The Valley of Death, The Armies of Life

THE VALLEY OF DEATH, THE ARMIES OF LIFE This mouth, liberators of the death and concentration camps will gather in Washington to remember, to warn—and to be thanked. "The bodies stacked like...

...New Jersey, where for some ten years, tike many Jews in the area, they engaged in chicken farming...
...The bodies stacked like cordwood...
...And so when we went into this place, I was totally unprepared, because I had no background, no frame of reference...
...After that first shock, you got over feeling that these were people any more...
...If we deny them help, we will have guilt to bear, we who already once in our time did not do things that we might have done that might have helped some Jews stay alive, be free...
...I was appalled...
...But I saw the arm move...
...The dead were all being put in one huge grave that the British had dug...
...And I walked into what looked like a place of incarceration, with towers on each end, and the place was well groomed, it looked pretty nice...
...Somebody has to tell them what it's all about without sugar-coating it...
...Then, too, there is a tremendous need for dealing with it right now...
...I just couldn't believe it...
...But I found out that the young people here had no knowledge of what had transpired in the world...
...While I was looking at all these things I saw figures sliding over the filthy floor at the other end of the room and as they game into the light I saw that they were men who were too ill to stand or even crawl and so they were carrying their mess tins in their mouths while they dragged themselves through the sewage on the floor toward the food kettle before the soup was all gone...
...School was not possible because of lack of money...
...It's a subtle approach...
...If, for example, a group of children from Iowa come to visit the museum, they should he able to identify the role that their parents played in bringing Nazi Germany to an end...
...our culture was Yiddish culture, European culture, for all practical purposes, the culture of the countries from which we came—Poland, or Hungary, or Czechoslovakia—and everyone carried his own cultural baggage...
...They sent pictures and letters and memorabilia recounting their experiences...
...Watching, I became aware that the tempo of everything inside the high wire enclosure was slow, like slow-motion, and I felt embarrassed at moving normally because wherever we looked we saw people who walked as if they were in pain, and they were bent from the shoulders forward, not from the back as with age, but as if bearing some insupportable burden...
...The British had fed them well that first day, it seemed, and their stomachs could not bear the shock of decent food and they got diarrhea and there is no doubt that many of them were so crazed by hunger that they ate themselves to death...
...Then you walked in, and it hit you between the eyes...
...We were at war, of course, and I decided that I would volunteer to go into the service because I wanted the experience, and there was nothing I wanted to get into outside...
...Crawford was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp...
...A truck was backed up to it like a garbage truck at an American dump and 33 guards were standing up high and swinging corpses back and forward and back and forward and then letting them go so that the bodies sailed far out toward the center of the hole...
...We saw the grave long before we reached it...
...I can't believe this...
...That response on the part of the bartender was more or less the response that one got from the German people as the war was coming to an end...
...The medics were wonderful, and the medical aides, seeing to it that the people were given things they could handle, like soup, to eat, and also medical care...
...I'd like to say something about Elie Wiesel's role in all this...
...But I had never seen such men as these...
...Leon Bass is Principal of Franklin High School in Philadelphia...
...It is not that their voices still crack as they remember, though that is so...
...Without it, there is no end to the Kingdom of Night...
...And he said, "I'd like to come, I wish I could, but I can't...
...We can't be content just with museums and archives...
...Belsen had been built originally by the Germans to hold just a few thousand prisoners but so many other camps had been either overrun or threatened by the Allied advance that an extra forty thousand had been shipped here where they would be safe deep inside Germany and people were sleeping in shfits and two or three to a bunk...
...We were in England for about a month...
...The British had to start somewhere and they started at the other end of the camp and they were just getting to this barracks and it was exactly as it had been left by the Germans...
...The dead hands and feet would dangle as the guards carried the rigid body to the truck and then they would swing it back and forth two or three times and when it had got enough momentum they would let it go and it would fly up through the air to the truck bed where it fell over other bodies that had already been loaded...
...And I filed the thing away, I guess, because it was so unpleasant...
...It was not every square yard but every square foot and sometimes almost every inch there were so many piles...
...Here an arm reaches out, as if in supplication— too late...
...The bodies were piled about four feet deep in the grave over the whole floor and they lay sprawled in every direction with the arms and legs spread or crossed or twisted as they fell, and some were facing down and some were facing up and some were staring straight into my eyes, and there were two thousand of them already in there...
...He walked around a bit, and then I saw him go over to the side of the road and vomit...
...And we also talked to Bedell Smith again, and he told us to reach Ike, and we did, and we told him of the stench of death, of the sight of people dying as you talked to them, of the living skeletons that none of us had dreamed of, of the cordwood of bodies, of the soap—all those incredible things, that none of us had imagined, that no one could have believed...
...You know, you hear something like this talked about and you say, "Oh no, that's impossible...
...On each side, lying so that the ends stood facing the road, were rows of unpainted, flimsy buildings, one story only, which were the notorious Belsen barracks...
...When people stand by while crimes are being committed, and they know that there are crimes, and they remain passive, their passivity is a crime of its very own...
...If you let them go, and you don't deal with them when they are small and controllable, there comes a time when you can't control them...
...neither the English language nor American habits were things that we could manage at the beginning...
...I got my photographers out of their trance and sent them back into the barracks so the Army would have a permanent record of what the Germans had done...
...And I was caught up in that very trying time...
...The Council would never have come to be if we hadn't had the opportunity to work under the chairmanship of Elie Wiesel...
...She was there when the war came and she carried messages for the Polish underground after the armies surrendered...
