Samuel Goetz, Holocaust studies advocate, dies

LOS ANGELES -- Samuel Goetz was 14 when the Nazis rounded up Jews in his hometown of Tarnow, Poland, and killed thousands of them -- his parents included -- in the gas chambers at Belzec in southeast Poland.

A few months later, he, too, was forced out of Tarnow and into the first of several Nazi labor camps in Eastern Europe. "I thought often [about] how I'm going to die," he recalled in a 1999 CNN interview, "whether it's going to be a bullet, would it hurt. I really did not know."

Instead, he was among the survivors. But unlike many Holocaust survivors, he didn't try to bury the nightmarish experiences or let them bury him in anger or bitterness. He told his children about what had happened to Jews during the war. And then he decided he had to do more.

An early advocate of Holocaust education in the United States, Goetz became a prime force behind the creation of a Holocaust studies chair at the University of California, Los Angeles, the first at a public university in the United States.

An optometrist for 50 years, Goetz, 85, died of pancreatic cancer Oct. 24 at his Los Angeles home, said his wife, Gertrude.

His ophthalmologist son, Joseph Goetz, recalled that when he was growing up his father "was always quite open about sharing what happened" during the Holocaust. But it was not until the 1970s that the survivor's desire to preserve the era's brutal history became his urgent cause.

During the 1970s, the Holocaust denial movement gained momentum, with books and other materials contesting the Nazis' murder of 6 million Jews during the war. Some of the material was written by academics at respected universities.

"When these Holocaust deniers began to surface, with all their talk about the 'lies of the 6 million' . . . I couldn't keep quiet," Goetz recalled in a 2005 interview. "I said education is the only way we can leave our legacy."

Goetz was active in the 1939 Club, which takes its name from the year Hitler's army invaded Poland and is one of the largest Holocaust survivors groups in the world. Goetz, who had served as the club's president in the mid-1960s, proposed that it raise funds to help UCLA establish a chair in Holocaust studies.

The chair was created in 1979 and helped turn the university into a center for Jewish studies.

"Sam was the central person in the 1939 Club who . . . [recognized] that teaching that history could be a kind of response to the widening revisionism that was spreading in Southern California," said Saul Friedlander, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who was named to the chair in 1987.

Although not an academic, Goetz "had an encyclopedic command of the scholarship on the Holocaust," said David Myers, chairman of UCLA's history department. "He read everything that came out. It lent a depth to his own account that made him different from most other survivors I met."