Debra Cordy was packing up her childhood home when she found them: the small, wooden box and the envelope labeled, “Dachau,” written in her father’s handwriting.
Her father, William Elston, had rarely talked about his time on the European front during World War II before his death in 1983. He never told Cordy what he’d found at the liberated concentration camp. Like so many veterans before him, “he pushed his memories to the side and focused on his life back home,” Cordy says.
But Cordy knew exactly what was in the box. Her mother had told her in high school, at least 15 years after the war ended, how her father returned to the U.S. with a sacred reminder of the horrors he’d witnessed, the remains of a Holocaust victim from Dachau.
“She said they were still in the house, hidden in a safe place,” Cordy remembers. “For years I looked for these bones, wondering if they really existed.”
After decades of searching, Cordy and her sister found the remains two years ago as they cleared out their family’s New York home. Mindful of her father’s self-designated mission to preserve them as proof of atrocities that continue to affect us 70 years later, Cordy packed them up and drove them halfway across the country from upstate New York to her home in St. Louis, where she hoped the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center would know what to do next.
On Sunday, those remains found a final resting place between two trees in St. Louis at Chevra Kadisha Cemetery during a Jewish burial service overseen by Rabbi Yosef Landa, from the Chabad of Greater St. Louis.
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Photos by Chris J. Cross, courtesy of Jewish Federation of St. Louis
A special burial for the remains of a victim of the Holocaust.
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Debra Cordy, whose father brought the remains home from Dachau.
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What's left of a Holocaust concentration camp victim fits in this tiny box, now buried in a St. Louis cemetery.
“What I do believe is that my father brought these remains back as a reminder to the world that what he witnessed should never be allowed to happen again,” Cordy said during the burial. “My hope is that this can be used as a symbol of a time in history when the world promised, ‘Never again,’ and a reminder that prejudice and intolerance are not the answer for humanity.”
Dan Reich, curator at St. Louis’ Holocaust museum, says Cordy’s discovery is the first time he’s heard of a Holocaust museum handling newly discovered human remains.
“So many victims of the Holocaust were buried in mass graves or turned to ash,” Reich tells SLM. “Many people would feel uncomfortable having even a small amount of human remains in their home. Debra Cordy wanted the remains to be handled with dignity and respect.”
Technically, there’s no way to know whether the person whose remains now rest in St. Louis was Jewish since some political prisoners ended up in concentration camps, but Cordy says the traditional Jewish burial was a way to honor the person’s life and all unknown victims of the Holocaust. She thinks her parents, now both dead, would be happy to know where the remains are now.
During the burial, Cordy recalled a line from one of her father’s letters to her mother from World War II:
“It was quite a thrill seeing the Statue of Liberty as we left the harbor, but it will be a much greater one when we see it again coming the other way.”
Contact Lindsay Toler by an email at LToler@stlmag.com or on Twitter @StLouisLindsay. For more from St. Louis Magazine, subscribe or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
