Texas Veterans Who Liberated Nazi Concentration Camps Share Stories with Baylor University's Institute for Oral History

Newswise - At the end of World War II, a young Army chaplain named Wilson Canafax was among soldiers who traveled to Nazi concentration camps with little idea what to expect. Moments after he got out of his Jeep at newly liberated Buchenwald, an emaciated Jewish survivor approached.

His plea was that Canafax conduct a Jewish worship service. And the young man who introduced himself was Elie Wiesel, a Romanian Jew who went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and to write more than 30 books about the Holocaust and the responsibility to fight hatred, racism and genocide.

Canafax and other Texans who liberated European concentration camps are telling their stories in video interviews with Stephen Sloan, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University. The two-year project to produce audio and video recordings of Texans' role is funded by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission. It educates citizens to increase understanding of the past and encourage individual responsibility for society's actions. Interview transcripts will be given to public libraries in the liberators' hometowns, the liberators' families and to Holocaust museums in El Paso, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.