By Carl Zebrowski
Editor 

Eighty years had passed since the liberation of the concentration camps when the Lehigh Valley Jewish community gathered in the JCC to remember Holocaust victims on Yom HaShoah. 

“Their stories must continue to be told not only to preserve history but to safeguard the future,” said Jeri Zimmerman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley. “The actions of the Holocaust must shape our behavior in the future so that ‘never again’ is not just a phrase, but a promise.”

Shari Spark, coordinator of the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley’s Holocaust Resource Center and organizer of the commemoration, said, “We are the generation that has to retell this story over and over.”

On a big screen behind the podium, footage from the January 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland showed. “Jubilation spread through the world,” Rabbi Moshe Re’em of Temple Beth El said of the approaching Nazi surrender. Celebrations and parades appeared all over the world. The sense of relief was obvious. But 80 million people had been killed during the war.

David Venditta, a long-time editor and writer for the Morning Call, took to the podium to tell the camp-liberation story of local U.S. Army WWII veteran Don Burdick. Venditta had reported in the newspaper about Burdick’s role with the 16th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, under the 101st Airborne Division, in liberating Germany’s Dachau concentration camp in April 1945. 

Venditta read some of Burdick’s memories of walking through the camp and taking photos with his army camera. “There was a noxious odor in the air,” Burdick said. “As we were coming down the road, there were piles of bodies like you would stack lumber.” He told Venditta he was sick for days. 

The photos would make others sick. “I knew when I developed my pictures that I had the evidence that this was an atrocity.” (We’ll note here that those images are but morsels among the overwhelming evidence that a shocking number of people still do not believe is real.)

“Did we really, quote unquote, liberate these people,” Burdick wondered. “You were so helpless. They told you don’t feed them—they can’t eat.” 

Venditta said, “The suffering and death troubled him for a lifetime.” Burdick died eight years ago, at age 93. Venditta finished, “His witness to the Holocaust will live on.” 

Rabbi Allen Juda, rabbi emeritus from Congregation Brith Sholom, talked about searching for the Holocaust story of family members. He has looked for records and recollections regarding his own relatives, with some success. 

“Finding information is not so easy,” he admitted. But he encouraged people to stick with the effort. “There is still information that you can find.”

The night of commemoration closed with footage of the first radio broadcast featuring Jewish American GIs since the start of the war. The U.S. Army film showed a Jewish service in Aachen, the first German city to fall to the Allies. The service remembered GIs and others killed by the Nazis. 

“During that service, things sort of hit you,” said one Jewish soldier on film. “You say a prayer for those GIs.”

He spoke of the personal connections the soldiers had to Holocaust victims. “There wasn’t one GI who didn’t have some extended family there who was lost,” he said. “They all—they all perished.”