Bismarck, North Dakota - News

Like a kick in the solar plexus.

Last September, for Sam and Maryvonne McQuade, of Bismarck, visiting the Nazis' Polish death camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau, that "sucker punch" was an exhibit on the ghastly "medical" experiments done by Dr. Josef Mengele on identical twins.

Of 3,000 twins Mengele plucked off the death camp trains, only 200 survived. Surgeries without anesthesia, gruesome blinding experiments to change eye color, a pair of twins surgically sewn together to create "Siamese" twins, injections with toxic chemicals, castration, beheading, and inevitably for all but a few, death -- by infection, radiation, shock, gangrene, gas.

Amid an array of horrors, these honed into a specific nerve ending.

"We have twin granddaughters," Sam McQuade said.

Memorial service

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has designated "For Justice and Humanity" as the official theme for the 2004 Days of Remembrance, in memory of the Jews of Hungary, deported 60 years ago in the final days of World War II.

And, organizers say, "to honor the courageous individuals and the few organizations and countries who attempted to rescue the Hungarian Jews."

The Bismarck Hebrew Congregation is sponsoring a public ecumenical memorial service Monday to observe Yom HaShoah -- Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The service starts at 7:30 p.m. at the former Temple B'nai Ephraim, now the G.A.P. Teen Church, 703 N. Fifth St. in Bismarck.

Leading the observance will be Joy Wezelman, president of the Bismarck Hebrew Congregation, and Grael Gannon. Gannon, Wezelman and Janell Cole will speak on aspects of the Holocaust's significance today.

Cole will discuss "the others," non-Jewish people persecuted by the Nazis during the Holocaust, including gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses and Freemasons.

McQuade will speak about his visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Sol Wezelman, lay rabbi and spiritual leader of the Bismarck Hebrew Congregation, will close the observance with the chanting of the Mourners' Kaddish and El Malei Rachamim, Jewish prayers in memory of the departed.

Reign of terror

Sam McQuade always has been a student of military history and World War II, he said. Last fall, he and his wife visited Jewish cemeteries and synagogues and Jewish sections of cities such as Budapest and Krakow.

"The virtual impossibility of escape," really struck him at the death camps, Sam McQuade said, and how the era's "reign of terror" would have made even successful escapes futile.

"There was nowhere to go," he said.

From the very beginning, Auschwitz, a former military barracks, was set up as a concentration camp for Polish dissidents, he said. Prisoners were worked and starved to death.

"Even before the gas chambers, life expectancy was three months," he said.

Three million visitors a year travel to Auschwitz, their guide told them. Few are from Germany, she said, and none are from the World War II era. Which is just as well for her. She told the couple that she "flatly refuses" to lead tours for Germans.

Some things never heal.

Her uncle, she told the McQuades, after the camp, always carried a piece of bread in his pocket.

Every day of his life, he was afraid he'd never have food again.

For more information, visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at http://www.ushmm.org.

(Reach Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or krherzog@ndonline.com.)