Spokane doctor’s letters from Dachau being preserved for history

The letters of a Spokane physician who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp will be preserved for future generations by a Seattle museum with financial support from a New York City foundation.

The Holocaust Center for Humanity, which opened its museum last October, is archiving, scanning and transcribing the letters, and hopes to build an exhibit around them in about a year.

“It’s a window into the past,” Dee Simon, executive director of the museum, said of the letters, which were described in a story in The Spokesman-Review last September.

Anesthesiologist David Wilsey wrote to his wife, Emily, from what he called “dastardly Dachau” about the conditions in the camp by the time his Army medical unit liberated it in 1945. He urged her to tell thousands about what he related, in hopes that they would eventually tell millions and that the horrors of the concentration camps would never be forgotten.

After leaving the Army, Wilsey and his family settled in Spokane, where he established his medical practice. He rarely spoke about his experiences after returning from the war, and the letters lay all but forgotten in a trunk in the attic of their South Hill home, until the Wilseys’ adult children came across them and some other mementos from his time in Europe after both parents had died.

Their daughter, Clarice Wilsey, took the letters home to Eugene, Oregon, where she works as a career counselor at the University of Oregon. Although her father never talked to her about Dachau, some years earlier she had visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and was surprised to see her father in newsreel footage shown in an exhibit on that camp. But by then, her father had died and her mother flatly refused to go through the attic trunk that contained artifacts from the war.

Clarice Wilsey began reading the letters, and while the graphic details were so shocking they often brought her to tears, she was compelled to find a way to carry out her father’s wish to tell people so the world would never forget.

After the story about the letters appeared in The Spokesman-Review, a director of the Peck Stacpoole Foundation in New York City read a version that ran in Stars and Stripes and contacted Clarice Wilsey. The foundation makes grants to a wide range of institutions for genealogy, historic preservation and art projects and offered to help preserve the letters. Because David Wilsey practiced for decades in Spokane, it was decided to keep the letters in Washington state.

The Holocaust Center for Humanity submitted a grant to the foundation and received $13,300 for the preservation of her father’s letters, with the promise of more if it was needed, Wilsey said.

About half of the letters have been scanned by archivists and transcribed, or “translated,” from David Wilsey’s cursive script, which today’s youth might find difficult to read, Simon said. The scanned copies will be available to other museums, and the center hopes to display the originals as part of an exhibit that could feature other letters it has collected from residents of Europe who witnessed the escalation of Adolf Hitler’s persecution of Jews and others.

“We really want to make them public,” Simon said. “Our view is, if you preserve something and just have it in storage, it doesn’t do any good.”

At some point the Seattle center could bring the exhibit to Spokane, she added.

Letters provide an important view of history, because they record what a person sees and feels at the time, Simon said. But they often get lost or destroyed, or succeeding generations don’t realize their importance and throw them away.

Finding such a complete set of observations as Wilsey’s letters is “kind of a miracle,” she said.

“I was amazed at the language,” Simon said. “The clarity of what he saw and what he felt – he wasn’t sugar-coating it.”

Clarice Wilsey, meanwhile, has taken a class about teaching the Holocaust to middle and high school children and spoke at a remembrance day at the University of Oregon. After that she was contacted by a university professor who said his father, too, was a physician at Dachau, but that he’d never been able to talk to him about it.

In going through her father’s photos with the professor, they found a picture of a group of soldiers with the two doctors standing next to each other in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It’s one of the many strange connections she’s made since deciding to work on her father’s wish that people be told about the horrors of Dachau.