Holocaust exhibit includes testimony

CINCINNATI – Henry Meyer was a Jewish teenager imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II. Elmer Reis was an Army soldier who helped liberate the German concentration camp where Meyer had been a prisoner.

The experiences of the men, who lived for decades in the same city but met only last year, are the latest addition to a stirring Holocaust exhibit at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a training center for rabbis.

Interviews with both men were added last week to the college’s “Mapping Our Tears” exhibit, in which visitors watch videotaped testimony from an attic setting resembling those Jewish fugitives might have used to hide from the Nazis.

Reis, 87, was a military police officer when he entered the Ohrdruf camp with an armored division.

American soldiers found bodies of Jewish refugees stacked in piles, along with other prisoners who had been shot in the head while wearing blindfolds, their hands tied behind their backs.

“It was revolting,” said Reis, a retired Cincinnati police officer. “What I saw, it just shook my boots. It was awful.”

Meyer, 81, was born in Dresden, Germany, to a family of musicians and had been a child prodigy on the violin before the war.

His parents and a teenage brother died during the Nazi persecution.

Meyer said he was saved from execution only when he told a camp doctor that he had been a violinist.

The doctor remembered seeing him perform and saved Meyer’s life by switching his identity with that of a man who had died.

“He changed the registration cards and I was alive again,” said Meyer, whose left forearm still bears the Nazi prisoner number that his captors tattooed on him.

Meyer was later able to escape from Ohrdruf and lived briefly with a German family.

Upon learning that Americans had liberated the camp, Meyer returned to the camp to obtain passage to Paris from military authorities.

He eventually departed for the United States, where he obtained a scholarship at New York’s Juilliard School. He later joined the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, where he performed and taught for 35 years before retiring in 1988.

Last year, Meyer learned of Reis and introduced himself, thanking Reis for liberating the camp. Reis said he was stunned by the gesture – and delighted.

Meyer, in a wheelchair since he was injured last year in a hit-and-run accident, said he did not talk about the Holocaust for many years but was prodded to do so by a friend after they saw news reports about people who denied that it occurred. Meyer recalled being scolded by his friend.

“He said, ‘It’s your fault. If you don’t tell the people, they won’t know,”’ Meyer said.

Reis scoffs at the deniers. “They don’t want to believe it,” he said. “I was there. You can’t erase from my memory what I saw.”