...I was a light colonel, attached to General Eisenhower's staff, and in a small town with a very small Catholic church, I approached the priest and asked whether we could "borrow" the church for Friday night services...
...They were so thin and so dried out that they might have been monkeys or plaster of Paris and you had to keep saying to yourself, these are human beings, and even when you said it your mind was not believing it because nothing like this had ever happened before and it just couldn't happen...
...That was a well-thought out position, and I argued like hell against it, but I couldn't budge them, even though I am sure they knew that real facts of what was happening—which we did not...
...each of the liberators uses the same words, for each it is the single most graphic memory...
...Not cordwood...
...there must have been 500...
...We must learn that if you don't have the courage to stand up to oppression in the beginning, there comes a time when you can't control it...
...Very few of us had any thoughts of survival...
...The death camps, the concentration camps, were rarely spoken of...
...Some, of course, never would...
...The eyewitness accounts will be from people from various countries, because, for instance, if you talk about Auschwitz or Maidenek or Theresienstadt, they were liberated by the Soviet army...
...The first group that was formed was the President's Commission on the Holocaust...
...She wore a dirty bandage around her throat that I wondered about and the lieutenant told me what he had learned...
...And, for this reason, the decision of the President of the United States, President Carter, to appoint a special commission under the chairmanship of Elie Wiesel, the poet laureate of the post-Holocaust era, was very important...
...No diversion from that purpose would be allowed...
...Talking, as I have these past weeks, with the people whose stories appear below, and with others of their kind—other liberators—/ have been deeply, deeply touched, moved, again and again, to tears...
...More and more, the American Jewish community came to realize that this was a part of their past just as it was a part of our past...
...In the morning, we will have eyewitness accounts...
...which is a small community with about 1000 Jewish families, we have maybe 500...
...And they were so emaciated...
...we've got to find a way to teach the lesson to new generations...
...He told us that his regiment had been pulled out of the battle to take care of the people in the camp...
...Their faces were indescribable because there were no cheeks or chin muscles but only skin and their lips were like paper tapes, and their bodies kept threshing about like animals out of the swamp age...
...the liberators of these camps are still alive...
...Eisenhower came about two hours after we spoke to him...
...Bear in mind that Buchenwald was, as far as I can recall, about eight or nine miles from where we were staying in Weimar...
...We went into the medical department and joined a line of soldiers who were being processed for duty in the camp and a sergeant took a pump that was an over-size Flit gun and blew white dust up our pant legs and sleeves, and down our necks...
...Some of their eyes were closed and that was terrible and some of their eyes were open and that was worse...
...The whole culture was strange to us...
...That about finishes it, I guess, except that my photographers did take the pictures we came for...
...LEON BASS I was graduated from high school in 1943...
...the next it was to enter Buchenwald, or Dachau, or another of those cursed places...
...We smelled it long before we got there, and then we walked through a plain door into a room about twelve feet high and forty feet long and twenty feet wide, and we saw that hundreds of men were jammed into the bunks that crowded every foot of space...
...Even among the survivors, in the beginning, we had a hard time...
...This was done to them...
...And then when I talked about the fact that there were so many camps—Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald—the youngsters walked up to her, shook her hand, engaged her in conversation and said they never knew, they had no way of knowing...
...He is not only the poet laureate of the post-Holocaust era, hut he is also a man who has dedicated himself to our work, who has been an inspiration to all of us...
...Crawford and his associates have done all this as volunteers, scratching for modest funds here and there Nor have the pressures been only financial...
...I saw the barracks where they jammed so many people in, and I saw the,cloth-ing outside of the crematorium, baby clothing too, which boggled the mind...
...Perhaps, he and his colleagues thought, they might find ten eyewitnesses to corroborate the testimony of the survivors themselves...
...I can't give you the full picture...
...by now, the story is familiar to most people...
...I saw the torture chambers, where they had the instruments, and the bloodstains were still there on the slabs and on the floor...
...Before the British came, this was also one of the choice jobs but not as good as working in the kitchen itself, but women sold their bodies cheap to be selected to peel the turnips that were their principal food, and they would slip pieces of turnip in their mouths when the guards weren't looking...
...They were going to uncover the salt mines where Goering had hidden all his treasures—gold, art, everything— and he'd not be available...
...And so.now we have a community that has begun to take the Holocaust very seriously, and now we have, at last, an official agency of the United States Government, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council...
...A man would be talking to you, and he would die in mid-sentence...
...So my experience was not as traumatic as other people's...
...And that's why I think the work of the Holocaust Memorial Council, on which I sit, is so important...
...and it's not only from generals...
...We will have nurses, war correspondents, priests, reverends, rabbis...
...All those faces looked alike...
...Finally, I got where I could see inside the grave and then I walked ahead until I could look straight out over and down into it and I didn't feel anything at all except Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Jesus Christ and I kept saying that to myself because I couldn't think of anything else...
...A lot of it concentrated on the Japanese...
...More than that—I never saw so many individuals die in my presence...
...As the American Jewish community came to be more identified with Israel, it came to realize that our yesterday and our today and our tomorrow are tightly interconnected...
...In my young life, even before I went into the army, in high school, I knew very little about the atrocities that were taking place in Eastern Europe...
...When a man can get nominated to run on a ticket somewhere out in the West, in California, and he is a white supremacist, he is a Nazi, he can run subscribing to these philosophies and he can come up a winner, that tells you it's not the guy in the sheets, it's the guy behind who sympathizes and endorses even if he won't come out and say so...
