Georgetown Loop Railroad
Bull & Bush
Never Let Hate Take Root In Your Heart
Holocaust Survivor Shares Memories And Advice
by Ruthy Wexler
At 98, Jack Welner’s face shines with the eager ebullience of a 6-year-old. His eyes twinkle with fun. That’s the kind of boy Welner was back in Lodz, Poland — helpful, fun-loving, excited about life — and by all accounts, that’s the kind of man he became. In between, however, came the Holocaust, and — because Welner is Jewish — unimaginable suffering.
Through Auschwitz, Dachau, labor camps, a death march — how, people ask, did you stay the same person? Looking back over the years, Welner explains how he kept bitterness out of his heart and held onto the twinkle in his eye.
Take This, You’ll Need It
It’s not that Welner forgot what happened. He shares memories so vivid, you are there: watching how fast the Germans turn a corner of Lodz into a barbed wire ghetto; seeing guards shoot Jews in the ghetto streets “just for practice”; pretending — along with the seven other family members crammed into one room with no toilet or running water — that the beet leaves your mother salted and fried taste just like herring.
“We were starving [in the ghetto],” recalls Welner. “Just before we got on the train [for Auschwitz], we got a little piece of bread. Late that night, we arrived. I helped mother down from the train. She still had her bread. She pushed it into my hand. ‘Here. Take this. You’ll need it.’”
Welner’s eyes fill with tears. “Those were the last words my mother said to me.”
Look For Luck
After the war, when Welner was in a safer place — Denver, CO! — and heard “even a little bit of antisemitism” he’d speak up. “I left Poland to get rid of SOBs like you, so you better shut up.”
“Later,” he adds, “we’d become friends.”
But back when hatred of Jews was law, Welner searched for small ways to survive. In a labor camp near Dachau, a guard kept beating Welner with a 2×4 so brutally, “I knew I would die if he kept it up … so I sank to the ground and began crying. Not so much from pain, but I had to … do something.”
Welner adds emphatically: “In my mind, I was saying, ‘I will survive you, you SOB!’”
Later on in that camp, “… my luck changed. A machine operator took a liking to me. I was suffering from an ulcer. He let me lie down. He brought me rinds of bread to eat.
“He saved my life,” concludes Welner, who, after the war, traveled twice to Munich to bring food to that guard.
Welner was still able to feel empathy.
Many had lost that capacity.
“I had a cousin, blonde, she survived by working as a maid in a Warsaw hotel, disguised as a Christian,” Welner recalls. “When the [Warsaw] ghetto was burning, someone laughed, ‘Look, the bedbugs are frying.’ Her family was inside that ghetto and she had to stand there, crying, saying nothing …”
Welner shakes his head. He tells how, upon arriving back in Lodz after being liberated, the first words he heard from a Christian were, “Oh, a lot of you Jews are still alive.”
L’Chaim (To Life)
Welner shares such memories seriously, like one delivering a valuable package. Now one more person knows and will not forget. But he is not inclined to dwell on or analyze the horror. Asked about antisemitism, Welner shrugs. “That’s how it was. Always the Jew was the scapegoat.”
When the subject turns, however, to his three children, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, Welner’s face lights up like a 100-candle birthday cake. He enthuses at length about each one. It glows when he converses about travel or music. And when he sings.
Welner loves to sing.
“I love Italian,” he rhapsodizes. “I still remember songs from Italy [where he was in a DP camp].”
In the ghetto, Welner recalls, there was a Jewish composer who wrote satiric songs. Welner sings one in Yiddish, then translates: “Such a disaster, you have to eat every day, the stomach always wants more and more…
“We needed to laugh,” he recalls.
Welner adores jokes. Laughing uproariously (but never ruining the punch line), Welner tells a joke about the cow from Minsk. The farmer and the bull. The one where two friends enter a bakery: “‘Moishe, look at that wonderful bagel!’ ‘Oh, but it’s got a big hole in the middle!”’
Optimist
“I see the bagel, not the hole,” Welner explains. “I’m an optimist.”
At 31, Welner anticipated a happy future when he met a beautiful girl, Adele. They married and moved to Denver. Seven years later, Adele died, leaving Welner with three small children and a broken heart.
Welner moved to Israel for five years to be near his sisters, then back to Denver, where he worked as a carpenter and raised his kids. Despite the disappointment of a subsequent marriage not working out, “My father always enjoyed life,” recalls Welner’s daughter Beverly. “Our home was filled with love and laughter.”
