Surviving the Holocaust: Reflections on Ben Guyer’s Testimony

By Kimora Aliff
From the blog series titled, “The Endurance and Relevance of Survivor Testimonials in the 21^st Century” by students of Professor Sylvia Taschka’s ‘Nazi Germany’ class at Wayne State University. In partnership with the Appelbaum Family Compass Fund.

Ben Guyer was a survivor of the Holocaust and a profound witness to this dark history. He was born in 1915 in the small town of Gombin, Poland, a place that was devastated by Nazi soldiers shortly after the beginning of World War II. After enduring unimaginable hardship and loss, Guyer finally immigrated to America in May 1946, almost a year after the war ended.

Ben’s Life in Poland

When the Nazis attacked Poland, Guyer had just been drafted into the Polish army. Trying to defend his country, he fought against the Wehrmacht at Warsaw but was quickly taken prisoner by the militarily superior German forces. Just a few days later, however, he was able to escape and returned to Gombin, hoping to reunite with his beloved older brother, who had raised him like a father after his parents had left for America (Ben’s own visa request had been denied several times.)

Gombin had already been devastated by the Germans. Over the next few years, all Jewish residents of the town were forced into a ghetto, where any attempts to escape led to being transported to what Guyer referred to as the “dead camp,” a place of certain death.

In 1942, Guyer’s brother and his family were deported to Chelmno and never seen again. The unbearable pain and loss Guyer experienced during World War II shows just a glimpse into the reality the Jewish community faced.

Soldiers and Ideology

In his poignant interview, Guyer also recounted the brutal treatment of young girls by Nazi soldiers, focusing on a devastating incident in 1941. During a German assessment of Gombin, a SS man, who had a Polish girlfriend in the town, brutally assaulted and raped a 13-year-old girl. Despite her mother’s desperate pleas, the girl’s father felt powerless against the armed German soldier. The soldier later returned and shot the girl, leaving her dead body deserted on the outskirts of town.

Guyer explained that the German soldiers were not supposed to have relations with Jews because they were looked at as inferior and impure, which is why the SS man returned to kill the helpless child; he saw her as an object to impose power over rather than a human, highlighting the objectification and dehumanization of Jewish girls and women during the Nazi reign. To the Nazis, Jewish women and girls could be used as mere objects for male gratification, a chilling reflection of their warped ideology.

Lessons from Ben Guyer

While carefully watching Guyer’s interview, I found that this is a man who has walked with his trauma for many years, waiting for someone to hear his story. Although memory can be a tricky thing to actually believe, especially when the memory is of an older person who is recalling events that happened many decades ago, the way Ben Guyer articulates his story in so much detail, and with such emotional intensity, one has no choice but to believe his account is accurate.

Using a visual interview by a Jew who lived throughout the Holocaust and survived, I was able to see and hear how devastating and traumatic it was for a Jew during World War II. The core detail that one takes away from this interview is how the Nazi party ultimately didn’t look at the Jewish community as a people, but rather as inferior, impure beings, who needed to be exterminated.