COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - People placed stones atop a granite memorial in a cemetery off Trenholm Road. The stones were a reminder that the dead are not forgotten and live on in the memory and lives of those placing the rocks, Rabbi Hesh Epstein said.
The stones are white and brown, some gray, and the memorial stands about waist high. Carved into the granite is a yellow Star of David, marking this as a memorial to a Jewish family.
“May the souls of the family members of Jadzia and Ben Stern, who perished from the brutal hands of the Nazis in the Holocaust, be forever remembered,” the memorial reads.
It lists the names of Jadzia and Ben’s parents and siblings.
But the ashes and tiny pieces of bones that were being buried on Sunday weren’t known family members of Jadzia and Ben.
No one at the ceremony knew the person or people whose cremated remains filled the cardboard cylinder that was about the size of a pill bottle.
The only clue to the ashes’ origins was a message written on the container:
“These ashes was taken from the crematory at Dachau, Germany on 11 Feb. 1945. Prisoners were burned in the oven that these ashes were taken from, small portions of bones remains.”
The story of how the ashes came to be buried in Columbia 75 years later and about 4,600 miles from Dachau is intertwined with the life of John J. Bouknight, a South Carolina man from the Dutch Fork area who served in World War II and helped track down Nazi officers to bring them to justice, according to his family.
As his grandchildren organized his belongings, they discovered the box of ashes.
‘SADNESS IN HIS FACE’
Daniel Bouknight and his sister were cleaning their grandfather’s house in November when she found the container in a closet.
The inscriptions on the box of ashes referenced one of the first and largest concentration camps the Nazis operated at Dachau, Germany, about 10 miles north of Munich. Jews and others were interned and forced to work and live in inhumane conditions, resulting in death by disease and malnutrition for ten of thousands of people, historians estimate. Nazis murdered thousands in executions and marches to and from Dachau.
Many of the bodies of those who died were incinerated in brick crematoriums, which can still be seen at a Dachau memorial site in Germany. The ashes Bouknight kept in his closet were said to come from one of these crematoriums.
How and when Bouknight came to have the ashes is unknown to his family. The Army deployed him to Germany months after the inscription on the box. His family does know some about his experience in World War II.
Bouknight spoke little about his time as a U.S. soldier in Germany, his family said. Over the years, his family has pieced together some of his military history.
At 18 years old, Bouknight joined the Army in 1945 as the war neared its end, his grandchildren said. By the time he was done with basic training, Allies had won the war in Europe. The Army disbanded most of the unit that Bouknight was part of, according to his family, but he was one of a few soldiers in the unit sent to Germany.
He landed in northern Germany in December 1945, his grandchildren said. He likely arrived in Dachau, which is in southern Germany, not long after he landed.
The Army assigned him to a unit tasked with tracking down Nazi officers and bringing them back to Nuremberg and Dachau, where they would be imprisoned to await trial.
Bouknight might have been part of an artillery unit, as some records indicate he worked on tanks and other heavy equipment, his family said. As part of the American and Allied forces, he also helped watch over food supplies for German civilians.
While Bouknight’s time in Germany and Dachau remained veiled, what he experienced there - the inhumanity and desolation he saw - affected him, his grandson Daniel believes.
Later in life, in the few moments Bouknight spoke about Dachau, “there was sadness in his face,” Daniel said.
The family believes the impact Dachau had on him may be the reason he never mentioned the container of ashes. It was too difficult for him to talk about his experience.
His grandfather did tell one story about Germany enough times for Daniel to recall.
A German boy stole some food rations from him, Daniel remembered his grandfather telling. He caught up with the boy and brought him back to the officers. The officers said it was up to Bouknight what was to be done with the boy. In a time when soldiers had been hardened by war, Bouknight simply took the boy home to his mother. Then for weeks, the boy’s mother kept bringing Bouknight food and gifts for bringing her son home.
CARRIED IN A POCKET
Daniel Bouknight described his grandfather as the “most moral man I knew.”
He was a person of high character who rejected bigotry and racism, which Daniel believes came from his grandfather’s experience in World War II. He taught his grandchildren to be the same way. He was humble about his war experience and in life.
