Painful Pictures

The photographs George Wise took in a Nazi concentration camp remained in a shoebox for 40 years. But the images from those pictures never left his mind.
Wise continued to see the starving people, smell the stench of death, and he still heard the screams. He even chose to work as a bricklayer so he would work hard enough to sleep heavily and avoid the nightmares.
Finally, a friend helped convince Wise to take the pictures out of his shoebox. He uses the photos, which he took at the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany after American infantry forces liberated it on April 29, 1945, to educate people about the Holocaust.
Wise will bring his message to the base at the Holocaust Remembrance Luncheon Thursday in the Club for Holocaust Awareness Week. He will tell the same story that had a National Security Agency audience in tears, as American generals were when they first saw the Nazi death camps.
“General Eisenhower, Patton and Omar Bradley all cried just like we did,” the 77-year-old Wise said in a telephone interview from his home in Lakewood, Colo. We didn’t know there was a place like that in the world. I couldn’t imagine any human being could do this to another human being.”
“If the war had lasted another six months, there wouldn’t have been a Jew alive on the continent of Europe, and the world would’ve never known if they had won the war,” Wise said.
Many people still didn’t want to know when Wise returned home. They didn’t care about the Purple Heart or his two Bronze Stars, but they especially weren’t interested in the plight of the Jews in Nazi Europe. So Wise put his pictures away and didn’t take them out again until his Jewish doctor asked him to talk to a reporter about what they saw at Dachau.
“They didn’t want to hear my story,” he said of family and friends. “That broke my heart. It made me feel so bad, I put the pictures in a shoebox.”
Wise, an Army combat medic in World War II, arrived at Normandy after the D-Day invasion. He thought he’d seen the worst war could offer. He was wrong. He saw the worst at Dachau.
Wise saw the piles of corpses and the wall where the Nazis executed about 9,000 prisoners just before the Americans arrived. Everywhere he looked, there were signs of cruelty, suffering and death.
“You can go there 56 years later and still eel death there,” Wise said. “You hear the cries of the people begging to touch you. American soldiers were the only ones to every smile at these people. You wanted to feed them, but you knew it would kill them immediately because they were starving.”
Wise used a camera he had taken from a German soldier and photographed everything he saw.
His one regret is he didn’t have a picture taken of him in the camp because of the doubters. Wise, who is not Jewish, has had to resist throwing punches at people who say the Holocaust didn’t happen.
“These are people who weren’t even born, and all they’re doing is taking what they read from hate literature and believing somebody’s bologna,” Wise said. “I call them liars when they say it didn’t happen. I say where are the kids? There’s a whole generation of Jewish kids that just aren’t there.”
The pictures say it all. Each one has a story, Wise said. But there’s also a central theme in what Wise tells his audience, which includes many children. He wants people to know, not only what the Nazis did to the Jews and other people they tried to exterminate, but the damage hate can do.
“I tell people they really never knew what the word hate means,” he said. “I wish we could take it out of the dictionary because it’s the worst word in there. You don’t have to love every person, but you don’t have to hate him. Just respect every person, regardless of race, creed and color.”
There have been many emotional moments because of the nature of Wise’s message, but his appearance at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has a special place in his heart. Jewish people lined up for blocks to give him a kiss and hug for his part in their people’s liberation.
“It took me 48 years to come home, and that was when I got my welcome home,” Wise said. “They cried, and I cried. It was wonderful.”
Since then, Wise not only has his pictures out of the shoebox – he also feels the need to share them in hopes no camera will have to capture those disturbing images ever again.