While representing UO at a conference in Washington, D.C., Clarice Wilsey decided to attend the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Clarice’s heart began racing as she stood in front of a video display on the fourth floor of the museum. While it was shocking to see footage of the two emaciated Dachau concentration camp survivors walking in their striped uniforms, that wasn’t what was making her legs tremble.

It was who was looking at them in the video: a U.S. Army doctor – Clarice’s late father.

“I watched it about 10 times,” she said. “I had this war with myself: ‘Yes, it’s my dad. No, it’s not.’”

Clarice knew her father served in the Army, but he never told her or her siblings that he was deployed to the extermination camp outside Munich, Germany, to care for liberated Holocaust survivors.

This would be the first of several revelations that helped Wilsey better understand her late father. More than that, these uncovered family secrets would give Clarice a new sense of purpose: to combat identity-based hatred, including antisemitism, in her father’s memory.

“I’m not Jewish,” Clarice said, “But I just feel like people who are not Jewish need to stand up against antisemitism.”

A secret family history

Although Clarice couldn’t definitively confirm that the man in the Holocaust museum’s video was her father, she’d soon learned about one of the most formative experiences of her father’s life in a surprising place: the attic of her childhood home in Spokane.

Clarice and her siblings found the box behind the chimney while cleaning out the house after their mother’s death in 2009. Inside were dozens of her father’s letters and photos from his time in Dachau.

A skilled anesthesiologist, U.S. Army Physician Cpt. David Wilsey was deployed to the Dachau concentration camp after its liberation in 1945. While treating the newly freed prisoners in the camp’s typhus ward, the 30-year-old wrote his wife, Emily Belk Wilsey, of Dachau’s “horror-torture environment” on a nearly daily basis.

“We roared through the gates of Dachau figurative ‘minutes’ after its liberation — while 40,000 wrecks-of-humanity milled, tore, looted, screamed (and) cried as/like depraved beasts which the Nazi SS (have) made them,” her father wrote on May 8, 1945.

A photo depicting a prisoner’s skeleton lay atop the box of “chronologically pristine” letters. It took Clarice back to when she was six years old and had found the box in the dining room during a family move.

“Little girls shouldn’t see these,” she recalled her father saying before taking the photo away from her. At the time, she didn’t understand what the photo depicted or where it might be from, but she grew up feeling she should never ask about it.

Reading her father’s letters as an adult felt like an “emotional earthquake,” Clarice said. It was clear that the devastation her father saw while treating patients deeply impacted him.

“All I ask is that you ‘instill’ it into as many thousand others as you can — till maybe we can get millions to ‘see’ it!” David wrote to his wife on June 11, 1945.

Although many of David’s letters to his wife included calls for them to speak out against what he saw in the Holocaust’s aftermath at Dachau, neither of Clarice’s parents ever brought up the horrors her father witnessed overseas.

“I kind of have this feeling that they had a vow of silence,” she said.

Years after her father’s death, Clarice decided to break that silence and made it her mission to uphold her father’s promise to speak out against antisemitism, hatred and Holocaust denial.

In 2016, Clarice donated her father’s letters and photos to the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle. They are now part of the nonprofit’s museum in an online exhibit, “Letters from a Dachau Liberator: The Wilsey Collection.”

Wilsey also joined the speakers bureaus in Portland and Seattle. These are groups that include survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, as well as their descendents. Members of the speakers bureau give personal talks about identity-based hatred and violence at schools and other organizations around the country. Since retiring from her job as a University of Oregon college counselor in 2018, Clarice has fully dedicated herself to Holocaust education and given over 150 talks nationally.

In sharing her father’s story, Clarice hopes to show students and other audience members that they have the power to prevent human suffering by spreading tolerance and kindness.

Speaking out against hatred

At a time when antisemitism is on the rise, it’s “never been more critical to teach about the Holocaust than it is now,” Dee Simon, CEO of the Holocaust Center for Humanity, said. Holocaust education can teach people “about the consequences of hate and really, the fact that we are all the same. There is no other.”

Since the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, 2023, hate incidents against Jewish, Muslim and Arab people have risen sharply in the U.S.
From Oct. 7 to the end of 2023, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, received 3,578 reports of Islamophobic and anti-Arab bias, a 178% increase over the previous year. During the same period, the Anti-Defamation League logged 5,204 antisemitic incidents — more than the total number of incidents in 2022.
“Hate, violence, prejudice and non-acceptance of the ‘other’ is increasing,” Wilsey said. “(Students) must understand how they can be part of the healing and have the courage to not perpetuate violence and war.”

Holocaust education can help shine a light on the impacts of hate and prejudice, Beth Griech-Polelle, the Kurt Mayer chair of Holocaust studies at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, said. She has often invited guest speakers through Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity to speak to her classes.

“To have that human being standing in front of them, I think that carries a larger impact than almost anything I can do,” she said.

Griech-Polelle hopes students who take her courses and hear from survivors and their descendents will become critical thinkers and be “more aware of falling into prejudice, falling into stereotypes and hate filled language.”

Clarice said concentration camp liberators, like her father, are “unsung heroes.” In carrying her father’s legacy, it remains important for her to show Jewish people “that non-Jewish people care and cared about what happened.” Antisemitism and the Holocaust is not just about Jewish people, she said. “We have to fight this together.”

Clarice isn’t planning to stop sharing her father’s story anytime soon. Eighty years after Dachau was liberated, Clarice sees this work more important now than ever.

“The (call of) ‘never again’ and the ‘never forget’ has to be for people who are not Jewish, people who are Christian (and) people who are Muslim,” Wilsey said, “We have to fight this together.”

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