page 9 of X

Play Movie

Photographs and Artifacts

Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.

Liberator's medal

This medal was presented to me in about 1978. The Jewish community in San Francisco got together and honored the liberators at Temple Emanuel and each of us represented different camp that we worked in or liberated. One of the survivors that you've you interviewed for this program, Max Garcia, helped design this medal and it's the outline of a concentration camp. It almost looks like the one at Auschwitz, the design where I went to visit a couple of years ago. I was only able to go into one building before I crashed out.

Sound Only - Partially cut off - Ken continues the story of visiting Auschwitz long after the war.
...Jews there that were killed by people like you. "Oh you're so sensitive." I kind of shoved him. We got up the next morning early and drove out of Vienna, as fast as I could - really fast. That night we went to see this camp, Ebensee, and all they had left was half of the crematoria door at a cemetery. The camp still had the metal sign above it - Arbeit Macht Frei - Work Makes You Free. It was a housing development but they left the sign up. They sent me over to the cemetery and in the corner there was a half of the door of the crematoria that I saw, that I had had my hands on. I said Kaddish and we left and that night I crashed - it all came out, I broke down.

Prime Minister's medal.

This medal is one I'm very proud of because it was given to me by the late Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, at a dinner held in San Francisco. It's a Prime Minister's medal for an accumulative amount of work that I had done in San Francisco and in Israel for the State of Israel. The back is representative of the state of Israel. It's called a Prime Minister's medal.

Yitzhak Rabin

This is a picture taken the day of the Israel dinner of state in San Francisco at the Fairmont Hotel. I had much longer hair than I have now, but that was back in the 70s, 1977. I sat next to his excellency, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who I later met a few times in Israel at some very special private visits with him. It was one of the most tragic things that's happened in the State of Israel for him to be assassinated. It might have been possible that he could have settled the whole thing. He was a great man.

Swimming suit

This picture was taken during the war, and no, I didn't shoot down the German airplane with the swastika. This was included in a exhibit of the Jewish war veterans in Washington, D.C. It's traveled around the country. These pictures were also seen in San Francisco. I may have been the only G.I. in Europe to have a swimming suit.

Family

This is a picture of our whole family. We're very proud. We have three wonderful children: Francine, Cindy and Larry. Their spouses, with the exception of one who has passed away. We have seven wonderful grand-children. Each one of them who knows about my story, because I have gone in to every one of their classes to talk to their classmates about the Holocaust.