Dachau victims’ ashes laid to rest in Durham

[struggle4progress]

By Jim Wise
Dachau victims’ ashes laid to rest in Durham
May 25, 2014

... In May 1945, Corsbie’s father, Walter, was in a U.S. Army unit in southern Germany. Sent on an errand to the Dachau camp, near Munich, he encountered one of the recently liberated Jewish prisoners, who gave him the lump of human ashes collected from one of the camp’s crematoria.

Corsbie never revealed why the prisoner chose him to have the ashes, and he never spoke of the encounter to anyone until, near death in 1986, he told his son. Joseph Corsbie, a Christian minister in Dobson, N.C., kept them tucked away as well.

Realizing his own advancing age and declining health in 2012, Joseph Corsbie wondered what to do with the ashes and told the story to relatives. A cousin, Mirinda Kossoff of Durham, gave the ashes to Sharon Halperin of Chapel Hill, a daughter of Holocaust survivors who had helped organize a Holocaust Speakers Bureau.

Halperin’s husband, Edward, is chancellor of the New York Medical College. He had the ashes analyzed by that city’s medical examiner, who confirmed that they were human remains. With Corsbie’s consent, arrangements were made for their interment in a Jewish cemetery ...

[Skittles]

1. not sure why he waited to do the right thing with the ashes

?

[struggle4progress]

2. Dunno. Mebbe he got home from the war, didn't ever have any good ideas

about what to do with the remains, found the war painful to remember, tried to get on with his life, and just always had this in the back of his mind as some duty that had come to him unsought that he should try to perform some day

[japple]

3. Your answer is probably the right one. Thanks for doing better than anything

I came up with.