Dance for the Doctor Girls, Dance!
Our textbook author, Spielvogel, states, “At Auschwitz, camp doctor Josef Mengele was especially notorious for his experimental surgery”.1. I would like to share a personal experience with you having to do with Dr. Mengele. In 1990 the Army sent me to Fort Bliss, Texas to attend the Sergeant Majors Academy. The course was a six month resident school that was a bit rigorous both physically and academically. The Army had a recruiting slogan at the time, “Be all you can be!”, if you failed the course you quickly became, “…all you can be!”. We had a number of guest speakers. When a four star general was addressing the group, you COULD HERE A PIN DROP, the silence was absolute. We had two speakers I especially remember quite well. The first was a presentation from Aberdeen Proving Grounds, the research and development branch of the Army. The speaker was demonstrating a self-inflating sleeping mattress. He had a young soldier assisting him who put the mat on the floor. Nothing happened! You could here an audible groan from the audience. A Master Sergeant in the front row shouted, “Specialist, make that thing work!”, eventually the mat self-inflated. Then the speaker handed the young Specialist a Kevlar helmet that had a hole in the front of it. He let the Specialist become the speaker with the microphone. The Specialist stated he had parachuted into Panama with the 82nd Airborne Division and was shot at point blank range by a Panamanian with a rifle. You COULD HERE A PIN DROP. The message for us was to insure that all of our soldiers were properly fitted with their helmets. A few months later we had a speaker that again invoked an audible groan from the audience. A blonde middle aged woman appeared on stage and started doing ballet movements. There was no music and seeing this woman who was in her 50s or 60s dance was not very entertaining. There was more than a loud, audible groan. Then the dancer moved to the microphone and said, “This is the dance that my sister and I always performed for Dr Mengele, at Auschwitz”. All of a sudden YOU COULD HERE A PIN DROP. You must remember that this was before the proliferation of the internet and before Google. Her message was that we should never forget that the Holocaust did happen; she knew, she was there. Whenever I hear the “Holocaust Deniers” I think of the lady dancing on that stage. 1. Jackson J. Spielvogel and David Redlers. Hitler and Nazi Germany. (Boston, Pearson, 2014). 268. 2. https://google.com.search.mengele.twins (holocaustonline.org.nazi-twins.org). 3. https://google.com.search.usasma.logo.
When I was in high school we had this old guy come and talk. No one knew who he was at the start of it. We all had the same reaction that you did. Once he started talking everyone was quiet, you could feel his pain, and his emotion in everything he said. His name was Henry Golde, he wrote the book Ragdolls. After his speech I bought a copy of his book, it is such a powerful story. The people who deny that the Holocaust happen, most likely have never met any of the survivors. There is so much proof that it indeed did occurred, and the stories from the people who went through it. That speech is something that will never leave my memory, and his book will always be on my shelf.