Arnold Samuels: ‘Eyewitness to the Holocaust’

From his Jewish family’s flight to escape the persecution of Hitler’s pre-War Germany to a daring return behind enemy lines for the U.S. Army to identify Nazi War criminals, Arnold Samuels’ first few decades of life left an impression that can never be forgotten.

Now at the age of 91, the longtime Ocean Shores resident, volunteer and former Councilman vividly describes his return long ago in his early 20s to his home in Hammelburg after the Allied Forces had forced Germany to surrender:

“It still gives me goosebumps. We were about 20 miles north of my hometown, and they were ready to start firing artillery down on the town,” said Samuels, whose job in the Army at that time was to provide coordinates for the big guns to hit their intended targets. “I was in survey team, and after they gave up, they sent a messenger out with a white flag. He had orders from the mayor, and we accepted their surrender.

“The next day, I took a jeep and I went into town. After they surrendered, the Nazis withdrew and the town was quiet. I parked the jeep in the middle of the town and walked up the street, and down comes a guy on a cycle with a Nazi uniform still on. He was a messenger. And he looked at me … and I looked at him. And I will never forget, I said, “Markus, is that you?”

The old friend, still wearing the Nazi uniform, got down and “we hugged each other” in a symbolic moment that would place Samuels on the battle lines during one of the most tumultuous times in history.

Samuels’ vivid life story is told by former Daily World publisher John C. Hughes who was honored this week by the Washington Secretary of State’s Office. Published to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, the profile “Arnold Samuels: Eyewitness to the Holocaust” is part of a series of profiles and oral histories marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The “Washington Remembers” project is sponsored by state Secretary of State Kim Wyman as Legacy Washington salutes World War II veterans and those who contributed to the war effort from around the state. It can be found online at http://ift.tt/1DTpiEQ

Wyman is the niece of a decorated World War II Marine. “Personal accounts from the deadliest conflict in world history teach us about sacrifice, freedom and who we are today,” Wyman said.

In a phone interview, Wyman said she was excited to oversee the stories of those who lived through such key moments in history.

“From just casual conversation, it has turned into this amazing project and opportunity to capture these stories,” she said.

Hughes, now the chief historian for Legacy Washington, met Samuels more than 20 years ago when he and his wife Phyllis were members of The Daily World’s Reader Advisory Board and Samuels would often write pithy letters to the editor. That’s when Hughes first learned that Samuels had worked in the Counter Intelligence Corps with another famous German who had fled the Nazis only to return — Henry Kissinger, who is part of the Hughes’ profile.

“One of my favorite Kissinger quotes came during a press conference during the Ford era: ‘This has the added advantage of being true.’ Everything Arnold told me checked out, especially after he loaned me the transcripts of a diary he kept during the war,” Hughes said.

“I shared the profile with the U.S. Holocaust Museum and received a call back an hour later. They were mightily impressed,” Hughes said.

Samuels believes too few young people today learned about the horrors and events that changed the world in the years before, during and after World War II.

“Arnold is deeply concerned that schools don’t teach more about the Holocaust and shared privately his disappointment that he hasn’t been asked to speak at a school in years,” Hughes said.

On April 15, Samuels was the guest speaker at Holocaust Remembrance Day at Temple Beth El in Tacoma.

Arnold’s profile

“My favorite Arnold quote was ‘after the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule everything else is hocus pocus,’” Hughes recalled of his interviews with Samuels. “With that he wriggled his hand like a magician.”

Here are some of the key details of the profile and series:

• Arnold Samuels escaped Germany with his parents and brother in 1937, a year before Kristallnacht. Their benefactor was Morris Ernst, one of the most influential civil liberties attorneys in America.

• Samuels’ aunt and uncle, Johanna and Leon Joel, weren’t so fortunate. They were among the 900 Jews who hoped to find refuge in Cuba or the U.S. in 1939, only to have their ship turned away. The Joels perished at Auschwitz.

• Leon Joel was also Billy Joel’s uncle. The famous singer-songwriter and the gregarious former Ocean Shores City Council member are united by the broken branches of their family trees.

