Holy Names Sister Mary Steinkamp with Maria Gascon.
Sentinel photo by Ed Langlois
Caution: Some of the descriptions in this story may not be appropriate for young children.
In 1944, at Camp Stutthof in northeast Germany, SS commanders forced a 16-year-old Polish captive to hold the heads of Jewish parents steady so they would see their children mutilated in so-called medical experiments.
Maria Haluschkewych literally was sickened by the task, but would have been shot had she refused. Other prisoners, even more cursed, were compelled to hold down the children while doctors plunged scalpels into the young bellies and chests, removing beating hearts and warm livers.
When she remembers it, Maria Haluschkewych Gascon, now 80, feels cold all over. Even today, when she hears fretful children during Mass, the horrid, gory scene flashes back and again she feels the urge to vomit.
To survive, Gascon has let go of the hate she felt during those moments 64 years ago. She has turned the experience over to God. But she’s also had it written down so no one will forget.
With the help of Holy Names Sister Mary Steinkamp, Gascon has published a 63-page book that tells her remarkable life story with clarity.
Born in 1928 in Poland, Gascon is the daughter of a kindly and deeply religious Catholic farmer. When she was an infant, the family moved to a village in Ukraine near the Black Sea.
She grew up on a 200-acre farm and played in the fields and barns with her neighbor friend. The girls sometimes got into mischief, like the time they swiped a warm loaf of bread meant to feed the farm workers. She had a pet pig named Pinky.
But the halcyon days were about to end.
In 1937, Stalinist police raided the farm, claiming it for the Communist state. Maria’s father was arrested because of his Catholic writing and was never heard from again. “I would never hear his hearty laugh or feel him swing me up on his strong shoulders,” Maria writes.
Religion disappeared from the family, for fear of punishment. But in 1939, young Maria found a secret stash of her brother’s Catholic books and had a spiritual awakening, feeling that Jesus and Mary were offering their love to her. She began praying every day and even snuck out to early services at the local Orthodox church. She had dreams that included crosses and snakes.
Meantime, Nazi ambitions were building pressure in Europe. Jews were executed in the Ukrainian village or carted off. Villagers were brought out to watch the killing as a lesson. It was all too much for young Maria. She decided that she must “forgive on the spot” and let God take care of matters.
By 1941, young Maria had been pressed into service as a cook for Czech soldiers, the first of many jobs she would be forced to perform over the next four years. German and Russian troops waged horrendous battles in the region.
When the Germans gained the upper hand, they seized Maria and a friend and put them on a cattle train to Poland to work in the wheat fields. She later became a cook again and saved the life of her mother, slated to be executed, by cooking the commander’s favorite dinner and making a personal appeal. But Maria gives credit to Mary.
Transported to Auschwitz, the family was in line for the gas chamber when new orders came through and German soldiers broke in and took them to another work camp in Poland. Next, they were taken to Camp Stutthof.
While most of the prisoners at Stutthof were non-Jews like Maria, there were some Polish Jews interned there.
“We prayed more than we ate,” Maria writes of the place.
She spoke German, Russian and Polish, so the SS often called upon her to translate.
The lice grew almost an inch long because they had so much to eat. Soldiers shaved the prisoners’ hair and doused them with DDT to control the vermin.
As Maria walked back from the apple orchards, where she picked food to aid the Nazi army, she often came across starving prisoners, cast on the roadside to die. She is still haunted by the eyes of one starving man.
She once tried to sneak a piece of bread to a starving 30-year-old Jewess in the next cell block. But other prisoners rushed in, beat the rail-thin woman and took the bread for themselves.
She did meet some kindly soldiers, like the German who gave her portions of his sandwiches. But mostly, she says, life in the camps was “upside down,” with human dignity buried below brutality.
Reportedly, Stutthoff began to process human remains into soap, leather and book covers. Stutthof was also known for horrific medical procedures and experiments, something Maria can verify.
After an Allied bombing in 1945, American troops came to liberate Stutthof and brought food, including candy. The chocolate made Maria ill, but the freedom brought incomparable joy.
She ended up marrying a G.I., a slim brown-eyed farm boy from Walla Walla named Herbert Gascon. The pair moved back to the Northwest and had four children.
Over the years, Maria has reported dreams in which Mary gives comfort or warning. The night before her husband died, she had a dream with Mary dressed in black. She warned her husband not to set off in his truck toward Bend that day, but he did and died in an accident.
She raised her teen children alone after that, fixing up a house just across the street from The Madeleine Church in Northeast Portland. Going to Mass has become the height of her existence, along with raising grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Gascon’s life, faith profiled in book
Several hundred copies of the book Maria: A True Story of Faith and Forgiveness (Guardian Books, 64 pages) have sold, with $10 of the price going to fund missions of the Holy Names Sisters in Lesotho in southern Africa.
The author, Sister Mary Steinkamp, met Maria Gascon at The Madeleine Parish and was taken by the story of the Nazi work camp survivor.
The book is now available for sale at The Madeleine, Holy Rosary and St. Sharbel parishes in Portland.
In her scrubbed-clean prose, Sister Mary has also written about her choice to remain in religious life when many others departed. One Who Stayed is published by Essence Publishing.
She is now working on a book about a family that adopted three children and only later discovered the youngsters had been born to a drug-using mother and bore some ill effects.
