Emotional LV ceremony honors veterans

Monday, Nov. 12, 2001 | 8:24 a.m.

At a Veterans Day ceremony Sunday survivors of Nazi concentration camps were asked to stand on one side of a stage and military veterans were asked to stand on the other.

Rabbi Joseph Kohn walked to the foot of the stage outside the Lowden Veterans Center Museum and stood in the middle. He had every right to do so.

Kohn, who helped open Temple Beth Sholom in Las Vegas in 1959, was both a death camp survivor of Auschwitz in Poland, and a U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War. The ceremony honoring the opening of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp exhibit at the museum at 3333 Cambridge St. brought tears cascading down his cheeks.

"This is just so emotional for me," said Kohn, a longtime leader of the local Jewish community, now retired. "Being both a camp survivor and a veteran I can see how the people on both sides feel."

Kohn was one of about 15 concentration camp survivors who were joined with death camp liberators of the 7th Army Sunday at ceremony hosted by the Council of Nevada Veterans Organizations and attended by about 400 people.

Kohn came to America in 1949 as a teenager and joined the Army during the Korean War to help repay the country that had rescued him from death. Although he could not serve as an official chaplain because he was not yet a U.S. citizen, Kohn conducted services on his days off. One of his duties in that capacity was officiating a Passover ceremony for 1,150 soldiers.

A half-dozen years earlier, as World War II was coming to an end, he waited anxiously for the arrival of Allied troops to rescue him from the Nazis, who had killed his mother and father, his brother and his five sisters, the youngest of whom was 1 1/2 years old.

"It took luck and courage to keep going to survive at both the camps and in the service," Kohn said. "I was in a number of camps and I served 13 months on the front lines in Korea."

The opening of the room honoring survivors and liberators of Dachau, a camp outside Munich, Germany, and another room honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, black fighter pilots of World War II, culminated a day of activities centered on the theme of thanking veterans.

During the ceremony Ben Lesser, the only Dachau survivor attending the event, said the Nazis, aided by the world's silence, burned Jewish books, then Jewish synagogues and finally Jewish people. He told the gathering that 6 million Jews, including 1 1/2 million children, were killed by the Nazis.

"If you were to name all of the names 24 hours a day, it would take 4 1/2 months to name them all," Lesser said. "If you laid 6 million people head to toe it would stretch from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco and back.

When he was liberated in April 1945, he recalled, "I only had hours of life left in me. I will always be indebted to the American G.I.s."

"We were not heroes," said Irv Walit, who served with the 649th Engineers of the 7th Army when he helped liberate Dachau. "We were just in the right place at the right time. I'm glad to see the survivors now."

Earnest Mittelman, a Czechoslovakian who was liberated from Mauthausen, said it really doesn't matter that only Dachau is remembered in the Lowden museum exhibit, because any one of the Holocaust death camps can represent the strife of all concentration camp survivors.

"The important thing is that we remember the past so this doesn't happen again," Mittelman said. "Most of us were in too bad shape to survive. Those of us who did were just lucky. I was a tailor. I was of use to them (Nazis). If they needed you, you could survive."

The outdoor event, under unseasonably hot, sunny skies and occasionally breezy conditions, hit a glitch when an American flag on the stage was blown off its stand as CONVO President Ed Gobel was making his opening remarks. While the pole remained on the stage, the flag hung over not yet touching the ground. Etiquette calls for a U.S. flag that touches the ground to be burned.

Former Assemblyman Jack Close, a Mormon bishop participating in the consecration ceremony, quickly snatched up Old Glory before it could tumble to the asphalt as the crowd let out a gasp of relief.