Clarice Wilsey’s heart began racing as she stood in front of a video display on the fourth floor of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. 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: Wilsey’s late father, a U.S. Army doctor.
“I watched it about 10 times,” she said. “I had this war with myself: ‘Yes, it’s my dad. No, it’s not.’ ”
Wilsey knew her father, David Wilsey, served in the Army, but he never told her or her siblings that he was deployed to the extermination camp outside Munich 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 Wilsey a new sense of purpose: to combat identity-based hatred, including antisemitism, in her father’s memory.
“I’m not Jewish,” Wilsey said, “But I just feel like people who are not Jewish need to stand up against antisemitism.”
Here’s how her discoveries, including a box of hidden wartime letters, inspired Wilsey to share her father’s story through Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity.
A secret family history
Although Wilsey 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 another surprising place: the attic of her childhood home in Spokane.
Wilsey and her siblings found the box behind the chimney while cleaning out the house after their mother’s death in 2009. Inside were more than 280 of her father’s letters and photos from his time in Dachau.
A skilled anesthesiologist, U.S. Army physician Capt. David Wilsey was deployed to the Dachau concentration camp after its liberation in 1945. While treating the newly freed survivors 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, cried as/like depraved beasts which the Nazi SS [have] made them,” her father wrote on May 8, 1945.
A photo of a victim’s skeleton lay atop the box of chronologically pristine letters. It took her back to when she was 6 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 was of 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,” Wilsey said. It was clear that the devastation her father saw while treating patients deeply impacted him.
Although many of David Wilsey’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 Wilsey’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, Wilsey 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, Wilsey 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 Seattle nonprofit’s speakers bureau, a group that includes survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, as well as their descendants. Members 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 counselor in 2018, Wilsey has fully dedicated herself to Holocaust education and given more than 100 talks nationally.
In sharing her father’s story, Wilsey 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,” said Dee Simon, CEO of the Holocaust Center for Humanity. 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 nonacceptance 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.”
A passage from one of Wilsey’s father’s letters to her mother has stuck with her: “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!”
Although her father didn’t speak out against antisemitism publicly the way he did in his wartime letters, Wilsey strives to uphold his call to fight hatred.
Holocaust education can help shine a light on the impacts of hate and prejudice, said Beth Griech-Polelle, the Kurt Mayer chair of Holocaust studies at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. She has often invited guest speakers through Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity to talk to her students.
“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 descendants will become critical thinkers and be “more aware of falling into prejudice, falling into stereotypes and hate-filled language.”
Wilsey said concentration camp liberators like her father are “unsung heroes.” In carrying her father’s legacy, it remains important for her to show “that non-Jewish people [care] about what happened.”
Now 77 years old, Wilsey isn’t planning to stop sharing her father’s story anytime soon. She is currently working to establish her own Holocaust education nonprofit by early 2025.
“The [call of] ‘never again’ and the ‘never forget’ has to be for people who are not Jewish,” she said, “because we have to fight this together.”
Correction: This story has been updated to remove a reference to David Wilsey running an anesthesiology practice in Seattle. He ran his practice in Spokane.