...they fell, as did the silver cross he wore...
...And it was this experience that was at the fountainhead of my great desire for the Jews to be able to return to their homeland, to have a country of their own...
...Because the truth must be documented...
...Right now, the way things are going, with the economy changing, you see a lot of things happening, and I think anti-Semitism is just one barometer to show you that, yes, there are racists that are still there...
...So it reaches for what it can comprehend...
...I remember walking down to the barracks—the inmates were still in their beds, too weak to get out...
...Outside of the memorial day, when we cried and lit a candle and said kaddish, we didn't know how to handle it, we didn't know how to handle it with our own children...
...what we want is a living experience, a center of documentation that will be built in the center of Washing-Ion...
...It was pretty close to the end of the war when we arrived at a base called Weimar, and we were bivouacked there, and it was at that time that I, along with some others—we were with what was called the Intelligence Recon-naisance Section of the Combat Engineers—were taken by the officer to a place that we had never been before, and this was Buchenwald...
...But despite their best efforts, scores of people died in my presence...
...You wanted to help and you did what you could but your clean American hands didn't want to touch them for they were alive with lice and their rags were soaked with drippings, and still you had to do something...
...My experience in the South was very devastating to me...
...I had been protected by being up North, and the subtle racism there never hit me...
...We went back to the central avenue and stopped at a different kitchen...
...MILES LfltMAN At the time of the Nazi occupation...
...Or they simply sank to the ground and huddled there like a heap of dirty clothes, so small and shapeless that the only way you knew it was a person was the face and the huge eyes that peered blankly at you...
...They were afraid to uncover it...
...I owe it to the kids, to those who I think need a fair shake...
...I-noticed that every foot or two square off the beaten path was spotted with human excrement...
...We drove the last mile to the camp with a British lieutenant of artillery...
...Now, 1 think the time is ripe...
...Or, perhaps, "cordwood" is merely our own inadequate effort to translate what the eye has beheld into a language the mind can comprehend...
...The limbs are recklessly askew, the bodies intertwine...
...Some of them were exhibits at the Nuremburg trials and elsewhere...
...fellows a great debt of thanks...
...For the 6.000,000 people who died, it doesn't make very much difference what we do...
...He was most gracious, and agreed readily, raising no objection to our covering over the Christian symbols in the church...
...This was a man's barracks...
...Bodies were stacked up on flat-bed trucks like cordwood...
...All of us believe that it is essential that we tell the story over and over again for future generations...
...I was a partisan...
...They wore prison clothes but they were plump and the lieutenant said that they were the regular camp cooks and the German guards had given these jobs to whoever would sleep with them and in that way some of the girls got enought to eat and sometimes they would steal from the kitchen and give it to their friends until the head guard found out what was going on and he beat a cook until he fractured her skull and she died...
...Someone had died in one of the barracks, and they just threw the body out...
...Some of the people did not move at all but stood transfixed against the wire that separated the buildings from the road, and their fingers were twisted into the steel links for support...
...Face after face looked exactly alike, as if all of them were twins in some sort of monstrous joke, and after a while I realized it was in the same way that skulls in a medical supply house look alike, only the difference here was that these skulls had skin on them and eyes but that was the only difference...
...This was one of three barracks that had not yet been reached by the workers...
...When a man died three or four of the strongest men in the room would try to get him down from his bunk and drag him outside, but sometimes they couldn't do even that and he stayed there for days...
...We are awaiting a formal reply from them, and I am quite confident that there will be Soviet participation...
...Most of us, back then, had to survive in a sort of cultural cocoon, being nourished on our past, living with Yiddish...
...And a body came through the window...
...We got back into the car and went to the British command post where I did everything I could because they needed all the help they could get, until another regiment was assigned to Belsen and a full hospital staff and that eased matters considerably...
...We noticed piles of something lying before each barracks, up against the fence beside each gate, and in a bit we came to a truck that was collecting these piles...
...in Vineland...
...So I go back a way, and I see people coming up for whom war means Vietnam, and I believe we've got to find a way to reach them with what happened before, because those lessons are so very important—the lesson that it can happen anywhere, and the lesson that we cannot allow it to...
...Eisenhower agreed to come, and I urged him to bring press people with him, and he came with one or two planeloads of people, that same day...
...It was a German army truck and the men working on it were wearing SS uniforms and a British soldier with a bayoneted rifle stood on the ground behind the truck directing them...
...But that makes the acts of kindness, of courage, of nobility, all the more important...
...Curtis Mitchell is a free-lance writer who lives in Florida...
...In the South, it became very overt...
...1 felt, from the beginning, that the memory had to be perpetuated, that the story should be kept alive for the sake of future generations...
...His wife...
...I guess the thing that really struck me was that if this could happen in what had been the most advanced country on the continent, in terms of science and technology, and, in years past, in culture, in music, art and all the other things that are supposed to add up to a good society, I said to myself it can happen anywhere...
...It was in the sector of front before the Canadian and British armies and it became apparent early in April of 1945 that the troops would sweep over it soon...
...And the survivor spoke, and she showed the tatoo, and she told about her family, and she spoke about the same things that IJjad seen...
...And yet you have today a very carefully orchestrated effort to deny the Holocaust...
...There will be other panels as well, and an important closing ceremony...
...It was such an awesome subject that people shied away from it...
...The interviews are painful...
...It would protect us for forty-eight hours...
...Chris, is a survivor of Auschwitz, and of the Death March, which commenced just before the Russian army reached Auschwitz...
