Pass from home
To the editor:
The parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us to act with love for one another. A complete stranger stopped to help a victim beaten and left to die on the road by nursing his wounds, placing the injured person on his own animal, bringing him to safety and giving two days wages to care for the injured person who was ethnically different from him.
On July 30, 1945, toward the end of the European Theater of WW II, Captain Joseph Lassiter Jr., intelligence officer for the 33rd Armored Engineer Battalion of the US Seventh Army gave a letter to my father, Fiszel Landau, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, allowing him to continue to wear a US army uniform rendering him a safer passage to return to his home in Poland. Papa was permitted to wear a US army uniform because he had no other clothes. Without the letter, papa could have been arrested, imprisoned or executed as a SS stormtrooper, German soldier or saboteur.
From September 1939 to April 1945, papa was captive in the Piotrkow Trybunalski Nazi ghetto, numerous slave labor camps including Mauthausen and Buchenwald and the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Papa was transferred from Mauthausen to Buchenwald Concentration Camp on January 20, 1945. Buchenwald was liberated on April 16, 1945. Upon liberation papa was moved to the Displaced Persons Camp at Hof an de Saale (Halle), Germany.
Captain Lassiter’s battalion moved into the Halle area and used displaced persons to help with its daily needs. From May until July 30, 1945 papa worked in the kitchen unit with Captain Lassiter’s battalion. On July 30, the 33rd battalion moved as part of its final deployment in the European theater.
Like the parable of the Good Samaritan, Captain Lassiter’s acts of Christian love for a Jewish survivor showed that compassion has no boundaries. He lived the Golden Rule of neighborly love in every situation. We honor his acts and his memory.