Wilson Canafax – The Texas Liberators

September 14, 2011

I was born in the town of Millsap [Texas]. My father was the station agent for the railroad that went through Millsap at that time. My mother became ill, and Dad moved the family. And I was the last of four children, three of whom were living. Dad moved to Dallas to get my mother near medical help, and—but she died. And so I was brought up in the city of Dallas. And Dad had a hard time. He had— His work was seven days a week. Ironically, he had no way of transportation, so he walked three miles to and three miles from his work every day. So you add that up over thirty-five years, and you’ll see how much he walked. And he never weighed over 125 pounds. Walked all of his weight off.

But my grandmother—our grandmother was the one who came into the home to look after us and see that we had clean clothes. And if we had patched clothes, they were still clean. And she got us off to school every day. In fact, the last six years of my public school education, I didn’t miss a class, nor was I tardy. That’s impossible today, but I did it, and I was glad I could. I got special recognition for it, and that was okay.

I graduated from high school at Woodrow Wilson High in Dallas. And I heard there was a school in Fort Worth where you could get a job and go to school. So I came over and I found a job working. And my grandmother, who had brought me up, had no place to go, so I took her with me to college. And we literally stayed there together for four years in an apartment. She looked after my food, my clothing, and everything else, and made me ready for school every day, like she had been when I was in high school. And I finished Texas Wesleyan. I came to SMU [Southern Methodist University] Seminary in Dallas. And I was just an average student. I was a pretty good guy, but an average student.

. . . Mine was no big to-do. That is, I didn’t see a streak of lightning across the sky that tells you to go preach. Mine was sort of a gradual feeling. I just got into it because that was what I wanted to do. And I felt like I had a personal relationship with God to respond to the work that I was called to do. And so it was a genuine feeling, a genuine call, and I appreciate so much the fact that I could be in the ministry and serve in such varied ways. . . .

And the war was going on, and they were needing chaplains. And so I guess out of patriotism or whatever, I told them I’d be ready to go if they could use me. And they said yes. That’s when the army took me in as a chaplain. I was sent to Fort Devins, Massachusetts, for training. And it was not a lengthy training, but it was there—I was there during the wintertime, and it gets cold in the interior Massachusetts, I can tell you. Texas light-blood going up there and it was cold. And I was given assignment from there to the parachute school at Fort Benning, Georgia. And I appreciated that. I was working with men who were under risk, but I was not a jumper. I was getting ready to be, and they said, “We need you more elsewhere.” So they picked me up and sent me to Europe. And I stayed in a depot in Belgium a few weeks—I think three weeks—near the little town of Dolhain.

They assigned me to the 1110th Engineer Combat Group, which was up in the middle part of Germany. And that’s where I met my group. They received me with genuine appreciation and friendship. So I was there when the war ended; I was at Marburg. And having been over there such a brief time, they said, “We want you to stay and do some chaplaincy work.” So they sent me down to Stuttgart. And I was at Stuttgart for a while. From Stuttgart, I was sent up to Frankfurt, headquarters chaplain. I enjoyed that. The bigwigs were there, and I had a chance to be of service to them. There I was a young chaplain, a chaplain still green behind the ears trying to be a chaplain to those four-star people.

The outfit I was with was the 1110th Engineer Combat Group. And we had moved up to Eisenach in that period of transition. And while I was at Eisenach—we were there about thirty days, I guess—I had heard that there was a death camp. We didn’t know much about concentration camps, or death camps, and neither did the German people. You’ve often heard it said that the Ger-man leadership kept these camps quiet as they could, away from people, and they did a pretty good job of it. Some of the German people I got to know quite well after the war I’m convinced were not fully aware of what those camps were. I heard there was one close by to Eisenach. So I decided I’d go nearby, about fifteen miles away, to this place they called a death camp, or a concentration camp. And I didn’t know much what to find. It was strictly an informal visit.

There was a room about—not quite as big as this room. The ceilings were higher. But this room had pegs in it about where the ceiling is in this room. Those pegs were about six or eight feet apart. They were heavy pegs. There were little stools around. They would bring the German people in there, and put them on those stools, and put ropes around their necks, and have them

there, maybe—I didn’t count the number of places there were—but I guess at one time maybe they could exterminate forty or fifty people. Kick those stools out from underneath them. I’ve never tried to myself imagine what it looked like to see all those people struggling and trying to live. I didn’t see it, but my imagination was there. That was the killing room. They would take them over to ovens on one side of the room and put the bodies in there and exterminate them. They did away with them there. This is where they killed people. It’s where they burned their bodies.

