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Dr. Alfred Munzer was just nine months old when his family was
separated during the Nazi Regime occupation of Holland, but he grew
up hearing about his relatives’ hardships.
These stories
influenced him to share his experience during the Holocaust
Commemoration at Joint Base Andrews, April 26, 2017.
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April 26, 2017- Dr. Alfred Munzer, Holocaust survivor, speaks during
the Holocaust Commemoration at Joint Base Andrews, MD. He spoke of
his family’s experience, including the death of his father and two
sisters, and being reunited with his mother after she was liberated
from a concentration camp. Speaking at the JBA memorial was part of
Munzer’s plan to continue spreading his knowledge and message in an
attempt to positively influence individuals around the world. (U.S.
Air Force photo by Senior Airman Jordyn Fetter)
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“The Holocaust has many lessons,” Munzer said. “It shows
what can happen when there is discrimination and hate, and
how they can progress to actual murder. That’s one of the
things, the terrible things, that happened during the
Holocaust.”
Munzer took these lessons and transformed
them into teachings to influence generations to come.
“I really became acquainted with my past when my mother
would go through the photographs and tell me stories about
my sisters, my father and my grandparents,” Munzer said. “I asked her which concentration
camps she had been in, what kind of work she did there and
what kept her alive. That’s how I began to construct the
story.”
Once he better understood the events
surrounding his early childhood, Munzer began sharing it
with people like Capt. Steven Rein, 11th Wing chaplain, who
gave the Holocaust Commemoration invocation and listened to
Munzer’s story.
“We are human beings and a society of
individuals who, for the most part, have grown up without
first-hand experience with survivors of the Holocaust,” Rein
said. “Every survivor’s story is very personal and moving in
a way that you don’t glean from history books.”
During his speech here, Alfred described the Munzer family’s
Holocaust chronicle, which began shortly after their son,
Alfred, was born in 1941 and restrictions on the Jewish
community had tightened.
“Jews were prohibited from
going into public parks,” Munzer said. “But one day, my
mother decided to take the baby carriage with my little
sister into a public park and a German woman approached the
baby carriage. The woman turned to the baby carriage and saw
my baby sister, with blond hair and blue eyes and she turned
to my mother and she said, ‘Ah, I can tell this is good,
German, Aryan blood.’”
It was around this time that
Munzer’s father, Simcha, and mother, Gisele, decided to
separate their family and go into hiding. His father
subsequently faked a suicide attempt to gain admittance to a
mental hospital, his mother became a nurse at the same
institution, his sisters were placed with a neighbor and
Munzer was cared for by a Dutch-Indonesian family.
Munzer disclosed that, despite Simcha’s and Gisele’s
attempts to keep the family protected, their two daughters’
location was disclosed to the Nazi’s and they were then
killed at Auschwitz at the young ages of six and eight.
“The emotion was palpable in the room [when Munzer
spoke],” Rein said. “He touched a lot of heartstrings
throughout his presentation.”
Alfred’s parents were
deported from the psychiatric hospital to Auschwitz in early
1943 and were then separated. Simcha lived to see liberation
from the concentration camp Ebensee, but was so weak that he
passed away two months afterwards. Gisele passed through 12
concentration camps before she was evacuated by the Swedish
Red Cross in the spring of 1945.
Alfred greatly
attributes his survival to Tol� Madna and Mima Sa�na, the
individuals who sheltered and cared for him during those
challenging years.
“We hear about all the horrors of
the Holocaust and we certainly want to avoid those horrors
from reoccurring, but there’s another important lesson which
comes from the family that rescued me,” Munzer said. “They
took tremendous risks and their story is one of two very
simple people standing up to evil and doing the right
thing.”
Alfred and his mother were eventually
reunited in 1945. After spending a few more years in Europe,
the two moved to the U.S. in 1958. Munzer went on to become
a doctor and serve two years as an Air Force major at JBA’s
Malcom Grow Medical Center.
In recent years, he has
spoken more frequently about his experience to the public
and to the U.S. Armed Forces.
“The military plays a
very important role in protecting civil liberties and
protecting people, not just from physical harm, but also
harmful speech,” Munzer said. “I think the values of
protecting humanity and human rights are essential to the
military.”
Speaking at the JBA memorial was part of
Munzer’s plan to continue spreading his knowledge and
message in an attempt to positively influence individuals
around the world.
“As members of the Armed Forces, we
play a vital role in ensuring and protecting the values of
this country and of democracy” Rein said. “We have to
remember the evils and atrocities that human beings are
capable of and the role we all play in ensuring a society of
pluralism and mutual respect.”
By U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Jordyn Fetter
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2017
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