When he returned to the United States from Germany following a vehicle crash that nearly killed him, he went to work at Olympia Mills, his family said.
He also began painting. But he was color blind. The first trees he painted were blue, Daniel said. Bouknight’s wife started getting the colors ready for him.
In 1989, The State wrote about Bouknight and his paintings. The reporter noted his humility, saying he was humble about an upcoming exhibit.
“I just hope people will like what they see,” Bouknight said about the exhibit.
Thousands of his paintings hung in people’s home, the article said.
Over the years, Bouknight’s family found out about acts of kindness he had done without telling hardly anyone. He had given land he owned in North Carolina to someone and given a house to a relative. He bought groceries every week at a farmer’s market and gave them away to others at the post office in Chapin.
“He’s always been a giving person,” Bouknight’s wife, Janie, told The State in the 1989 article.
When the grandchildren found the ashes, they worried their grandfather may have done something wrong - that keeping the ashes was disrespectful to the dead.
The grandchildren reached out to Rabbi Hesh Epstein of the Chabad of South Carolina in Columbia, which is the local chapter of the world’s largest Jewish educational organization.
“I think he Googled ‘Rabbis,’” Epstein said with a laugh.
Actually, Daniel searched “Synagogues near me.”
Epstein relieved their fears about their grandfather doing wrong. He had done something great by keeping the ashes, Epstein told them. This was an opportunity to give a person or people the last rites they likely never received.
Families finding the remains of Dachau victims in the belongings of relatives who served World War II is not unheard of. In 2014 and 2016, families had ceremonies for newly discovered remains in North Carolina and St. Louis.
Epstein had to find a place to bury the ashes that the Bouknight family brought to him.
He thought of the Beth Shalom Cemetery, a Jewish burial site in Arcadia Lakes associated with the synagogue of the same name. There, a plaque dedicates the cemetery “In loving memory of the six million who perished in the Holocaust.”
That plaque was erected by Jadzia and Ben Stern about 25 years ago, said Dr. Lilly Filler, the daughter of Jadzia and Ben and chair of the South Carolina Council of The Holocaust, a state government agency that teaches about the Jewish genocide.
In 2010, Filler and her siblings had the Holocaust monument with the yellow Star of David created to memorialize members of their family who were known and those who they never knew.
The monument memorializes Filler’s parents, who survived the Holocaust. It also honors her four grandparents and seven aunts and uncles who died in the Holocaust, family she never knew.
The grounds near her family’s memorial were a proper place for others she did not know, Filler said.
The monument she and her siblings erected, while dedicated to their Jewish family, acknowledges the many others killed by the Nazis, Filler said.
“This day we renew the bonds that bind us to those who have gone the way of all the Earth,” the monument reads on its back. “As we reflect upon those whose memory moves us this day, we seek consolation and strength. They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind.”
Like the ashes of the unknown, Filler’s father was imprisoned for a time in part of the sprawling Dachau concentration camp until it was liberated in April 1945.
Epstein and Filler arranged through Beth Shalom Synagogue to have the ashes of the unknown buried at the memorial.
Carrying the container of ashes in his pocket to the cemetery, Epstein said he felt like he was carrying the historical burden of the Holocaust and great responsibility.
With a crowd of about 50 people, Rabbi Epstein along with Rabbi Jonathan Case of Beth Shalom Synagogue held a Jewish burial service for the ashes.
They spoke Psalms, recited a memorial prayer for Holocaust victims and said the Kaddish, a burial prayer, “as if everybody there was a direct relative and mourning the people represented by the ashes,” Epstein said.
“For some unknown reason, we were chosen by Providence and the kindness of strangers who are strangers no more to find you and lay you to rest among your people. You are home, and we are grateful,” Rabbi Epstein said.
The Rabbis poured the ashes into the small grave. Everyone covered the grave with earth at the end.
Filler called the memorial a “once in a lifetime” ceremony for her to be a part of and said it was beautiful that the ashes of the unknown received a “proper and respectful burial.”
People willing to give their time and hearts to an unknown person - it reminded him of something his grandfather would do, Daniel Bouknight said.
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