We are all someone's child, and our parents are no different.
Our parents live complex lives full of highs and lows for decades before even considering bringing children into the world. Clarice Wilsey had this realization at 6 years old.
In 1953, Wilsey, her parents and her two siblings moved to a new house in Spokane. While rifling through boxes, Wilsey found a stack of photos that she describes as "horrifying."
"There were dead bodies," she says. "Piles of them."
At 6 years old, she had never experienced the death of a pet or relative. She had never experienced loss or grief. So she approached her father, U.S. Army Capt. David B. Wilsey, and asked about what she had seen.
"He grabbed them out of my hand," she recalls. "He told me, 'Little girls don't need to see this.' And he was right."
She lived with that memory through her childhood and teenage years, knowing she would never ask her parents or tell her siblings about the photos again.
Wilsey's father, who was a practicing anesthesiologist in Spokane from 1949 until his death in 1996, never spoke about his experiences serving in an Army field hospital during World War II.
And by the time she visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2006, her father was 10 years gone, and her memories of those photos had been pushed to the furthest corners of her mind. But the moment Wilsey stepped out of the elevator into an exhibit on the Dachau (pronounced daw-cow) concentration camp in southern Germany, all those memories came rushing back.
There, just feet from the elevator door, was a video of her father walking past two recently liberated prisoners.
"I started to have a war with myself," she says. "Was it actually him? I didn't know him until after the war, and my memory of him was not of a 30-year-old man, because I never saw him at that age. I started shaking, my heart was pounding, and I was sweating."
Wilsey asked her mother about what she'd seen, but her mother wouldn't speak about her husband's experiences at Dachau.
After her mother's death in 2008, Wilsey and her siblings returned to her family's Spokane home to clear out their belongings. Once she was back home in Eugene, Oregon, she opened some boxes and again found the photos she'd first discovered as a 6-year-old, along with over 300 letters her father had sent to her mother over the course of their lives. She quickly realized some of these letters were sent while he was working at Dachau in the five weeks following the camp's liberation by American troops.
The letters recounted nightmarish conditions and unimaginable atrocities that occurred there during the Holocaust. Using her father's words, with help from her friend Bob Welch, Wilsey wrote the memoir Letters from Dachau: A Father's Witness of War, a Daughter's Dream of Peace.
On Saturday, April 26, in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of Dachau's liberation — April 29, 1945 — Wilsey is sharing her father's story, as recounted in the book, with community members at the Spokane Valley Library.
Since releasing the memoir in March 2020, Wilsey, now 78, has given over 150 talks across the United States, bringing awareness to the Holocaust and the horrors her father witnessed at Dachau.
"My life as an author doesn't surround selling the book," she says. "It's all about telling people the experiences of my dad."
In the book, Wilsey details her father's life leading up to the liberation of Dachau and, based directly on the letters, discusses his time at the camp.
The first American doctors to enter Dachau after its liberation were with the 116th Evacuation Hospital. One of them was David Wilsey, who served as an Army physician on the front lines of Germany and France in 1944, including during the Battle of the Bulge. Clarice says the letters describe her father's role in performing lifesaving surgeries on Dachau's survivors.
"He writes that he would have seven people on operating tables arranged around him like spokes on a wheel," she says. "He would be monitoring all seven at the same time, but it was necessary. There were so many wounded."
David Wilsey was eventually awarded the Bronze Star for developing this unique technique to manage the extraordinarily large patient loads.
By June 1945, David Wilsey left Dachau a changed man. He spent five weeks at "dastardly Dachau," as he called it in his letters.
After he was back in Spokane, Clarice says her dad did what most war veterans did — tried to completely move on with their lives, ignoring the trauma they had just gone through.
Her father started his anesthesia practice, became a founding member of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, helped create Spokane's first Sister City relationship with Nishinomiya, Japan, and became involved in the planning for Manito Park's Japanese Garden.
Wilsey says she's had plenty of "emotional earthquakes" throughout the entire process of finding her father's photos, seeing the video of him at the Holocaust Museum, finding his letters and writing the book, but it's been worth it because she gets to tell her father's story every day.
"I cannot tell you what my heart does when I'm talking to these young people," she says. "I'm not just telling them about World War II and Dachau. I'm talking to them about countering Holocaust denial, countering bigotry, hate and antisemitism." ♦
Daughter of Dachau: Sharing the Voice of Her Father • Sat, April 26 from 1-2 pm • All ages • Free • Spokane Valley Library • 22 N. Herald Road, Spokane Valley • scld.org
Also on Sat, April 26, from 10-11 am at the North Spokane Library (44 E. Hawthorne Rd.) and Sat, April 26, from 6-8 pm at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church (5720 S. Perry St.) Call to RSVP: 509-220-6727