• During World War II, Samuels served first as an Army infantry undercover agent behind enemy lines. He helped interview Dachau survivors and interrogated suspected Nazi concentration camp guards.

• At war’s end, Samuels and another young German-born sergeant, Henry Kissinger, headed a Counter Intelligence Corps de-Nazification office near Munich.

• Samuels worked for the Voice of America as a radio engineer during the 1950s, then became a civilian engineer for the Air Force, retiring with a rating equivalent to lieutenant colonel.

• A tireless community activist, he is the only person ever elected to the Ocean Shores City Council as a write-in candidate.

Other profiles in the series focus on former longtime Washington State Auditor Robert Graham of Olympia (also honored by the North Beach School District), who served with the Air Transport Command in the South Pacific; Joe Moser of Ferndale, a fighter pilot POW who survived hellish captivity at Buchenwald.

Next to be published are profiles of George Narozonick of Olympia, who was on landing craft at Normandy on D-Day; and Regina Sawina Tollfeldt of Olympia, a “Rosie” worker on the B-17 production line at Boeing’s Seattle plant.

Wyman noted her own uncle had served in the U.S. Marine Corps on Okinawa at the end of World War II.

“He never talked about it, and for obvious reasons because he had what we now know was post-traumatic stress. He passed away a few years ago and I was talking to my dad, who was his younger brother, and he never had even shared it with him,” Wyman said of her uncle’s war experiences in the Pacific.

‘Enjoy life’

Samuels tends to downplay his own role in uncovering the horrors of the Holocaust. He doesn’t talk that much about it around Ocean Shores, where he regularly takes photos for the North Coast News and the Chamber of Commerce, teaches exercise classes at the Senior Center, attends the Elks or Eagles clubs, and appears at just about every VFW event. He even helps with the local North Beach TV telecasts of the City Council meetings, still maintains his ham radio networking — many of the skills and preoccupations he picked up during his war years.

Something else he learned post-war was to value his health and environment.

“I enjoy life,” Samuels said when asked his secret at 91 for longevity. “Like my dad used to say: You take care of your body, and your body will take care of you. I don’t smoke, I don’t booze. I don’t do drugs. I don’t gamble. I live a relatively easy life, but a busy life. I try to keep busy.”

He’s not much of a cook and eats most of his meals at the Senior Center since beloved wife Phyllis passed away when he was 77.

“It was tough,” he said of losing the one he loved all his life, who helped him raise the couple’s three sons: Stewart, Kenneth and Michael. For about the past 15 years, it’s just been Arnold at home with his longtime furry feline companion, aptly named Shadow.

“It’s still tough. The fact that I’m active makes it easier, but in the evenings it’s still a lonely life,” Samuels says of being a bachelor late in life.

His only indulgence is a couple glasses of Zinfandel a night: One at the Eagles or the Elks early in the evening, and then later after going on his ham radio network about 7:30 p.m. “But that’s all. Two is the maximum, except at a party where I might have a third one. Wine is good for you.”

As his perfectly punctual cuckoo clock sounds nine whistles for the early morning riser, he reads some of Hughes’ profile for the first time in its completed version.

Looking up from the account, he reaches back to explain: “I talked to a lot of Germans afterwards, and most of them were totally ignorant of what was actually going on. They knew the Jews were chased out, but they didn’t know what they did with them. They didn’t know they were taking them to concentration camps. The only ones who really knew about the death camps were the SS who worked in those camps. But the outside world knew very little.”

Right up until arriving in 1945 at the concentration camp of Dachau, where a documented 32,000 people died and thousands more were never accounted for, Samuels and the other American and Allied forces had no idea of the extent of the Holocaust.

“Even up until Dachau, I didn’t know what was going on. We were young kids. Henry Kissinger and I were young 21-year-old kids.

“It gives me goose pimples. All we knew was that we were bringing the murderers to justice. We didn’t worry about history or consequences. All we knew is that they deserved what they ultimately got.”

For excerpts from the Arnold Samuels profile can be seen at http://ift.tt/1DvAiH1