Fort Carson held a Holocaust Remembrance Day Monday, April 16th, as part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance, April 15-22. This year’s theme was “Choosing to Act: Stories of Rescue”.Click here for pictures of the eventKaren Z. Brass, the daughter of David Zauder, a Holocaust survivor and detainee of 5 concentration camps, including Auschwitz, came to speak to Fort Carson yesterday about her father’s experiences and the importance of being a “Standupster.”Brass coined “Standupsters” in the early 1990s.“The most important thing about this for me was to not promote bystanders. Without bystanders much could’ve been different and I know that today’s theme focuses on being someone who stands up and saves, chooses to take action,” she said.Brass is aware that had there been more standupsters and less bystanders, things could have been a lot different for her father and the other Holocaust survivors, as well as the 6 million people who weren’t that lucky.David Zauder was born in Korkov in 1928 and was the youngest of 2 boys. His brother, Soloman, was a violinist, and he was a trumpet player.  Zauder had blonde hair and blue eyes, something that saved his life on several occasions throughout his 5 years as a detainee.The Nazis’ forced Zauder and his family to move to the ghetto of Krakov, Poland in 1939, when he was just 10 years old, and work as a child laborer. (Prusia Fortcamp).When Zauder first got his number tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz Death Camp, he rubbed off what he could off it, changing the last number from an 8 to a 3; a move that saved his life.“The showers, the gas chambers. My father was sent there once but early morning he escaped. And because of his hair color and his eye color the Nazi guard that saw him there let him run and did not chase him. He was saved again,” said Brass of her father’s experiences.“The crematorium is where he worked while he was in Aushwitz,” she said. He worked in the woods cutting down trees to fuel the fires.After almost 5 full years, Zauder was finally liberated on one of the many death marches that included “marching by night, forging in the forest by day and hiding and then going in to concentration camps as they were slave laborers after all,” she said.This death march was in the middle of the winter and the detainees only had long sleeved pajamas, a cap, and wooden shoes to keep themselves warm. After being starved and marching for several days, Zauder collapsed face first in to the snow but no one stopped to help or to look at him because helping someone meant that they, too, would be bayoneted by the Nazis.“Finally, he managed to say to the person behind him, in perfect Polish, ‘Please help me, I cannot die here.’ And the man bent down, picked up my father and put him inside the blanket that was wrapped around him so the Nazis did not see. And my father and his brother’s eyes met. My father passed out knowing that he was going to make it. He chose to live.”“Later in the march, they were marched in to a clearing by the Nazis and they were put in to a position to lie down, face down, in to the snow in a circular formation while the Nazis/ positioned their machine guns around that circle. And my father was layed down and his brother, Soloman, laid on top of him for sure the bullets would start to fly, he was saving his brother’s life. My father was lucky to have such a brother.”“Up over the hill you could hear the tanks coming. General Patton, 3rd Tank Division, Army. Somebody had enough courage to look up only to find that there were no more Nazis left. The machine guns abandoned and everyone started running. It was pandemonium. My father and his brother jumped on a tank and continued to fight for 3 days,” she said.A year later, Zauder was able to board the first ship to America where he planned to live with his aunt in Michigan. He joined the Army, learned English, and spent 5 years as a soldier.When he got out of the Army, he joined the Cleveland Orchestra and continued to play the trumpet. He played for 30 years, the longest tenure of the orchestra to date, and became a world renowned musician.Even though Zauder now lives with his daughter, Brass, and her family, due to spinal cancer, his story is far from over. Brass travels the world to tell her father’s story in hopes that more people will join the cause to be a Standupster, fight back against bullying, and put an end to stereotyping and intolerance.

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