Honoring the wishes of her WWII father

Nothing, including a car fire, stops a Eugene woman from telling people about Dachau

What was left of Clarice Wilsey’s Subaru sedan after the March 7, 2024, fire — while she was en route to McMinnville to give a speech

Note: Eighty years ago Tuesday (April 29), U.S. soldiers liberated the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. Among those men was Dr. David Wilsey, an anesthesiologist with the 116th Evacuation Hospital. Wilsey’s daughter, Clarice Wilsey, recently retired after 20 years as the associate director and senior career counselor at the University of Oregon Career Center. The Eugene woman is the author of Letters from Dachau: A Father’s Witness of War, a Daughter’s Dream of Peace. This is her story. Their story.

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ON THE MORNING of March 7, 2024, Clarice Wilsey, 76 at the time, was on Interstate 5, headed to McMinnville to speak on the Holocaust, when it happened: Her 2005 Subaru sedan caught fire. She pulled over to recalibrate her phone’s GPS app when she saw white smoke billowing beneath the front hood.

She hurried out of the car and instinctively called her contact for the McMinnville talk to tell her she might be late.

“Have you called 911?” the contact asked.

“No.”

Red flames now flared skyward from the hood.

“Lady,” said a guy who pulled his pickup to the side of the freeway, “get away from the car. It’s gonna blow!”

Clarice backed up and called 911. The Salem Fire Department arrived to extinguish the fire, which had fully engulfed the vehicle. An Oregon State Police officer took her to its headquarters, where Clarice’s McMinnville contact picked her up.

Although the computer with her laptop presentation was fried, her nerves jangled, and her car totaled, she gave the speech.

“It went well,” she said.

IT WOULD BE an understatement to say that Clarice Wilsey is committed to carrying on her father’s encouragement to keep reminding the world of the atrocities of Dachau; yes, she did call her contact person before she called 911.

Since her book, Letters to Dachau, came out in 2020 — I was privileged to help her write it — Wilsey has given more than 150 talks around the country on the Holocaust. She’s now in Spokane, giving 11 talks.

Clarice, age 3, and her father in Spokane, 1950.

Why? After 43 years in higher education at five universities, why not kick back, relax and enjoy her retirement years? Because she believes she’s been called to be her father’s voice about Dachau since he and her mother never talked about the atrocities

Her story begins in 1953. As a 6-year-old in Spokane, Clarice came across photos of, as she says in the book, “dead people with no clothes on, stacked in piles.”

“Clarice!” her father said, grabbing them from her hand. “Little girls shouldn’t see these!”

She never forgot what she saw.