The Diary of an ‘Undesirable’

Latino USA

My Cultura, Futuro and iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1945, 20-year-old Anthony Acevedo was held in captivity with other American soldiers inside a Nazi concentration camp called Berga. There, the soldiers were used as slave laborers, building tunnels for underground fuel factories. It was during this time that the Mexican-American medic kept a secret diary and documented the horrors he witnessed inside the camp.

Acevedo held on to his war diary until 2010, when he donated it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. That same year, he registered as a Holocaust survivor with the museum—the first and only Mexican-American to do so.

This episode originally aired in May 2018.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Maria Inojosa and I am Penileira Mides.
0:03.0	And on this new series, we're going to get to know the most powerful Mexican government official ever to face trial in the US for his alleged ties to the infamous drug lord El Chapo.
0:16.0	But this is not your regular narco story.
0:19.0	It's like true crime meets telenovela.
0:22.0	This is our new series, USA versus Garcia Luna.
0:27.0	Find it whatever you get your podcasts and at futuroinvestigates.org.
0:40.0	Hola Latino USA listener, here's a show from our Archivos.
0:45.0	From futuro media and PRX, it's Latino USA, I'm Maria Inojosa.
0:54.0	Today, the story of the only Mexican American to register as a Holocaust survivor and the scars that stayed with him.
1:03.0	In October of 2010, a man in his late 80s walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and registered as a Holocaust survivor.
1:25.0	His name is Anthony Acebezo and he walked in with items including a Red Cross Arm Band, a Catholic prayer book, and most importantly, a tattered war diary with the pages still intact.
1:38.0	Anthony was one of 350 American soldiers who were imprisoned inside a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and then kept it a secret.
1:49.0	Throughout the story, you'll hear Anthony in his own words through an oral history that he recorded at the Holocaust Museum in 2010.
1:59.0	You'll also hear excerpts from his diary, which are read by an actor.
2:04.0	Producer, Janice Amolca, brings us the story now of Anthony Acebezo.
2:10.0	Anthony Acebezo grew up in a Mexican household in Pasadena, California, east of Los Angeles, and much of his childhood was pretty typical of the time.
2:19.0	He played with his cousins when to school, attended church.
2:22.0	But then one day in the mid-1930s, when Anthony was almost 10 years old, he noticed that all his family's furniture had been packed up.
2:30.0	So he asked his mom what was going on.
2:33.0	What's happened? Were you going? They said, no, we're all going. And they said, where are we going? We're going to Mexico.
2:41.0	And they said, why? Is it because we were told to leave the United States?
2:51.0	Anthony himself had been born in the US, but his parents, they were undocumented.
	...

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