...We feel that there is a redeeming value in pointing out that at a time of total darkness, there were some people—as few as they were—who had the courage, even at the risk of their own lives, of their own safety, to do something noble...
...Before that, I had been lulled into complete disbelief of the stories that we were just beginning to hear...
...You can become the victim, and worse yet, you can become the perpetrator...
...It was around that time, a week . or ten days after I heard the term "death camps" for the first time, that I saw in the map room that a division of ours was heading right towards Gotha, which was marked as a death camp...
...I tried to get General Bedell Smith to persuade Eisenhower to be there, but Smith told me that Eisenhower was meeting with Patton the next day...
...I landed at Utah Beach on July 4, 1944, and I remember just two days later giving what was probably the first sermon for American forces in France...
...They didn't realize that human suffering is universal, that nobody's excluded...
...If you had proposed a commission of this nature 25 years ago, I doubt anyone would have been receptive...
...And don't think that you can escape in this country where we feel that we have a democratic society...
...I wanted to make certain but the lieutenant said it was no use...
...I came out of there unable to deal with it...
...Nor did it take courage to weep upon encountering the dead, the dying, the barely alive...
...I feel very strongly about that...
...For the non-survivors, there was an educational process as they started reading and getting more factual information...
...It is an evil plan that they are designing...
...life was very kind to me in that I had the opportunity, even at the time of the Nazi occupation, to fight back and to repay in kind...
...They are dead: we cannot help them...
...Almost without exception, there was a profession of total ignorance about such things, that they existed, that the atrocities did occur...
...But President Roosevelt's view was that winning the war would help more people, and that nothing should be taken away from the war effort...
...And she felt so warm, and I think she passed the word to someone that I had done this, and that's when my involvement became more real, more real for me as well as for those whose lives I touched...
...The floor was filthy with human excrement and splinters and old rags and boards, all soaked in filth, and as my eyes got used to the light I saw that the bunks were arranged in tiers three high and that almost every bunk held two men...
...And I remembered that I knew the Chief Medical Officer of that division, and I called him and asked whether he would let me attach myself to his unit...
...We felt that it was of vital importance to call a conference of those people who entered the camps on the day the gates were opened, to have eyewitness accounts of w hat ihe\ found there...
...I saw...
...We have responses from soldiers, from nurses, from doctors, we have them from war correspondents, and we are going to use them...
...Bear in mind that it is only 36 years since the time that Nazi Germany was finally defeated...
...And I told them that we'd been hearing all kinds of stories about what had happened to French Jewry, that I myself was wondering what had happened to my own relatives, whom I visited in Paris in 1937...
...I couldn't believe it...
...So you remembered that there were twenty thousand others for whom things had to be done, too, and before you could lift a finger another thousand would be dead right here in this block of barbed wire, and you felt stifled and sick because you were so helpless...
...It would take me a long time to describe what I saw...
...I spent three months there, and went from there to Mississippi, and they switched us from infantry to combat engineers —the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion...
...A watch tower with a machine gun mount stood over the barracks but it was empty now...
...We didn't know, of course, that the next day would also be the day of FDR's death, April 12, 1945...
...When the women marched by I saw one or two who smiled but most of them wore that blank look everybody had and after they had passed I saw that many of their skirts were unbelievably foul and offensive...
...My great regret, of course, is that it would have taken so little effort on the army's part to save lives earlier...
...I went off with my jeep and my driver to join the unit, and we arrived at the camp...
...LEWIS WEINSTEIN I had been in Europe for ten months before we reached Gotha, the first of the death camps to be liberated by the American forces...
...We were surrounded by so much hatred: Hitler could never have accomplished what he accomplished if he hadn't had willing accomplices wherever he came...
...And there were people there who were recommending that we not give any help to those Jews who wanted to come to America instead of going to Israel—the same issue that's in the news again now...
...But here it is, right in front of you...
...I had to say, "She was there...
...And I managed to talk with Eisenhower himself for a few minutes, and he said, "I know it's very important, and 1 know it's important taxyou personally that I come,'" and I interrupted him and said, "It's not that it's important to me personally, but this is one of the great events of the war, the liberation of the camps, because now we know that many hundreds of thousands"—I wasn't at all thinking in terms of millions at that time—"of Jews have been destroyed, and many, many others...
...I'm not ready to put my freedom up to public referendum...
...I'd never seen or had any idea that such a thing could be—bodies stacked like cordwood, barrels marked "ashes," rooms with gold teeth, all manner of personal objects taken from those who'd died...
...Sometimes, they would shape a piece just right and then put it under their skirts where a guard would rarely look and when they got back to their barracks they would recover it and eat it...
...Ike was very blunt...
...Ihad no background, no frame of reference...
...That's why our purpose is not sentimental, but very, very pragmatic...
...I went into the crematorium and saw the remains, the bones, the skulls, the rib cages, the ashes...
...People should have the opportunity to come to a place like this, to iearn for themselves about the evils of dictatorship and oppression...
...It must be told and retold over and over again...
...those who are involved in various projects have complete access to him: he can be reached every single day...
...From then on, I was a determined advocate for the creation of the State of Israel...
...I saw the laboratory, where they had put parts of the human body into formaldehyde for preservation...
...The grave was about ten or twelve feet deep and it was about thirty by fifty feet in size, and all the earth was piled up on two sides and the ends were open so the trucks could get up close...
...It was in the pile that the truck had just left and I saw an arm move and I yelled at the lieutenant and he looked and said he didn't see anything...
...There was a handful, and 1 mean a handful, of non-survivors who came to be with us...
