Man shares Holocaust escape tale

AUGUSTA – A Brewer man who escaped the Holocaust as a child when he was transported to safety in Scotland shared his story with a group gathered for Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance for Holocaust victims.

Alex Wilde was part of the Kindertransport that sent 10,000 Jewish children from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany to Great Britain in 1939. Sixty-five years later, he shared the story of his life with more than 100 people at Temple Beth El in Augusta on Sunday.

Wilde described how storm troopers tried to round up his family in Vienna in October 1939 and held up his Austrian passport with the large “J” stamped on the front indicating it belonged to a Jew. He talked about the second-rate high school set up for Jewish children after they were removed from schools with advanced courses.

“We were separated and harassed and made to feel inferior,” he said.

Wilde, who was sent from Vienna by his mother, ended up in Scotland. There, his foster father managed to send tickets to Austria to allow Wilde’s mother, a physician, and his father, a lawyer being held in the Dachau concentration camp, to escape to Britain.

Wilde was one of fewer than 500 children transported to Britain who saw their parents again.

The family reached New York City on Columbus Day 1940. They found jobs in their new country and Wilde joined the U.S. military, serving in Alaska and Texas. After the war, Wilde went to college in the Midwest and retired to Maine in 1990 after 38 years with Blue Cross-Blue Shield.

“We can look with satisfaction and pride on the accomplishments of many of the children, 95 percent of whom grew up with strangers in a strange land,” Wilde said.

He said he didn’t want to talk much about the Holocaust until last year. He made his first presentation a year ago and followed it up by speaking to three middle school classes. Students wrote letters telling him they admired his bravery.

Gov. John Baldacci spoke at Sunday’s ceremony, sponsored by the Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine. He recognized about a dozen Holocaust survivors, one liberator, and one person who was a child of survivors.