Gov. DeWine: From Holocaust to Nazis at Columbus drag brunch, history teaches, can repeat

Mike DeWine is governor of Ohio. 

Louise Gips of Cleveland will turn 90 in December. She was almost six years-old when her family fled to Ukraine following the Nazi invasion of her native Poland, and eventually ended up in Siberia as Jewish prisoners of war.

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Louise told her family’s story at the Governor’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony in April. She also told her now deceased husband, Harry’s, story. While she and her family were fortunate to have survived the Holocaust, most of her husband’s family did not.

Harry was 10 years-old when Nazis captured his family in Poland. They were sent to a Nazi ghetto, where countless Jews died of disease or starvation or were loaded on trucks daily to be taken directly to death camps where they were executed.

Harry had six siblings. He and his oldest three siblings managed to escape the ghetto.  Harry, then about 12 years-old, went to a farm and told the owner that he was a Christian boy and offered to work for him.

A fight for survival

The farmer looked out for Harry until someone recognized him and alerted the farmer that Harry was Jewish.

Knowing he and his family could be killed for harboring a Jew, the farmer told Harry to hide in the woods. It was there, in the forest, that Harry spent the next 18 months fighting to survive.

When the War was over, he went back to his hometown in Poland, only to learn that his family had all been killed except for two of his sisters. Nazis executed his youngest sister just three months before the War’s end.

Louise told these stories because, in her words, “If all of us don’t speak, history will definitely repeat itself.” She is right.

History is a teacher

It is both incomprehensible and scary to me that there are people today in America who think that discrimination, hate, and bigotry are OK. According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were over 204 recorded antisemitic incidents of vandalism or propaganda in Ohio in 2022, often perpetrated by either neo-Nazi or white supremacist groups. Antisemitic incidents, alone, increased by 22% in Ohio between 2021 and 2022.

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Most recently, protestors purported to belong to the neo-Nazi group, “Blood Tribe,” gathered outside a Columbus brewery hosting a drag brunch fundraiser for the Kaleidoscope Youth Center. Donning red shirts and black ski masks to hide their cowardly faces, they waved a black flag with a Nazi swastika and a banner with the words "there will be blood."

History is a teacher.  We must use it, as Louise Gips has so eloquently done, to educate our young people and remind everyone what Hitler and the Nazis stood for and the atrocities they committed.

'Some bastard will say this never happened.'

I told my dad, Dick DeWine’s, story here in the Dispatch a few years ago, following the violent demonstrations of white supremacists in Charlottesville.  It bears repeating.

Dad was a Private in the Army during World War II.  He used to tell me about what he and his Army company saw when they arrived at the Dachau concentration camp just days after it had been liberated. What my dad and his fellow soldiers witnessed in Hitler’s Germany was burned on their brains for the rest of their lives.

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Dachau was a camp where more than 30,000 people perished at the hand of the Nazis.  When Dad was there, he saw the ovens that the Nazis used to burn the bodies of so many of the prisoners, many still containing ashes and skeletal remains.

Even into his 80s, Dad still vividly pictured the devices the Nazis used to slide the bodies into the ovens.  He told me about going into a room next to the ovens and seeing fixtures on the walls that looked like showerheads. Those at the camp told him that prisoners were taken into these rooms and told they were going to take showers. Instead of water coming out of the nozzles, deadly poisonous gas was emitted.

Dad also remembered walking down the road near the camp and encountering a very weak, emaciated man who had just been a prisoner.  My dad and his buddies talked to the man and gave him food and cigarettes.  They asked him if they could take his picture.  He said yes — if it was with an American soldier.  So, they did.

Recollections of the Holocaust are difficult to read and even more difficult to imagine.  It’s one of the reasons that when the concentration camps were being liberated, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower instructed that photos be taken and films be made of the prisoners and of the unimaginable conditions in which they lived and in which so many were murdered.

He wanted to make sure that we told these stories because, in his words, “Some bastard will say this never happened.”

There will come a time, in the not-too-distant future, when there will be no more Holocaust survivors — no more American liberators.  If we don’t continue to tell their stories, who will?

It is our responsibility as Americans, as Ohioans, and just as human beings to never let this dark chapter of history be forgotten — or repeated.

Mike DeWine is governor of Ohio. 

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: From Holocaust to drag brunch, truth of Nazi hate must be told