...Belsen is a small town in north Germany and its only fame, so far as I know, is that the Nazis built a concentration camp nearby...
...A girl came into the kitchen followed by two older women and she was the first individual we had seen in the camp...
...Right now there is a broad interest in the Holocaust by very many scholars and educators, and there are many schools where it is being taught as part of the curriculum...
...It is far more that they are as perplexed, as anguished by their experience as those of us who have come upon the harrowing evidence only at second remove, and that out of the anguish a modest wisdom emerges, a wisdom whose name is compassion...
...What we are doing is for our children and for our grandchildren...
...Our belief was that if we were to give our lives we ought to demand a high price: at limes we demanded rather handsome prices...
...And I told the men that we were there not only to help the world get rid of Hitler, but also to conduct a rescue mission, to help save our fellow Jews...
...This has to be told—the willingness of people to assist in the crimes, and the indifference of bystanders, which, in my opinion, is just as bad a crime as active participation...
...And I spoke to them of the history of the Jews of France, as best I could remember it...
...It's unbelievable...
...It was some time, I believe, in April of 1945 that we went into Buchenwald...
...We were halted at the gate by a sentry and while he examined my papers I looked down the central street that ran from the entrance straight through the heart of the camp...
...It's an insidious thing...
...The piles before each barracks were dead men and women...
...I was in Europe on a War Department mission, but Belsen was something else again, so I forgot my orders, borrowed a couple of Signal Corps cameramen and hurried north...
...When they entered the camps, they had not yet seen the grisly photographs, nor heard the hideous details...
...The survivors of Auschwitz and Maidenek and Buchenwald are still alive...
...he told me that it was by direct orders of the Commander in Chief, President Roosevelt, and the Chief of Staff, General Marshall, that no plane, not even a bomb, would be spared from the single overriding purpose, the total defeat of the Germans...
...Henry Jackson is the senior Senator from the State of Washington...
...The lieutenant told us the men in the SS uniforms were guards who had been captured with the camp and now they were forced to collect and bury the dead...
...I could see a dripping from some of the top bunks onto the lower bunks and on down to the floor and it was so shocking that I couldn't believe it but the lieutenant said that is what it was...
...I tell my youngsters here, and that's my major reason for talking about it to minority youngsters, you cannot ignore that fact of what happened to another minority because they were, different in terms of their religion and culture...
...On April 30, 1945, Crawford visited Dachau...
...We had many meetings, and we sent back a report to the President, and he then appointed a permanent body called the United Stales Holocaust Memorial Council, which consists of 50 members, 50 lay leaders from various walks of life—there are Jews and non-Jews—and we also have 10 members of Congress, so the total is 60 people, including five Senators and five Representatives who hold the position while they are in office...
...We received more than 600 letters from liberators, people who entered concentration camps on the day of liberation...
...And that's how the idea of the Liberator's Conference came about...
...it has reproduced key documents that might otherwise have disappeared...
...they knew what happened to their grandparents, and so on...
...even the survivors needed time to deal with it, to cope with it...
...There's no corner on the market...
...You know, we're running out of time...
...I'm very concerned, and I try to tell my youngsters, "learn how to read, learn how to do computational skills, learn how to differentiate between friend and foe, what is right, what is wrong, because you can be had...
...It had almost healed when the British came but there had been no time yet to put on new dressings...
...SENATOR HENRY JACKSON I'd been in the service earlier in the war, but when I came back to Buchenwald just after it was liberated, I came as part of a Congressional delegation...
...survivors are moving on in age, and so arc the liberators...
...The program of the conference will include, first of all, the formalities—and we hope that the Secretary of State will greet the conference on the opening evening...
...The lesson of the Holocaust is a lesson all of us must learn from, not only Jews...
...And even in our whole orientation in the army, nobody ever talked about why we fight, about what Hitler was doing to Jews and others...
...Still, nothing I'd heard or suspected could have prepared me for what was to come...
...As time went on, things changed...
...They forgot their cameras and their assignments and everything...
...I sat there as they challenged her, until finally I had to stand up...
...Never again could we allow it to recur...
...Miles Lerman, Chairman of the International Liberators Conference, lives in Vineland, New Jersey...
...The lieutenant guided us into the women's part of the camp and we watched a company of women marching toward a convoy of trucks and he explained they were the healthiest ones who were being moved to another barracks at the tank school, which was clean and where they could be decently fed, but he expected trouble with them because he had moved a batch over yesterday from the same section and put them in clean rooms and wood beds and when he had returned this morning the women had torn up all the blankets and made clothes for themselves and they had broken up the wooden beds and built fires on the concrete floors, and although toilets were in every hall they had used the corners of their rooms or wherever else was handy...
...You began to see the human personalities, the way they had been denigrated and degraded...
...And I said it was understandable...
...When we started, the American Jewish community had a problem coping with this dark chapter of the history of our people in Europe...
...And, of course, I could identify, I could fill in...
...Belsen was her twelfth camp and she had kept notes about every other one and she had organized a historical section among the inmates before the British got there and when they came into the camp she took her papers and her reports to the commander...
...In effect, she was running the camp and she was just seventeen years old...
...We started out by asking the Department of History of the United States Army to help us research the subject matter and come up with the units that participated in the liberation of the concentration camps—Buchenwald, Mathausen, Nordhausen, Dachau— and they were most cooperative...
...We went with the two women and their soup kettle to a building at the far end of the camp...
...So, "cordwood...
...the witnesses are typically distressed, and no amount of listening has jaded the interviewers, routinized the procedure...
