By Deborah Layman
Birmingham actor Sam Chalker has played many roles in his 60 years on the stage, but his most recent role gave him the opportunity to meet the man whose life he was portraying.
As part of the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center’s annual “L’Chaim” (to life) event last month, Chalker was one of two members of The Seasoned Performers who told the stories of liberators of the Nazi camps in “What We Saw: In the Words of the Liberators.”
Chalker told the story of Travis Ray Carter of Marion County, who was a liberator of Buchenwald.
Ward Haarbauer told the story of the late J. George Mitnick of Jasper, a liberator of Dachau and father of Mountain Brook resident Ronne Hess. Haarbauer performed a reading of a letter Mr. Mitnick wrote to his family in 1945.
Chalker’s script was adapted from video recordings of Carter telling his story for the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center archives. To prepare for the role, Chalker watched excerpts of the videos.
“It wasn’t hard for me to become Travis Ray Carter,” Chalker said. “My wife’s uncle was in the war; he was a good old boy from Walker County. I was not unfamiliar with a man such as Mr. Carter.”
Carter served in the 512th Military Police in General Patton’s Third Army, which landed in France a few days after D-Day and proceeded to Belgium and then Germany. The Nazis were still in control of Buchenwald, a labor camp near the industrial city of Weimar. The Third Army took control of the camp and liberated the remaining prisoners, who had been treated brutally and were near starvation.
Carter and his fellow soldiers cared for the prisoners and forced the people of Weimar to go to Buchenwald to see the horrors they had willfully ignored for years.
Carter, a lifetime member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and past president of the Winfield Chamber of Commerce, now lives in Tuscaloosa with his son and daughter-in-law, who accompanied him to the Dorothy Jemison Day Theater at the Alabama School of Fine Arts for the “L’Chaim” event. After the performance of “What We Saw,” Carter told Chalker that he did a “good job” of telling his story.
“It was a pleasure and an honor to meet Mr. Carter and to talk to him,” said Chalker, a Vestavia Hills resident. “When Mr. Carter went to war, he was just a good old boy from Marion County, just 19 years old. I said to him, ‘It’s hard to imagine what you saw.’ He said, ‘You can’t imagine.’
“Mr. Carter’s story is so moving and so important. We need reminders of how terrible the Holocaust was so we never let it happen again.”
Chalker’s life on the stage began when he was five years old in Ensley. “A lady came to the neighborhood to teach ‘expression’ to the kids,” he said. “Our house had the largest living room, so we got our lessons for free.”
At Ensley High School, he studied speech and drama under Florence Pass. “I took every speech class that was offered. There are people my age all over Birmingham who came under the influence of Florence Pass at Ensley High School.”
After high school, Chalker started doing community theater in Birmingham. “I’ve been doing it ever since,” he said. Over the years, Chalker has appeared in productions by Birmingham Festival Theatre, Town & Gown Theater, Birmingham Children’s Theatre, Virginia Samford Theatre and The Seasoned Performers. In 2010, he starred as Morrie in the BFT production of “Tuesdays with Morrie.”
Chalker also got involved in radio at Ensley High School and received a degree in Radio Arts from the University of Alabama, where he was the voice of WUOA, the college radio station. In the 1970s, Chalker was an announcer on WBHM in Birmingham.
Now, as a Seasoned Reader with The Seasoned Performers, Chalker performs dramatic readings for audiences all over the state, “from kindergartens to retirement homes,” he said. He currently is reworking Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart” for the Halloween season. A favorite reading of Chalker’s is “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by his favorite poet, Dylan Thomas.
For information about The Seasoned Readers and the Seasoned Performers, visit www.seasonedperformers.org.
For information about the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center, visit www.bhamholocausteducation.org.
Editors note: The dramatic reading was written by Deborah Layman in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation. ϖ
