Holocaust Sites Awe Teacher

The boldness of the gas chambers and gallows at Auschwitz stunned Brad Veile. But the mountains of small clothing stripped from children by guards stabbed his heart.

“I have kids, 4 and 5,” he says softly. “That was tough.”

Brad knew his trip to Poland and Israel last summer would be no vacation. It was sponsored by such groups as the American Gathering and Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the Educators’ Chapter of the Jewish Labor Committee.

He’d taught the Holocaust to his social studies classes at Lakeside High in Plummer for six years; something was missing. He was quoting numbers - 6 million dead Jews - and relating horrors on a scale his students, even he, couldn’t grasp.

“I needed more,” he says. “I needed people.”

Questions about the Holocaust had nagged Brad since he invited a camp survivor who’d settled in Spokane to speak to his classes several years ago. Nazis had imprisoned the woman at Majdanek in Poland.

Brad, who’s 40, listened to her story and thought about his German heritage. He wanted to know his relatives hadn’t caused her grief. The summer fellowship program in Poland and Israel offered the best chance to find out.

The program targets teachers because they have the greatest access to new generations. Sponsors want teachers to see and absorb the human race at its worst and best, then teach about the Holocaust and Jewish resistance. Brad and 300 other teachers applied. He was one of 45 chosen.

His community wanted him to go, and helped raise about $5,000 to bankroll the trip. Clubs, schools and churches held spaghetti feeds and yard sales. People sent donations.

Brad read voraciously before the trip. Survivor accounts. Anatomies of death camps. The history of genocide. He thought he was prepared in early July when he reached Warsaw with his group.

The tour started on a bright note at the U.S. Embassy. Hillary Clinton was visiting and posed for pictures with the group.

But smiles quickly faded as the teachers headed to the Warsaw Ghetto. The ghetto, like the rest of Warsaw, was decimated during the war. Brad saw history erased in the streets and in the Jewish cemetery, where Nazis collected headstones for road paving.

Poland personalized the Holocaust more than Brad expected. He stood in the musty cells at Auschwitz and heard haunting echoes among the stacks of wooden bunks at Birkenau. His throat tightened at the dissection table in the crematorium at Majdanek. His stomach burned at the muddy ponds where Nazis dumped human ashes.

“A pond will never look the same to me again,” Brad says. “How could a civilized population do this? How could they regress so far?”

His German heritage hounded him. Were his relatives victims or perpetrators? The question grew in importance with every camp.

The Majdanek death camp hit Brad hard. His Spokane friend had cheated death there. He wondered if her worn shoes were among the thousands that now fill the barracks. How had she avoided the five furnaces that still stand with ashes in them?

“I tried to imagine being there,” Brad says. “What qualities did they have that helped them survive? It was just overwhelming.”

But Treblinka’s simplicity was the most moving. The buildings are gone, replaced with a dense forest of stones of all shapes and sizes. Some bear names of cities. On one is the name of a priest who was gassed with his Jewish orphans.

“There’s nothing to see or touch,” Brad says. “It’s left to the imagination. There were more wet eyes there than anywhere else.”

Brad researched his family name at the Hall of Names in Israel and found eight variations of his spelling among the dead. He’s not Jewish and will never know if the eight were relatives. But he hopes they were.

“It’s morbid, I know. But they resisted Hitler,” he says. “I guess I was grasping for someone who did the right thing. It made me feel better.”

Throughout the trip, the group lighted candles and prayed for the dead. After lectures in Israel and visits to memorials and a kibbutz, Brad returned home burning to teach.

He hasn’t stopped reading about the Holocaust since his return.

“They told me I’d never be the same after this trip,” he says. “The feelings and emotions were hard for me to fathom, but seeing where they were made it come alive, made it personal.

“This has to be taught. We have no choice,” he says. “It’s too easy to forget and we can’t ever let it happen again.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: Veile will speak about his trip at 10 a.m., Tuesday, at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library. The public is welcome.