Dallas Holocaust Museum and Related Stories

Dallas Holocaust Museum and Related Stories

After visiting the Holocaust and Human Rights Museum in Dallas, several memories, people and places associated with that time period come to mind.



Firstly, I would like to comment on how well the museum exhibits are presented.  I have personally visited Dachau, outside of Munich, in 1967 while driving from Athens to Rotterdam. I also spent the good part of a day at Auschwitz in 2013, while touring Poland and Eastern Europe.  While both physical death camps inspire horror at the magnitude of the Nazi extermination efforts, our museum in Dallas does a credible job of presenting the historical record in easily understood exhibits.



While at Auschwitz in 2013, I was encouraged by the number of young Europeans who were visiting the museum there in Oswiecim, Poland.  It is incumbent on us older folks to ensure that the horror of what happened in Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s is not lost to our gen-xers, millennials, gen-zers, etc.  The exhibits at the Dallas Holocaust Museum are vivid enough to engage and interest young and old alike.



I have several stories from people whom I knew, who lived in Europe at the time of the holocaust and the second world war.



Mark Raczinski?sp shared some of his story with me in the 1960’s at our Caltex offices in New York City.  Mark’s family were minor peerage in Poland (as was mine), and Mark was a colonel in the Polish cavalry when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.  Mark’s horse mounted units were among the poorly equipped defenders trying to stop the Nazi panzers.  Mark later was a defender of Warsaw, and eventually joined the free Polish forces in London.  He had pictorials and compelling anecdotal stories of Warsaw before its virtual levelling by the Nazi’s.



Jan Baazer was in my car pool in Rotterdam in 1961-62.  Jan was a student in Amsterdam, and later part of the Dutch resistance after the Nazi’s invaded Holland in 1940.  Jan was captured by the Nazi’s and impressed into slave labor in a German factory.  Jan and a friend escaped and made their way into Switzerland and then into Southern France just as the area came under the control of the pro-Nazi Vichy government.  After several close calls, they entered Spain, where the neutral, but fascist government imprisoned them.  Through efforts of the Free Dutch in England, they were eventually released and made it first to England, and later to the United States.  Jan spent the rest of the war training Dutch marines in the U.S.  After the war he got his engineering degree from M.I.T. and joined Caltex.  Jan left Caltex for C.E.R.N. in Switzerland during my stay in Holland.



Another Dutch patriot was Jan Veetsma?, who was working at the Palembang refinery in South Sumatra in what was then the Dutch East Indies during the Japanese invasion in 1941-42.  I do not know Jan’s full story, but as I gathered it, refinery personnel drew straws on who would remain to set off demolition charges to blow up the refinery before the Japanese could take it over.  They destroyed part of the refinery and oil storage and were captured and ultimately tortured by the Japanese.  Jan did not discuss details.  He walked with a limp and a cane because of damage done to his legs.



The chap that replaced me as Supervisor of the “Persian Gulf Group” for Caltex in New York was Ray Driksna, Latvian, Australian American.  Ray lost his family in Latvia and was a displaced person after the war.  He made his way to Paris and was partly educated there.  He emigrated to Australia, where he obtained his engineering degree and joined Caltex Australia.  He eventually got to New York in a mid-management role.  Ray was a taciturn type, so details are sketchy.  Ray drank a lot and had a Norwegian girlfriend.



Various estimates show that there were between 70 to 85 million total deaths during the second world war.  Multiply this by 3 or to get the total number of war stories related to these deaths.  We simply cannot forget that most of these deaths were the result of some form of socialism forcing itself upon mostly modern, sophisticated countries by promising free stuff resulting from some form of income equalization.  Lest we forget!



Ray Gruszecki

November 16, 2019