By Benjamin Strawbridge
Staff Writer
April 5, 2018
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William H. Engle, a World War II veteran and Holocaust survivor, took the opportunity to speak of his experiences and escape from Nazi Germany, as well as to tell the story of his late friend and “companion” Esther Bauer on Wednesday, April 4 in the Granite State Room in the Memorial Union Building.
Engle was introduced to Bauer, who died in November 2016, in August 2003 when a “mutual friend” of his discovered her memoirs, which were undated and originally written in German in spite of her well-versed English-speaking skills.
According to her memoirs, Bauer was born on March 13, 1924 in Hamburg, Germany, growing up with a father who was a principal of a city’s Jewish girl’s school and a mother who was a medical director, as well as the school’s primary doctor and one of its teachers. In 1933, when she was eight, Adolf Hitler rose to power. In 1939, at age 15, she was forced to work at the local factory, describing her new line of work as “slave labor.”
Between 1938 and August 1939, Bauer saw most of her former school “comrades” “immigrate” away from the increasingly dictatorial Nazi government to countries such as England and Sweden. Despite her father’s mantra that, “I did nothing wrong, so nothing will happen to me,” in June 1942, Bauer’s family received word that they would be sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp on June 11. The next day, Bauer’s father developed a cold, which later worsened into a brain infection and, ultimately, cost him his life.
While at the camp, Bauer and her family were housed in an unkempt living quarters with other captives from Hamburg, with no privacy, no forms of entertainment to pass the time and the lack of proper plumbing facilities, relying only on plastic buckets to dispose of human waste.
On June 19, Bauer and the other Jews were transported to the gas chambers. While many were tragically given the gas, Bauer, twice in a row, got water coming from the shower head. The remaining were transported to various other factories and concentration camps across Germany, where Bauer was often forced to engage in strenuous hard labor building warplanes, sometimes for 12 hours straight.
When Russian forces began their invasion of Eastern Germany, Bauer and two of her friends escaped to a nearby town, away from the distracted eyes of the concentration camps. A friend of Bauer’s in Hamburg, discovering that she was still alive, met up with her while in refuge and ultimately took her back to Hamburg in July 1945.
Engle was born in a small German town near the French border in October 1924.
Due to his visa, Engle’s father was released from his concentration camp and joined him and the rest of his family in the state of New York in March 1939. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Engle was inspired to volunteer for a chance to join the U.S. Army and fight against the Axis forces; he was drafted six months later. Following basic training in North Carolina in 1942, Engle and his comrades were shipped to Algiers, North Africa in 1943, where he became an official American citizen while on duty following procedure with a representative from the State Department.
In 1944, Engle was shipped once again, this time to Italy, where he joined the Allied front lines. On May 15, he worked with a coalition of American, British and French forces in a, “successful push for Rome,” making it as far as Siena. The forces ultimately chased the Germans to the west bank of the Rhine River in France, before entering Germany and liberating the concentration camps. Before Engle could be shipped from Belgium to the Pacific Theater, the atomic bombs were dropped in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war.
Engle returned to the United States in December 1945, where he was honorably discharged.
As for Engle’s advice to future generations taking up the mission to end future genocides like the Holocaust: “love your neighbor,” pulled from the Ten Commandments, adding that, “no person is born to hate others.”
Originally published in The New Hampshire in Vol. 107, No. 23, on April 5, 2018.