Holocaust survivor Henry Kruger hasn’t been following the war in Kosovo very closely. It’s just too painful.
As ethnic Albanian refugees stream across the borders, not only does it hurt him to see the mass human suffering. It reminds the San Francisco resident of the escape routes his own family never had.
“I watch those eyes of the little kids on the trucks,” Kruger, 75, said, his voice cracking. “My little brother didn’t get a chance to go on the trucks. He went to the ovens, to Treblinka.”
As NATO continued its assault on Serbian forces in Kosovo this week, a number of local Holocaust survivors expressed similar reactions. They are heartened to see action taken to halt what appears to be a rapidly escalating ethnic cleansing campaign. And they are reminded of what couldhave been done years ago to save victims of the Nazis.
During World War II, “if they would have bombed all the access routes of victims, they would never have been able to transport millions of people,” said Novato resident John Steiner, who was liberated from Dachau.
Steiner, a 73-year-old professor who started the Holocaust studies program at Sonoma State University, said he is “absolutely supportive” of the NATO assault.
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic “has committed crimes against humanity and against peace. The only thing a person like that can understand is a response which cannot be misunderstood — power.”
Steiner believes, however, that ground troops will be needed to meet NATO’s objectives. He supports their use.
“If you have violent conflict, you have to accept the fact that people will die as a consequence,” he said. “That’s the nature of violent conflict.”
Louis de Groot of Berkeley ultimately supports the use of ground troops as well, although the prospect causes him some conflict.
“It’s a very difficult question because when you send in the ground troops, the families of the ground troops make the sacrifice,” the Dutch-born survivor said. “On the other hand, I have the experience myself with the need of ground troops to come free me.”
The 69-year-old de Groot, who survived the war switching from hiding place to hiding place, was the only member of his family to emerge from the Holocaust alive.
Looking at today’s Yugoslav conflict, he believes NATO forces should have intervened earlier.
“It’s the old story of talk, talk, talk and do nothing,” he said. “It’s finally time the world stands up to this kind of discrimination and genocide. We don’t know exactly what is going on in Kosovo, but it’s quite obvious genocide is going on.”
Like de Groot, 71-year-old survivor Selma Blick is grateful to see action rather than talk. The San Francisco resident has been closely following the war in Kosovo on CNN.
“When you see pictures of children bundled up in winter, of old women, it reminds me exactly of what we went through,” the Polish-born survivor said. “But we never had the feeling anybody was doing anything, even when we were free.”
Blick, who was only 12 when the war started, ended up in the Vilna ghetto and Kaiserwald, a Latvian labor camp in Riga. Many of her relatives lost their lives.
“If the world did anything for us, maybe a few more Jews would have survived,” Blick said. “Nobody cared, the way I look at it.”
Watching the Kosovo conflict on television has also brought back searing memories for William Lowenberg of San Francisco.
“I see in front of me constant reminders of what we went through in the ’30s and the ’40s,” he said. “It’s not much different.”
Lowenberg, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau and a former presidential appointee to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, is exceedingly distressed to see history repeating itself half a century later.
“What’s appalling is that in one lifetime you see a repetition of the arrests and murders of innocent civilians, people being driven from their homes. The bottom line is the world has not learned at all.”