...We want all the people who entered the camps...
...And we stopped in Weimar, nearby, and I talked there to a bartender...
...I had been an elementary school principal and a teacher in the system for a long time, but I finally was assigned here...
...Even if he was alive and we pulled him out there was no place to put him, no nurses to take care of him, nobody to feed him, and if he somehow got well physically his mind was probably gone...
...They had gone beyond the point of no return...
...Monuments won't do it...
...And I went over to the laboratories where they'd been doing medical experiments, and I saw the lampshades that Ilsa Koch had had made of human skin...
...His captors mistakenly took him for a Jew-, and prepared to hang him...
...they seemed too incredible...
...And it was just at about that time that we began to experience very devastating weather and the Battle of the Bulge ensued...
...About a month earlier, she had got a glandular fever and her throat swelled almost shut but she refused to go to the hospital because it was known that anyone who went to the hospital went on to the ovens...
...He's by no means a figurehead...
...to reopen it...
...I, too, was there...
...And in the spring of 1978, Crawford—by now a professor of sociology at Emory University in Atlanta—appeared on a local television station to describe what he had seen...
...It's only the younger officers who arc left...
...You can become the victim, and worse yet, you can become the perpetrator...
...As we came nearer, I had our driver park a little way back and we got out and walked toward the edge of the grave and the German guards went on with their work and we could see a short flash as a body sailed out from the tailgate and disappeared...
...I feel, as a survivor, that since I was fortunate enough to come out of this terrible period alive, I have an obligation to continue with all my ability to document this story, because future generations must learn from it...
...She was captured and the Germans sent her from one camp to another...
...By now...
...So I got up and said, "This will be the first time in Jewish history, to my knowledge, where Jews who are enslaved are not permitted to go to the place where they want to go...
...The truck finished its job and pulled away and we walked up slowly, and I felt tight and funny inside and I didn't really want to go any closer because I didn't want to see what I had to see, and my driver was about eight feet behind me and I knew he felt the same...
...It took no special courage to be among the liberators: one day, the assignment was to kill the German soldiers, or wash the mud off a jeep...
...Now, they were filling the second...
...And I remember expressing some doubt as to whether we'd heard the full story...
...600, 700 people who come...
...And I'll never forget that as we were walking down a sort of roadway, with barracks on both sides, there was a crash...
...We do not want a monument...
...we must refute the efforts of the rejection-ists...
...We'd expected 30 or 40 GIs to show up...
...The SS guards in the truck grabbed at the clothes and straightened it around until it was piled neatly on the others like cordwood...
...FRED CRAWFORD In 1944...
...And the stories came out that day of the liberation of the first death camp by the American soldiers...
...Chris and I did not...
...They came to America in 1947...
...there the laws of probability have linked two dead in hopeless embrace...
...I came out of the service after going into the South Pacific for about six months...
...One day I was in class where a survivor had been invited to speak, and she was telling her story, and the youngsters were sitting there just saying, "Aw, it couldn't be...
...The angles are grotesque, one has to study the photos to see them as aggregations of bodies rather than of dissociated limbs, a bizzare pile of amputated arms and legs and heads, the rendered Jews of Europe...
...more important, understands that the facts and the lessons must be conveyed from generation to generation...
...The American community was not ready for it...
...Even in death, we do not line up evenly, we do not stack symmetrically...
...They were dying, he said, by the thousands, and I thought he was exaggerating...
...I have had a number of meetings in the Soviet Embassy and they have a very strong interest in the conference...
...Since that time, I have been traveling about, speaking mostly to young people, especially at the high school level, and adults too, when I can, telling them the story...
...The flash would be white when the man or woman was naked and it would be dark when he was still in his rags, but the body always made the same crackling sound when it hit...
...Then, in the afternoon and the next day, we are planning a number of panels— American and British and French war correspondents, historians who are recognized authorities on the Second World War, members of the international tribunal of the Nuremberg trials, archivists from various countries to speak about the documents they have—many thousands of which have not been opened to this day—medics and nurses who will tell how they went about reviving these skeletons, these people who weighed 60, 70 pounds on the day of liberation, who were ravenous but who had to be fed intravenously, because their digestive systems were all dried out and though they were wild for food, food would have killed them...
...Some of them screamed and some cried and some just whimpered...
...I had an enjoyable experience there, and we finally went from Southampton to the Continent, and went on up into France, where we stayed for about a month until we were assigned to the Third Army, General George Patton's army...
...They knew Uiat they were children of survivors...
...And I didn't deal with that whole thing until one day when I came to this job, which was 1967-68, the principalship of Franklin High School...
...I saw the dead bodies piled up outside, the bodies they couldn't get to for cremation...
...I comprehend their affirmation...
...The war was still just down the road a piece and there were ten thousand sick ones back in the barracks who might be saved if we worked hard enough...
...The conference will be called "An International Conference of Liberators of Concentration Camps," and as it looks right now, about 400 to 500 people will participate, including the foreign delegates, the people in the Department of History of the U.S...
...Inside, about fifty old women were huddled in a long room that was empty except for tables and benches and they were peeling potatoes...
...The image haunts...
...It's a cliche, but Santayana was right—those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it...
...And when we tell the story, and we undertake the task of documenting it, we are planning to document everything that transpired in the way that it happened because we believe that future generations must know the good and the bad...
...There must have been forty or fifty that we could see at the same time and they were all squatting...
...As we drove down that road between the barracks, I forgot everything but the sight of what was all around me and so did the two boys from the Signal Corps...
