(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)October 12, 2014

(MAHWAH, NJ) –Rasheeda S. Sampson-Jefferson, singer, actress, dancer, choreographer and Adjunct Professor of Dance at Bloomfield College, delivered a talk entitled “One of the Black Angels: My Father, A Soldier and Liberator of Buchenwald Concentration Camp” at Ramapo College of New Jersey on September 11, 2014 under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

She shared the story of how, on April 11, 1945, her father, Otto Sampson Sr., a member of the 380th Quartermaster Company of the U.S. 4th Armored Division, became involved in setting free and tending to Jewish inmates at one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. Based on a 1999 interview that she conducted with her father, her presentation made it clear that the experience was a painful one on several levels. On the one hand, there was the horror of what he and his fellow GIs encountered at Buchenwald. On the other, there was the bitterness and humiliation of serving in a segregated unit of the U.S. Army in which discrimination and racism went hand-in-hand with fighting to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny.

Ms. Sampson-Jefferson only discovered her father’s role in history by chance. On one of her Sunday visits with him a television program about a ceremony honoring African-American liberators was on the air. Otto Sampson rose trembling from his chair exclaiming that he was there. Correspondence with the Department of Defense confirmed his story and eventually Mr. Sampson, too, was honored for an experience that he understandably repressed for so many years.

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