30th Anniversary Guardians Commemorative Book - Book - Page 219
PASSING ON
OUR HERITAGE
More than 200
members of the
greater Wallach family
were murdered
during the Holocaust, including
aunts, uncles, and cousins. My father
was a vocal Nazi opponent, so he
became a marked man. In 1933, after
Hitler took over, one of my father’s
employees heard that our family
would be executed. My mother
immediately picked up my brother,
sister, and me at school. We ran to
the railroad station with my dad and
caught a train to Cologne. We later
learned that the Nazis had come
looking for us that very night.
Eventually, we wound up in The
Hague, in Holland. By the mid1930s, it was very obvious what
the Nazi Party had in mind for
the Jews. When I was just ten,
in late November 1936, my dad
abandoned his successful company
in Amsterdam and we came to
America. It was extremely traumatic.
We were in a depression, there were
no jobs, we spoke no English, and
just having a place to live and to eat
was a challenge. Early on, we didn’t
know if my dad would be able to
take care of us in a strange country.
He soon built another successful
business, but other family members
and most Jews in Europe were not so
fortunate. Not only were six million
people murdered; a great majority
of them were tortured first through
starvation, overwork, and beatings.
I want our next generations to learn
completely what happened to them.
It’s their heritage; it’s their history;
it’s their people. Parallel to that, the
world must know what happened
from 1933 to 1945. It should not be
forgotten, lest it happen again. This is
all part of what we must teach young
people, and what better way than
through the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum?
In this day and age, we’re all deluged
on a daily basis with requests for
donations. But I have not found
anything that I believe in or wish to
support as much as the Museum.”
SAFEGUARDING TRUTH FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS l 217