As a Holocaust Survivor, Welner spoke to schools and groups in Denver and surrounding areas. Then in 1995, the Shoah Foundation sent Lori Goldberg to interview Welner.
The two connected.
“We became best friends, sharing life’s joys and challenges,” says Goldberg, who, coincidentally, in the first years of their relationship, saw Welner on Tuesdays.
“He was my Morrie,” she says, alluding to the book, Tuesdays with Morrie. “From Jack, I learned about courage, resiliency, hope, and love.”
My Motto
“Jack has taught me, no matter how difficult life can be, one should never give up hope, one should never stop loving,” said Goldberg.
“My motto,” Welner says, “is, ‘Don’t let the past ruin your future. If you live in the past, you don’t have a future.’”
“I receive so much more from Jack than I could ever give,” says Welner’s caregiver, Linda Chambers. “It is an honor to know him. He will not allow hate to grow in his heart.”
Runoff Race For Mayor
Hancock Campaign Goes Hyper Negative
by Glen Richardson
In the May 7 Denver Municipal Election two-time incumbent Mayor Michael Hancock received only 38.65% of the vote and his prior pledge to not campaign negatively went very much out the window. Led by the Brownstein Farber Law Firm, the lobbying firm CRL Associates, Colorado Concern and myriad “high-density developers,” money has poured into the Hancock campaign to muddy up political neophyte Jamie Giellis who finished second with 24.86% of the vote.
Hancock had hoped, and expected, to receive over 50% of the vote and had only run positive ads about himself and his affability, which apparently was not effective as over 60% of Denver voters voted for someone other than Hancock. After election night, two other main challengers Lisa Calderón and Penfield Tate endorsed Giellis. Hancock, in response, garnered the support of former mayors Wellington Webb and John Hickenlooper.
Giellis, who had never run for political office before, appeared shocked at first by the Hancock onslaught and appeared ill-prepared for the inevitable claim by the Hancock forces that she was a “racist.” Giellis had appeared on the Brother Jeff Fard’s radio show and did not correctly identify what each of the letters in the acronym NAACP stood for. The failure to correctly identify each of the letters made national news.
Not being a seasoned politician, Giellis did not scrub all of her social media when she entered the mayor’s race, and what she asserts are seemingly innocent observations were recast as being “racist.” Her notation that in some cities there were seemingly few Chinese in today’s Chinatowns was claimed to be anti-Asian. A tweet for a “meet & greet fundraiser at La Cocinita for a nacho/taco bar, lowriders, and a conversation about Denver on May 16” was declared by the Hancock campaign to be anti-Hispanic even though the event was titled such by the owner of La Cocinita restaurant, a Hispanic, and not Giellis.
On Saturday, before the ballots went out on May 20, Hancock began television ads which stated, “like Trump, (Giellis) called undocumented immigrants criminals.” A Denver Post fact checker reputed the claim but the ad has appeared to be effective even if apparently dishonest.
Giellis did, however, appear to rebound. Lacking money for television ads she had a press conference where she accused Hancock of fostering a “poisonous culture” of sexual harassment with graphs showing Denver taxpayers paying nearly $1.5 million in settlements and legal fees during Hancock’s eight years in office.
A review of where each of the candidates performed best in the May 7 election shows that Giellis performed best in the areas where many developers had inserted projects, often against the wishes of the surrounding neighborhoods, including Cherry Creek, Hilltop, Crestmoor, Country Club and Virginia Village. Hancock performed best in his northeast Denver home turf as well as outlying areas where high-density development has not yet occurred.
A major bone of contention between the candidates is the issue of homelessness. Both opposed and voted against Initiative 300 the so-called “Right to Survive” ballot issue which went down to a crushing defeat. Hancock supports the “camping ban” that prevents camping overnight on city property. Giellis does not support the ban as she believes all it does is try to sanitize downtown and push the homeless into the local neighborhoods. She proposes a combination of designated campsites in sanitary locations along with tiny home locations to address the problems of homelessness.
Hancock, with a massive fundraising advantage, hopes that his name recognition and advertising campaign will win out in the end. Giellis, who personally toured every neighborhood in Denver, hopes her person-to-person campaigning will defeat what she views as a cynical negative advertising blitz being relied on by the mayor.
