Looking Back

From the William Davidson Digital Archive of Jewish Detroit History 

accessible at thejewishnews.com

58 | SEPTEMBER 19 • 2024 
J
N

I 

heard an interesting story last 
week. Bob Koski, an audio 
expert and friend, was helping 
me with a video that will introduce 
the online version of the “Israel @ 
75” exhibit developed 
by the Detroit Jewish 
News Foundation last 
year (coming to the JN 
website soon!). 
Bob told me a 
story about his 
father as we worked 
on the recording. 
It was a saga with 
a profound lesson regarding the 
Holocaust. Although the Shoah 
was devastating for European Jews 
and their families in the diaspora, 
it also had a deep impact upon 
many other people, including 
American non-Jews. Case in point, 
consider Bob’s father, Edmund T. 
(Korczakowski) Koski (in 1954, he 
shortened his last name to Koski 
for easier spelling). 
Edmund Koski was a second-
generation Polish Catholic from 
Detroit who served in the 456th 
Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion in 
General Patton’s Third U.S. Army 
during World War II. He landed 
in Europe shortly after D-Day in 
June 1944 and fought in five major 
battles, earning a Purple Heart 
along the way. 
As much as his battlefield 
experience changed Koski’s life, 
another event had a more abiding, 
lifelong impact upon him. He was 
among the first American troops to 
see the infamous Nazi death camp, 
Dachau, after it was liberated by 
the U.S. Army on April 29, 1945. 
What Koski experienced at that 
moment deeply affected him. For 
the rest of his life, he was a strong 
advocate for Holocaust education 

for all. 
Dachau was one of the first 
Nazi concentration camps 
in Germany. Originally built 
in 1933 to imprison Hitler’s 
political opponents, along with 
Treblinka, Auschwitz and many 
others, Dachau became one 
of the infamous Nazi death 
camps. 

Long after seeing Dachau, 
Koski impressed upon his 
son, Bob, the horrors of the 
Holocaust. Edmund had 
acquired a handful of 
official Army images 
of Dachau from a 3rd 
Army Signal Corps 
photographer who 
hoped the photos would 
show people at home 
the atrocities of the 
Holocaust. 
Bob said that after his 
father showed him the 
photographs, “Those 
horrible images were 
permanently etched in 
my mind. I first viewed 
them as a 12-year-old. 
As my Dad showed them 
to me, he explained in 
detail the horrors he’d 
personally witnessed. I’ve 
never forgotten.” 
In the 1980s, Koski donated 
the photos directly to Rabbi 
Charles Rosenzweig, who was on 
his 20-year quest that resulted in 
today’s Zekelman Holocaust Center 
in Farmington Hills. 
Mark Mulder, director of 
Curatorial Affairs, explained that 
the archival collections at the 
Center have a number of images 
and footage from Dachau: “As you 
can imagine, the vast majority 
of those photos and collections 

come from U.S. soldiers 
who were at the camp at 
liberation or shortly after. 
They are typically accompanied 
by harrowing testimony of what 
it was like for those soldiers to 
be firsthand witnesses to Nazi 
atrocities.” 

The William Davidson Digital 
Archive of Jewish Detroit History 
also holds many stories of Dachau 
on more than 900 pages. The 
first reports related to the camp 
were published shortly after its 

liberation in 1945.
I appreciated Bob sharing the 
story of his father and Dachau. It 
is a sobering story, to be sure, but 
one that illustrates that the effects 
of the Holocaust are widespread 
and still felt today, never to be 
forgotten. 

Want to learn more? Go to the DJN archives 
 
at thejewishnews.com.

Mike Smith
Alene and 
Graham Landau 
Archivist Chair

LEFT: Edmund Koski at 
Michigan Central RR Station, 
Detroit, about to depart for 
Europe, 1944. BELOW: Son 
Bob Koski standing in the 
same spot as his dad, 2024.
Never Forgotten