...Vineland is one of the communities in the United States that attracted a very sizable number of survivors...
...It was early and the sun was still low but people were moving on the street and about the barracks and far away among other buildings, wearing all sorts of rags and uniforms and the odd striped convict suits of the concentration camp prisoner...
...Everything must be accurately recorded as it actually , happened...
...I spent a year in Mississippi and then on maneuvers in Louisiana and Texas and in Little Rock, Arkansas, and finally, we went overseas in 1944, from Boston to Liverpool...
...it has produced a series of 30 minute television programs that have been widely aired in the United Slates, Israel and West Germany...
...It is a result of this process of education and awareness...
...In one pile would be three or four and in another pile there would be eight or nine and in another pile there would be eighteen or twenty maybe and it was like that down the street as far as we could see, for about half a mile, I suppose...
...When I visited the camps with my colleagues, I was of course appalled by what I saw...
...Together with a few friends, he prepared to seek out "normal" Americans—the sons and the brothers and the neighbors of the skeptics—who had been part of the liberating forces...
...Just because you're black, that doesn't mean you won't become an Idi Amin, you won't become another Adolph Hitler...
...But once I began to suspect the real truth, I talked with Ike [Eisenhower] on several occasions, pointing out to him that it wouldn't take a great deal of effort to bomb the railroad tracks to the camps, and that such action might help save many lives...
...I saw what I always refer to when people ask me as "the walking dead," devoid of any expression in their eyes, just skin and bones, holding on, trying to survive...
...Strangely enough, I did very little talking with my colleagues about it, maybe a comment or two, nothing that I can even remember...
...It was horrible...
...The community is emotionally more prepared to deal with it...
...I thought we were being shielded from some of the facts...
...I had a chance to talk to someone about what had gone on...
...You could see their eyes asking, begging, entreating...
...Army, the formal diplomatic staffs, the members of Congress...
...She's telling the truth...
...General Collins, who is the head of the Department of History of the Army, assigned a special task force to help, and they have been most cooperative in giving us the information we requested...
...They will testify as to what happened on day one when they entered the camps...
...The calls and the letters disputing the fact of the Holocaust unnerved him, and Crawford decided to do something about it...
...The noise that began as soon as we walked inside the door was terrifying at first and I saw that it came from men in their bunks who were so thin and sick that they couldn't get out of bed so they beat their mess tins against whatever would make a racket...
...As we drove, he pointed to girls who were squatting just off the walks all in plain view...
...The man was either alive or he had fallen in such a way that his arm had been in balance and now it simply slipped to another position...
...I attended, some four or five years ago, a meeting of the Council of Jewish Federations where the subject under discussion was our responsibility for Jews coming out of Russia...
...Their numbers had dwindled from some hundreds of thousands to maybe twenty thousand when the Americans came on the scene...
...So I think I owe something to the society that has given me so much and to parents who gave me so much...
...Elie has been a very, very active chairman...
...Fires don't extinguish by themselves...
...I got involved in Jewish life almost immediately on any level that I possibly could...
...When he found that she could speak English he made her a sort of camp leader and general assistant...
...I couldn't eat as a result of this experience, and I'm really just glossing over it...
...Lately, other centers have begun to work cooperatively with Crawford and his colleagues, insuring that Crawford's passion that "new generations be exposed to the terrible truth" will be fulfilled...
...We turned off the main road and passed a kitchen and I looked into it and saw about thirty buxom women who were busy among kettles full of British army rations...
...Yet the mind cried for some way of ordering the assault on the senses...
...It was in late March or early April in 1945 that I first heard the term "death camps...
...My scars are deep, but not nearly as deep as with those who survived the death camps...
...There are several factors that help account for the change...
...Fine," he said, "but no surgery, please...
...And then they begin to prey on their own...
...I can't buy it...
...I came here during the midst of the turmoil—black awareness, the whole issue of civil rights and the cries for change, and justifiably so, and I subscribe to it...
...L.F...
...We started creating a cultural and social life for ourselves that involved identifying with Israel, and most specifically and most important, from day one, we in Vineland made it a habit that every April we had a day of memorial, a Yom HaShoah, a formal day of remembrance...
...It turned out that he had lived in the States, in New Jersey, and had returned to his native Germany during the Depression...
...It's only 36 years, and you have today more than 100 publications that profess that the Holocaust never happened...
...But first my men and I would have to be dusted for typhus...
...And when you come to a memorial service today, you find that 50 or 60 percent of those who come are young people, and about half are non-survivors...
...Already, the first grave with 5,000 bodies had been covered...
...The camp was crawling with the disease...
...Somehow, we managed to get through that with very few being lost...
...we were all orphans, we were all deeply affected by this tragedy...
...The world has to know it...
...It was the decision of the United States Holocaust Council to go forward with a museum in Washington...
...I drove the Silver Shirts out when I was prosecutor in my home state...
...Our road ran along the edge of the camp past the ovens where the Germans cremated their prisoners, and out to a clear space close against the high wire boundary...
...And I know that there is a direct link between what I saw on April 12, 1945, and what I said at that meeting...
...The Army had set up a control point in a building that had served as a German tank school and the officer in charge gave me permission to take all the pictures I wanted...
...He is working on hehairofthe Council day in and day out...
...As a matter of fact, of the commanding officers of all the armies that took part in the liberation, very few are Still alive...
...They had no categories for dealing with what they found, no network of analogies or associations that could help them cope with the data...
...I was lucky to be born in this country, and have the privilege, the opportunity, to make my way...
...She had been in Auschwitz...
