‘Never forget the name of Dachau’: A father’s secret decades later turns into a daughter’s hope for peace

Clarice Wilsey remembers very clearly the first moment she learned her father David was keeping a secret.

The family was moving from one house in Spokane to another. While helping pack, the younger Wilsey opened a box and found pictures of bodies piled on top of one another. At the time, she had not had a family member or even a pet die, so she wasn’t quite sure what death was.

As curious children are wont to do when confused, she took the pictures to her father and asked what they were. But instead of starting a conversation, that moment marked the beginning, and end, of her father talking about the photos.

“The look on his face was awful,” she said. “He grabbed them out of my hand and said ‘Little girls shouldn’t see these.’ And he stomped off. I just knew I should never ask about that again.”

Wilsey tucked that memory, and what she saw in the photos, away for the following decades until a visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where she had what she calls an emotional earthquake.

While waiting in the line for the exhibitions, an employee waved her to an elevator and said she could make her way up. After getting off the elevator, she was confronted with a video about the Holocaust.

She watched it once. Then again. And again. Wilsey was almost positive photos of her father were included in the video.

“I’m having an argument ‘Yes, it is. No, it’s not. Yes, it is. No, it’s not,’ ” she said. “But my heart was pounding. I was sweating. My knees were shaking. I had an incredible visceral response.”

Wilsey eventually made her way down to the information desk and told the employee she thought her father was in the video and asked if anyone would want to know his name.

She later connected with the museum’s public relations person and shared information about her father.

Years later, she’s still grateful to the employee who moved her to the front of the line, saying she likely would have walked right past the video if she was in the stream of 50 people entering the exhibition.

Filled with a renewed sense of curiosity about her father’s past, Wilsey called her mother from the museum and told her about the video.

Her mother, Emily, simply responded, “Oh, that’s interesting.”

Knowing she wouldn’t get much more out of her mother, Wilsey once again tucked this new information away.

It wasn’t until 2009, while cleaning out the family home after her mother passed away, that Wilsey stumbled upon the photos she found as a 6-year-old, this time accompanied by 300 letters her father wrote her mother while working as an Army physician in Dachau after it was liberated.

“I started reading ‘We roared through the gates of Dachau. 40,000 people screaming, crying, yelling,’ ” she said. “He said ‘Dearest, I want you to tell thousands so millions will know what Dachau is and never forget the name of Dachau.’ “

Wilsey was shocked by what she read but also by the fact that the letters had survived from Dachau to Bismarck, North Dakota, where her mother lived while her dad was overseas, to Minneapolis, where her father was a professor after returning home, to several houses, and a house fire, in Spokane.

She read the first few letters then had to put them away because they were too emotional to take in all at once.

A few months later, Wilsey felt the need to put more attention on the letters and her father’s story and decided to retire after 40 years working in higher education.

“I retired on Sept. 28, 2018, and Oct. 4, 2018, I flew to Dachau,” she said. “I met with the director of research and an archivist. Then I saw a picture in the exhibition hall with my dad, and that was another semi-emotional earthquake.”

Prior to her trip to Dachau, Wilsey had presented her father’s story about 10 times.

After she got home, she hit the ground running. Her presentation count is now about 150.

She’ll add three more when she visits Spokane on Saturday and gives talks at the North Spokane Library, the Spokane Valley Library and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church.

Wilsey sees it as her mission to do what her mother and father couldn’t and speak about his experience in Dachau, a sentiment shared to her by a man who attended one of her early presentations at the University of Oregon, where she worked at the time.

It was his suggestion that she copyright her father’s letters and led Wilsey and co-author Bob Welch to write the memoir “Letters from Dachau: A Father’s Witness of War, a Daughter’s Dream of Peace” in 2020.

Her father’s letters are now preserved at the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle.

Looking back, Wilsey can remember a few instances that hinted at her father’s connection to the Holocaust.

Her father, who built his own medical practice and volunteered with local groups like Spokane’s Sister City organization after returning from the war, once yelled at the television while watching Walter Cronkite interview a Holocaust denier.

“My dad would start yelling at the TV ‘I was there!’ ” she said. “Then he’d say a few choice words about what he thought about Adolf Hitler.”

She asked a question but was again told she didn’t need to know about it.

Another hint came while her father, who earned a Bronze Star for his work during the war, watched “Schindler’s List.” While watching, her father would rub his hand back and forth across his forehead.

“To me, it was like he was trying to erase something in his memory,” she said.

Now that she has the full picture of her father’s experience, Wilsey understands why her parents were so reluctant to speak about that time in their lives.

Seeing the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand forever altered her father, of course, but her mother also had reasons to bury the memories, worried as she was not only about her husband but also about her infant son, Wilsey’s brother, who was awaiting heart surgery.

“My mom and dad would not talk about it, so I feel that that’s my mission, my calling to be his voice because he could not, my mom could not speak about the horrors he saw and experienced.”

Wilsey said it can be tiring to give presentation after presentation, keeping herself in the emotions she felt when reading the letters and those her father felt when writing them, but she also knows she’s not alone in her fight against hate, bigotry and antisemitism.

“I know it’ll be exhausting, but you know what? I have so much dedication, commitment, because it’s not just about the Holocaust,” she said. “It’s about countering hate, countering denial, countering all that awful stuff that we see in the news.

“Yet one of the things I say to the students is ‘I’m going to talk about mystery, crime, Nazis, then hope, and that they are the hope. They’re the people who are going to be the leaders of our future. When I’m in my retirement home playing bingo, you’re going to be out there taking care of the world.’ ”