe a guilt feeling, maybe so, but it's something I had to do. In these twenty-two boards that I've been on - most of them have been in leadership positions. I'm fortunate enough to have been able to do this. From Camp Tawonga Board President and establishing scholarships for kids to go to Camp Tawonga, which we're still doing. Israel Bonds, to the Jewish Vocational Service, to the UJCC, to being on the Jewish Community Federation. I started out just calling on cards in 1947 - probably most of you weren't born in 1947 - but this was for the Jewish state. My little red wagon comes into recall and anything I can do to help the Jewish cause, I was there. I spent many many hundreds of hours in meetings and then I became campaign chair for the North Peninsula. Then I worked my way up and eventually I was General Chairman of the Jewish Community Federation Campaign in San Francisco, Vice President of the Federation, and President of the Jewish Vocational Service and the Israel Bonds. Even later, after that was all done, I've been involved with the Institute on Aging in San Francisco, became President of that, and I'm still on that Board and the American Jewish Committee. So many I forget the names.
This was my payback. This was my payback. <tape changed here> The concentration camps reminded me that I was a Jew and that I have an obligation to continue the great heritage that we have. I'm proud to say that my wife and I have a kindergarten school just outside of Haifa in Israel that we dedicated on our thirtieth anniversary. That was twenty-seven years ago, so we're married fifty-seven years.
What's the name of the school?
The Thelma and Kenneth Colvin Pre-Kindergarten Nursery. We didn't know what to put under the slogan and finally one of our daughters, Cynthia, came up with the inscription for that. The inscription was "Because We Believe in the Future of the Children of Israel." That's on the school plaque now. Every time we go over there we go to visit it. What a thrill it is to see these little kids running around. They speak Hebrew, but they all come in from all of North Africa, and even Ethiopians, and they come from the Arab countries to build up the state of Israel.
I am very proud to say that over the years with this Jewish involvement I've been able to meet some of the great leaders of Israel like Ben Gurion and Golda Meir and Abba Eban and right down the line and Yitzhak Rabin. In 1987 or something, I was honored in San Francisco with a dinner, the Israel Bond Organization. Yitzhak Rabin, alev ha-shalom, [Hebrew for "may he rest in peace"] presented me with a medal that I have over here. The Israel Prime Minister's medal. I was very proud to receive that. We had a dinner of about 800 at the Fairmont. That was kind of my payback to me.
When you were making the Germans clean up the barracks, what did you want them to feel? What did you want their reaction to be to you?
I wanted them to know I hated them. I really hated them. That kind of leads to a point. I've gone into schools for fifty years to speak about the Holocaust as a liberator. I remember one time in San Jose there was a young Hispanic girl. This is a whole thing about my speaking to these schools, that when I talk to them I was there to give credibility to the survivor, to that story and to the historian. I would tell them a little about my experiences as I've talked today.
I would also give them a lecture. The first thing I'd have them do, I'd say to maybe 200 or 300 sophomores and juniors or seniors in high schools all over the Bay Area, "I know this has been a tough day for you so I want all of you pretty girls to stand up and just stretch." The girls would look at each other and little by little they'd stand up and stretch and I'd say, "Okay now sit down. I want you ugly boys to stand up and give a good stretch." Little by little they would stand up, stretch and I'd say, "okay sit down." I'd say, "Now you did it. You bought this hook line and sinker. You know what you just did? You created a difference between the beautiful girls and the ugly boys. This is what discrimination does. This is exactly how Hitler created discrimination in Germany. That you people are good and they're bad so they should be killed. You did it in thirty seconds. Now you know how easy it is to discriminate."
I'd tell them "Look, I want each one of you to become a committee of one so that next time you hear a joke, a racist joke, or a dirty word" - I would name all the names of the minorities and I won't even repeat them here they're so bad. I would get the permission of the teachers to do this and I'd say, "Next time you hear any one of these words," I'd ask them if they'd heard any of this in the last two weeks and they'd all raise their hands and the teachers would raise their hands and I'd say to the kids, "The next time you hear any of these words, whether it's your own family, your friends, your brothers, your sisters or your teachers. You just put your hand up and say, "Wait a minute, we've studied about the Holocaust and we know how bad it was and that persecution and discrimination caused it and we don't ever want that to happen again." I say to you right here - you're the same people - don't let that ever happen again. Don't let discrimination. If you hear somebody say something you stop them and say, "we don't allow that anymore and let's stop that forever."
This one young girl came up to me in San Jose after the program - you asked me the question about hate - and she waited until everybody left the stage and she said "Mr. Colvin, I just have one question to ask you. Do you hate the Germans?" It took me back a long way. I just skimmed over the years. I told her the truth. I said "When I was there I hated them with everything I had in my body, but I can't hate their grandchildren or their children. They didn't do it. It was the grandparents that were hypnotized." I said, "You know, I don't want you to hate anybody and I don't want to hate anybody, but when I saw what they did, I hated them, but it's different today."
Is it something that you can say you've forgiven or is that not really a word that you would use?
No, I don't forgive the Germans for what they did, those Germans back then in '45. They were rotten people. They were hypnotized, or call it whatever you want, there have been all kinds of books written about it, about who was responsible. But they were no good, inhuman. That's my story.
