TUCSON AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, Ariz. - The 162nd Fighter Wing here helped a new generation of Americans learn what happens when people stay silent in the face of genocide.
The wing hosted more than 600 middle and high school students during a program honoring the victims of the Holocaust March 29.
Dr. Gail Wallen, teacher, historian and clinically certified hospice chaplain, spoke to the students about the historical events that led to the Holocaust during World War II. Then the students divided into groups to listen to first-hand accounts from seven Holocaust survivors.
"I hope you will hear them well because you are the last generation who will have this opportunity," said Dr. Wallen. "If you forget the past it will happen in the future."
According to Dr. Wallen, the survivors represent a universal tragedy and serve as witnesses to what happens when the abnormalities of a culture are allowed to run unchecked.
"This is why we fight so this doesn't happen again," she said. "The men and women in uniform fight for freedom from this kind of oppression."
In one small group seminar, Walter Feiger, Holocaust survivor from Krakow, Poland, gave an attentive audience his life story.
"In 1939 when I was 12 years old, Nazis banished my family to a 15-square-block ghetto area where thousands of Jews were forced to live," said Feiger.
They were not allowed to leave their assigned ghetto without permission and were forced to wear the Star of David as a symbol of their status to Nazi invaders. There they waited for their systematic relocation to camps throughout German-occupied Europe.
He and his older brother were soon sent to a forced labor camp in Germany where they were fed one-half pound of bread each day and forced to work on highway building projects in Bavaria.
"Starvation can be very painful," said Feiger. "You will eat anything that is edible when you are starving. There wasn't a cockroach to be found in our wooden barracks because that was nutrition for us."
Despite their best efforts to avoid the Nazi death camps, the brothers were eventually sent to a concentration camp where 30,000 people faced unimaginable living conditions and extermination.
"Six weeks before we were liberated by the Russians, my brother died from typhus; a disease that was incurable back then and was borne from lice that infested the camp."
After the war, Feiger left Europe to find a new home in Israel. He served as a police officer there and also as a lieutenant in the Israeli Army. In 1956 he moved his family to the United States.
"Make something of yourselves because you have the ability to do it," Feiger said to the students. "And God bless America."
At the program's end, the students gathered for a candle lighting ceremony to remember those affected by the Holocaust.
"I think today was wonderful," said Dr. Wallen. "We've been doing this event here [at the Tucson Air National Guard Base] for five years and we are very appreciative to the wing for supporting these events."