David Galante, 94, Auschwitz Survivor Who Taught About The Holocaust After A 50-Year Silence
David Galante Image by youtube
BUENOS AIRES (JTA) — It took 50 years for David Galante to begin talking about his experience at Auschwitz.
Born to a Sephardic family in Rhodes in 1925, Galante studied in a Jewish school as a child, learning Italian, French and Hebrew. He was a teenager when he arrived at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. When he was liberated a year later, he weighed just 83 pounds and had the number B 7328 tattooed on his arm.
“The Russian soldiers, especially female soldiers, cried their eyes out and some of them vomited when entering and saw,” he recalled in an interview.
Galante died at 94 on July 27 from COVID-19 in Buenos Aires. He had arrived in Argentina in 1948 with his brother Moshe, the only survivors of their family and two of the 151 Jews from Rhodes who survived the war.
In Argentina, Galante married and had two children, Sandra and Ezequiel, but he remained silent about his wartime experience for decades.
“It was painful, embarrassing to tell all the horror we had to endure,” he said later.
It would take roughly a half-century before Galante began to talk about what he had witnessed. In interviews, he would describe how the Nazis disembarked on Rhodes and put the vast majority of Jews on boats for the long trip to Athens, and then on to trains for Auschwitz. Describing his wartime experiences, “the wounds began to heal in a slow way,” he would often say.
Galante became an active member of the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires, giving speeches in schools, public interviews, and also writing a book of his memories. He said that he felt that his real liberation began when he started to speak out.
In a video made by the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires, his wife Raquel said that she slowly persuaded him to bring all the truth, pain and horror out. His daughter Sandra made a brief appearance saying, “I want to make a wish for my father … that life doesn’t make him suffer anymore, give him a break.”
Galante was buried on July 28 in the main Jewish cemetery of Argentina, in the La Tablada area of Buenos Aires. The funeral was broadcast online to friends and relatives.
The post David Galante, 94, Auschwitz survivor who taught about the Holocaust after a 50-year silence appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
