By Charlie Alison, Staff Writer
The Springdale News, Oct. 2, 1988
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A short boy, dark haired and dimpled, stepped toward Robert Clary, the actor who portrayed LeBeau in the 1960s television show “Hogan’s Heroes,” to ask him for an autograph. The boy looked much like Clary must have as a child growing up in France.
And Clary, still as irascible as he must have been as a child, asked the boy, “An autograph? Why do you want an autograph? Do you think someday it will be important?”
The boy shook his head yes.
“Did you hear what I said in the speech I just gave? If you remember it, you will have something important. Do you still want an autograph?” Clary asked.
The boy nodded yes again. The crowd laughed. “Here you are,” Clary said, signing a notepad and laughing with the boy’s persistence.
Persistence might well have been the theme of Clary’s speech. Clary, a Jew who survived internment in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, spoke to a crowd of about 300 students, faculty and community members at the University of Arkansas Union Theater Friday [Sept. 30], retelling his persistence at living during the Holocaust and now his regained persistence in describing that hell-on-earth experience to others.
“I never wanted to talk about my experiences (in the concentration camps). I wanted to have a normal life; not relive my nightmares,” Clary said. “But I’m very vocal these days. The world situation requires it.”
Clary, sponsored by the Hillel Club and Jewish Student Union, said that intellectuals, “revisionists,” are trying to change history books by saying that the Holocaust never happened. Anti-Semitic sentiments are getting stronger, according to Clary, who noted the rise of white supremacy groups in the United States and neo-Nazi organizations in Europe.
While watching a PBS documentary about the Jewish Holocaust, the show mentioned that all eye-witnesses to the concentration camps would be dead after the next 30 to 40 years. Clary said the documentary made him realize that many younger people had little concept of the depth of cruelty manifested toward the Jews during World War II.
“I better stand up and be counted. I have a duty. I have to leave a legacy … for history’s sake,” Clary said. “I face young audiences and tell them the truth about those 31 months of infamy. I came to tell you: ‘Look what happens when we stay in apathy!’”
In a sometimes emotional, always revealing speech, Clary described how during 1941, after Germany had occupied France, the Nazis began requiring Jews to wear Stars of David on their clothing, keeping them out of public schools, making them observe curfews.
Then one night in 1942, they came to the apartment building that he, then 16, lived in with his family and dozens of other Jewish families. They had 10 minutes to collect their belongings and leave to be shoved onto buses and then taken by train to concentration camps. His mother had told him to hide with his sister, but he wouldn’t leave his mother. “I adored my mother. I could not think of being separated from her.
“From that moment, I never knew a quiet moment, never a kind word. Always the shoving,” Clary said. They were put 100 people to a boxcar with only two buckets for a bathroom.
Over 80,000 Jewish people were deported from France, according to Clary. “Of 1,004 people in my convoy, only 15 men came back, not a single woman.”
Clary was separated from his mother soon, put in one of the concentration camps while his parents were sent to another one where they were gassed. Later, seeing a documentary film about the gas chambers, some of it footage taken during the war showing the victims falling out of the chamber’s doors after being gassed, Clary said he wept at seeing “how my gentle parents died just because they were Jewish.”
In the concentration camps, Clary said, the food they were given daily consisted of a “cup of black water they called coffee,” a bowl of hot water that, if you were lucky, had some potatoes floating in it, for soup, and a piece of bread with a square of margarine for supper. “Instinctively, I would sing and dance to get that extra piece of bread or potato,” Clary said, calling the guards and administrators at the camps “all sadistic monsters.”
“I’ll never forgive Reagan for going to Bitburg,” Clary said. (President Reagan, while travelling in Germany in 1985, insisted on stopping at Bitburg Cemetery to honor German soldiers, despite advice from his aides. Many guards and members of the Nazi SS are buried in Bitburg.)
Later, Clary was tattooed with an identification number. “We realized we were no longer humans; we were cattle, branded cattle.”
He said he realized how much an animal they had made him when his best friend, someone with whom he had become friends during two years in the concentration camps, died. “I saw my friend, George, dead there, and I didn’t care. That is the worst statement I can make.”
Of 13 family members deported to Nazi concentration camps, Clary was the only member who returned alive to France. One brother had survived because of where he lived in Paris. A sister had joined the French Underground Resistance, and a few others had survived. But most of his brothers and sisters were dead. His parents were dead.
“Today, I lead a very good life here (in the U.S.) I have a good career, not great. I have a great country, not perfect,” Clary said. “You must learn so we can avoid a repetition of the past.”
Word, Image and Sound 