The last time an incumbent mayor lost in Denver was in 1983 when a young Federico Peña defeated 74-year-old incumbent Bill McNichols. Hancock is deemed the favorite, notwithstanding getting less than 40% of the vote in the first round. Almost 40% of the Denver electorate turned out in the first round which was far higher than expected. The higher the turnout the better the chances of the challenger, according to experts, as citizens happy with the status quo often tend not to vote.
The runoff election is set for June 4, 2019, and ballots have already been mailed by the City and County of Denver.
Initiated Ordinance 302 And Council Runoffs Will Help Determine Denver’s Future
by Glen Richardson
While the runoff for the next Mayor of Denver has taken most of the media attention, there are five runoff spots for City Council as well as the City Clerk and Recorder position on the June 4 ballot. In addition, there is a vote on Initiated Ordinance 302 which would mandate voter approval before Denver spends money on trying to lure the Winter Olympics to the city. The proposition was not on the May 7 ballot as the necessary petitions were not turned in until after the day for inclusion in that voting.
The Council runoff races are in Districts 1 (the Highlands and Federal Boulevard area in North Denver), District 3 (West Denver including Sloan’s Lake), District 5 (Central Southeast Denver including Hilltop and Crestmoor), District 9 (Downtown Denver and Five Points, and District 10 (Cherry Creek and Country Club). Three of the races involve incumbents (Districts 5, 9, and 10) which is abnormally high in a city that has upset an incumbent only once in the last three-and-one-half decades (Espinoza over Shepherd in District 1 in 2015). This indicates, according to some, a high level of unhappiness on how growth has been managed in the City and County of Denver during Michael Hancock’s eight years in office, which the City Council in large part controls.
In the runoff for City Clerk and Recorder, term-limited City Councilman Paul Lopez drew only 37% of the vote in the first round which surprised many election observers given his high name recognition. His personal backing of a massive Sloan’s Lake development has been his anathema to some voters. Others attribute Lopez’s poor showing to a disastrous debate performance against Peg Perl who appeared to be highly qualified for the position, while Lopez came across, at best, as amiable but incompetent for the position.
Another surprise in the first round was the showing in District 9 of Councilman Albus Brooks who is deemed by many the heir apparent to Mayor Hancock. He bested challenger Candi CdeBaca in the first round by only 45% to 43%. Voters appeared upset by Brooks being too close to the business group the Downtown Denver Partnership and high-density developers. New developments in the district have forced many African American families who have lived in the district for generations out of Denver.
In District 10 incumbent Wayne New received 39% of the round on May 7 while challenger Chris Hines attracted 30% of the vote. Some felt New did not do enough to challenge Mayor Hancock on myriad issues in his first term, but many fear Hines will be little more than a puppet for developers if he were to get into office.
In Council District 1 the leader of control growth on the Council, Rafael Espinoza elected not to run for a second term after upsetting incumbent Susan Shepherd in 2015. He indicated he could do more outside of Council to encourage reasonable and beneficial growth, and strongly backed his top aide Amanda Sandoval. She is in a runoff with Denver Fire Department Lieutenant Mike Somma who is counting on massive union support for his runoff bid. While unions often do not heavily participate in first round elections they do often throw in their money and manpower for runoffs.
In Council District 3 where incumbent Paul Lopez was term-limited, immigrant rights activist Jamie Torres was the top vote getter in round one with 40% while longtime community leader Veronica Barela received 36%. The vote may depend on the massive Sloan’s Lake development pushed by Paul Lopez and Brownstein Farber Law Firm that is opposed by Barela and many residents.
The only incumbent to fail to win or be the top vote getter in round one was Mary Beth Susman who attracted only 36% of the vote and was bested by political newcomer Amanda Sawyer. Susman is viewed as highly vulnerable for voting against residents’ wishes numerous times for high density development in her District.
A highly interesting side note is Initiated Ordinance 302 which would require a vote of Denver residents before using money or resources in an effort to obtain an Olympic bid. The measure was a result of an effort by Denver to host the 2020 Winter Games which eventually gave Salt Lake City the chance to potentially bid to host the 2030 Winter Games. While developers and some in the business community strongly backed the bid, it was largely opposed by many everyday citizens who saw no reason to spend potentially tens of millions to lure growth and more people to the Denver metro area. The vote is seen as a test of the popularity of rapid if not uncontrolled growth.
Election Day is June 4, 2019, but ballots were sent out by mail on May 20. In the first round the voting was slow up and until election day, May 7, when almost half of the final vote tally were turned in.