My conversations at Buchenwald were rather limited. There were no formal tours going through, and they didn’t try to organize people to bring them in and let them see it. I was dealing with men, looking at them, almost 100 percent of whom could not speak English. And they were looking at me, and I was a chaplain, a man of God. What could I do for them? And there wasn’t much I could do. I still carry that feeling of inadequacy. When I was there with them and had been presented with a situation that my faith said, “Okay, here you are now. What can you do, and what are you doing with it?” And so I felt like I couldn’t do much with it. And did I depend on the grace of God? Yes. God’s grace was present then, even though I couldn’t feel it the way I should, it was there, and it’s been with me ever since that time.

The first thing I thought about was—the first thing that came in was one of guilt. Now, you’ve had the kind of faith which you have told yourself will hold up to anything. You have the kind of expression to yourself with the idea that you can face anything. Okay, old boy, you have faced something you can’t handle, now what are you going to do? Well, it was a spiritual struggle. . . . I didn’t want to come to you or anybody else and say, “You know, my faith isn’t strong enough to bear this.” I was guilty, I felt guilt. And the feeling at that time was, I didn’t have the faith I should have, but yet I did. And went through it, came out of it, and have continued. And I still have, I don’t say flashbacks, but I go back to that time of, “Why couldn’t you handle it?” The main thing that I could do is to get back home and get to work. Deal with people, prepare sermons, preach them. Just be a part of what you were meant to be to begin with.

A person wearing captain’s bars could go most anyplace, and chaplains were given commissions. And so I thought, “Well, I’ll go down and see about this place.” And my jeep driver and I drove down there. And we parked near the front entrance, you know, started over toward the front. And before I got to the front entrance, there was a young fellow, came up to me speaking perfect English. Looked like he was about fifteen or sixteen years old. He was too young to have been in the German army. And he said, “I see you have a cross on your lapel. Are you a chaplain?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Could you—do you think you could do us a favor?” I said, “Well, I can try.” It turned out that this per-son that was talking to me was the young fellow, Eliezer Wiesel, Eliezer Wiesel, who’s known better today as Elie Wiesel. There have been documentaries on his life. Well, he didn’t know me from Adam, and same thing. I just knew I was meeting a young fellow. And I was six or eight years older than he, and he was too young to go into the German army, and I was—I was too young to really be a chaplain, but I was there anyhow.

And he says, “Could you do something for us?” And I said, “Well, I’ll do my best if I can help you.” And he said, “First of all, I’d like to take you through some parts of the camp here.” And I didn’t know what that meant because I didn’t go there for any formal take-through. I went through the main entrance, I remember that well, and walked in. And as you’ve heard the expression dead men walking, that’s the way the—the—I don’t like to use the word inmate. I don’t like to use the word residents. That’s where the people who were in the concentration camp looked. I went to several of them, some who could speak English, and I could talk a little bit with them. I planned a worship ser-vice for them. A chaplain had many different ways to put things together, so I planned a Jewish worship service for those in the Buchenwald death camp who wanted to come.

So many of them had wanted nothing to do with religion, but those who were genuine in their faith enjoyed the opportunity to come to a worship service; they came. . . . I remember the first time. We got our carryalls, those big trucks, and put the people who could be carried in those things to a place where we could have a worship service. They had to be lifted on. They had to be carried on, crying. They never thought they’d be alive. Many of them had been there, not knowing too much about their past, because they’d always been under some kind of incarceration—concentration. But we got them in the carryalls and took them to the place of worship. And I was in charge of the worship service.

We had some little prayer books that were distributed among those that wanted them. And on one side of it was Hebrew, He-brew prayers. Other side was English. So as they went through the service in Hebrew, then I could follow along in English itself. They cried. They shouted. When they got through, they were just raising hands, sort of like our Pentecostals today raise theirs. They were just raising their hands in joy and appreciation. They didn’t think they’d ever see that again. They didn’t think they’d be alive.

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