...The pressure of the noose broke the necklace of his dog lags...
...I heard the driver being sick behind me and the lieutenant said we ought to get back and as I started to turn away I saw a body move...
...The girl and the lieutenant had seen all this before and they took me out of the barracks and then I remembered why I was in Belsen...
...We watched that and none of us thought of our cameras and the lieutenant told us that the big job now was to separate the dead from the living and it was almost impossible because the people were dying too fast...
...For their courage to affirm life, in the face of the memory they carry with them, I am in debt to Leon Bass, and to Curtis Mitchell, and to Lou Weinstein and Fred Crawford and Miles Lerman...
...We got back into our car and the lieutenant directed us to the improvised cemetery...
...Louis Weinstein is a senior partner in the Boston law firm of Foley, Hoag and Eliot...
...From the earliest days, we talked with our children and tried to teach them about it...
...She was from Cleveland, she said, where she had gone to the junior high school until her parents who were Polish moved back to Warsaw...
...People who are damaged, who are distorted, who are very bright—and I see so many brilliant youngsters coming through—who drop out of school, and become drug pushers, become those who prey on the elderly, become the Black Mafia, whatever you want to call them...
...We will have generals, surgeons, soldiers...
...Some of us kept it from our children...
...Now, little more than three years later, the "Witness to the Holocaust" project has completed some 200 oral interviews, has more than 300 names to go, and keeps adding new names to its list...
...They were skeletons and their faces were all the same again, just like skulls with skin on them, but in some of the bunks the men didn't beat their tins at all but just lay still...
...I've learned that you can't take for granted the fact that just because a terrible tragedy has befallen one generation, the lesson of that tragedy will necessarily be transmitted to the following generation to assume that the lesson has been learned for all time...
...Every man had to take down his pants, too, for one final dusting...
...There are so many ways that day has stayed with me, so many links to things that happened later...
...I asked him how much he knew about what was going at Buchenwald, and he said he knew nothing about it...
...He's a hard working chairman, fully aware of the details of what's going on...
...Something about her and her carriage or the angle of her head made us look twice and the iieutenant called to her in English and she came over while the other two women were getting a huge kettle of hot soup...
...It had been taken shortly before by the advance troops and we went in, and we saw what had gone on...
...And, as we begin building the museum, we feel that some part of it should deal with the role of the liberators of the camps and what they found when they entered...
...I got to Belsen just a day or so after the British had liberated the camp...
...They hadn't had a chance to clear the place...
...They must know the nobility and the insanity...
...I would never have believed it...
...And then he came over to us and he said, "I really owe you My great regret, of course, is that it would have taken so little on the army's part to save lives earlier...
...We would gather, the survivors, and we would cry together...
...Nobody would do this to other people...
...And I made a motion to table, which was passed almost unanimously...
...And no one spoke against the proposal, no one objected...
...I was totally unprepared...
...I saw this, and then we had a chance to go about the place and look...
...I see no cordwood...
...I got on the field telephone, and I got hold of the commanding general of that division who was a friend of Eisenhower's, and my friend from the medical group and I told him what was happening, and asked him to get Eisenhower to come down...
...We felt that the story must be told, and it must be told by people who were witnesses to the crime that was uncovered...
...Time helped, and Israel also had a great deal to do with it...
...But there were many survivors who didn't know how to handle it...
...as do all of us, I depend on it...
...settling first in Brooklyn and then moving to Vineland...
...Instead, she got a razor blade and a mirror and she cut her own throat where the swelling was worst and let the pus drain out...
...Perhaps these are the wrong photographs...
...Fred Crawford was shot down over Hungary while flying with the 52nd Fighter Group of the American Air Force...
...The sickest men were too weak to move but they moved their bowels and their kidneys and bladders and nobody could help them and it had been dripping like that for weeks...
...Because there is so much we can learn from what happened...
...I have forced myself to study the photographs, to hold my gaze and not avert it...
...I watched the (German-American) Bund operating back home, before the war...
...Maybe it was so awesome that they were afraid to approach it...
...You can see one or two dead people or fifteen or so in a morgue and you feel an intense, personal relationship with death and with them, but the feeling for these 2,000 was altogether different...
...They were stacked up like cordwood...
...And that's a tremendous resource for us...
...It was early in the morning...
...They thought that they were the only ones suffering...
...Then we met with the executive directors of the veterans' organizations, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Catholic War Veterans, the Jewish War Veterans, and we asked them to announce in their publications the plans for the conference, and the response was tremendous...
...You walked in, and it hit you between the eyes...
...This commission was charged by President Carter with the task of submitting a report as to how the United States could best deal with the fact and create a permanent center of documentation, a museum, that would gather all the data, all the material, all the facts as they should be recorded for posterity, for future generations...
...Finally, we went into Germany...
...Miles Lerman was in the underground, an active partisan in the forests of southern Poland, between l.emberg and Kiev...
...As the truck came to a new pile, the guards would go to it and one at the head and one at the foot and one would twist his hands in the sleeves and the other would get the cuffs of the trousers, and they would lift the body off the pile and walk back to the truck where the tailgate was down and two other guards were standing up above waiting...
...What took courage, what takes courages, is to come home and remember, to refuse to forget, and more still, to believe, withal, that it is a worthwhile thing to care, to believe that perhaps, just perhaps, the world, we, can somehow become better, do better, but even without such belief still to care...
...So I went into the service, and I was sent to Camp Wheeler, Georgia, as a trainee in the infantry...

Vol. 6 • October 1981 • No. 9


 
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