Surviving to tell his Story

After the war, most people thought it was just a Jewish propaganda, concentration camp which is another problem I had when I came home. People would not believe me as being a survivor of a concentration camp. Most of my friends laughed at me, well not to my face but they said to my face, “Sure Ed, yeah sure we believe you.” But behind my back they would make fun of me, they would say, “Ed has a problem. Ed’s got a mental problem. He has, this is all in his imagination. Ed couldn’t have been in a concentration camp because it was only for Jewish people. Are you Jewish? No. Do you have a marking on your arm? No. Well then and you were Canadian Air Force? No, you couldn’t have been in a concentration camp.” It was a most difficult thing to do. So it was for many, many, many years, almost forty years later before I started speaking out. Once I became a target of laughter, once I became a target of disbelief, I gave up because people wouldn’t believe me anyway but I harboured this. I had this within me, something I wanted people to know about. Twenty six Canadian air men were involved in the Holocaust by their presence in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Yeah sure, yeah. So that was one of the things that kind of prompted me to become active, to speak out, to let people know it did happen as a Canadian, as non Jewish, as a Christian, I witnessed all this, the horrors of being afflicted by another person.