It was a solemn event at Training Support Center (TSC) Great Lakes as Sailors gathered together during the Holocaust Remembrance ceremony May 1.

The event started with opening remarks from TSC Great Lakes Executive Officer Cmdr. Jason Juergens.

"It is important to remember our history – it should not be forgotten," Juergens said. "This is how we educate ourselves and others on the ways to move forward, bettering ourselves and the practices we undertake each day. One of those important practices being, how we treat people. We must treat each individual with respect and dignity, not matter what their background."

U.S. Air Force Captian Ralph Rehbock (retired), a speaker at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, Illinois, served as the guest speaker for the ceremony. Born in 1934 in Gotha, Germany, Ralph Rehbock and his family came to Chicago in 1938 and lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood. He gave a historical perspective of the period, to show how the normalcy of life in Germany changed for his family in 1933 when Hitler came to power, and how they eventually were able to escape with the help of a cousin’s generosity and the actions of strangers.

“There were a lot of things happening at the same time when my family escaped Germany,” Rehbock said. “The Nazis were great testers; this is how they got the population to the point where they allowed the Holocaust to happen. It started when Hitler wrote the book ‘Mein Kampf’ (My Struggle) saying horrible things about Jewish people. It continued when Hitler was on the radio saying that the Jewish people were responsible for World War I and hyper-inflation and called us the demon race.” 

According to Rehbock, many people thought Hitler would just go away and everything would go back to normal. But, Hitler decided to pass some laws. The most damaging one to the Jewish people was the revocation of German citizenship.

“It was during this time that my mother visited her cousin Chicago where they gathered together all the documents that stated that my cousin was willing to support my family; this was the only way that we would be allowed to move to the United States,” He said. “The day we arrived in Berlin to go to the American Consulate to get our visas; 1,400 synagogues were torched, 91 people were killed and 30,000 men were arrested. When we finally got out of Germany, along the way strangers would assist us on our travels until we reached America. We were the lucky ones. I am so happy that people, who did not even know us, took action to help us.”  

The Holocaust was the deliberate genocide of nearly 6 million European Jews during World War II by the Nazis. Other social and ethnic groups were persecuted and killed also, and the death total was estimated to be between 9 to 11 million.

"This is our history," Juergens said. "Just because it didn’t happen on American soil, doesn’t mean it is not our history. Many survivors and their families migrated to America to make a better life for themselves – they carried, and still carry, the scars of such a heinous act that occurred nearly 80 years ago. There were many that paid the price so we all can have the lives we have today."

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