I recall getting behind the wheel of a jeep in the early afternoon of April 11, 1945, in full battle gear with my rifle on my shoulder, not knowing what to expect when I got to the camp. The narrow and hilly road leading to the camp seemed deserted. I was driving slowly, looking carefully ahead, and nervous with anticipation. Approximately one kilometer from the camp, I stood on the hood of the jeep and, using a pair of German-made Zeuss field glasses- the very binoculars taken from the German Army Lieutenant that I had captured earlier- I could make out what looked like the front gate of the concentration camp. While I was still too far away to see clearly, it seemed to me that the front gate of the camp was swung open. What looked like human beings were lying in front of the gate. All the while I was keeping a sharp eye out for any sign of German guards. About two hundred yards from the gate, I again stood on the hood of the jeep and now could see clearly the wide-open front gate with a sign above the gate carrying the following words: ”Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes One Free).
Even though I was now quite certain that the open gate was a clear indication that the concentration camp guards had fled, I slowly maneuvered my jeep towards the gate with great caution and my rifle by my side. Suddenly, I spotted some activity in one of the guard towers at the perimeter of the camp but soon realized that they were prisoners who apparently had taken over the deserted towers. I could clearly see their striped camp uniforms. I looked at my watch and it was now a few minutes after 3:00 PM. I found out a little later that the Nazi guards had fled into the nearby woods only a few minutes prior to my arrival.
It seems clear to me that I must have been the first American soldier to enter the camp. About three hours later, I spotted other American soldiers wandering around the camp. The history books credit elements of the Sixth Armored Division of the 3rd US Army as the first American unit to have entered the camp.
It is difficult for me to describe and put into words what my eyes beheld that afternoon on April 11, 1945, as I approached the front gate. There were dozens of prisoners (I hate to call them prisoners, since they were all innocent human beings) lying quietly and almost motionlessly all around the front gate, as if they had spent every last ounce of energy just to experience the freedom of an open gate. They seemed to have great difficulty just moving their bodies. I never saw such decimated human beings with eyes deep in their sockets, ribs and bones protruding. I felt a sudden chill overtaking my body. An odd thought suddenly entered my mind: Is this reality? Am I really witnessing this and not dreaming it? How can a human being do this to another human being?
The quiet moans and cries coming from these unfortunate human beings put an end to all such thoughts. I was not dreaming this, it was reality, and I was a witness to it.
I quickly got out of my jeep and proceeded to walk among them. For a brief moment I did not know what to do. Who to attend to first? They all were in bad need of help and kept reaching toward me. One of the prisoners in particular caught my attention as he kept pulling my trousers. I knelt down beside him, propped up his head, and gave him a candy bar that I had brought with me. He quickly devoured it. He was unable to mutter a sound even though he was trying to tell me something by gesturing wildly with his hands. At first glance, he seemed to an old man in his seventies. He told me later that he was only 35 years old. The candy bar seemed to have revived him somewhat because, in a few minutes, he began to speak in a low voice. But I could not understand what he was trying to tell me. I recognized that he spoke Polish. I decided to speak to him in German, hoping that he could speak Yiddish. Yiddish, a Jewish language of the Jews, was spoken in Poland, Russia and other East European countries. Yiddish is a derivation of the German language and in many respects similar to it. The experiment worked and we were able to communicate.
His first words to me that I could understand were: ”Mr. American Soldier, I want to show you what the Germans have done to us.” I told him that I was an American Jewish Soldier, which seemed to urge him on. I could detect a wild excitement in his voice when he continued. “Please take me with you. I want to show you everything. Please let the whole world know what you will see here today.”
I picked him up in my arms like a baby and gently placed him in the passenger seat of the jeep. He felt like he weighed no more than sixty or seventy pounds, even though he was a tall man. We spent the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening together going through the camp.
The first place he took me was a dispensary, one of two so called "hospitals" at Buchenwald. In fact, it was a "House of Death." The one-story building that seemed to have been designed as a cow barn was about 100 feet long and 30 feet wide and about 12 feet high. It sported a tin roof, a dirt floor, and the Germans had meticulously built shelves on both sides of the long walls and divided them into small cubicles. Each cubicle was approximately 6 feet long, 3 feet wide and 2 feet high, just large enough for a human body to fit in.
Whenever a prisoner went there to get relief from any ailment, no matter how insignificant the ailment, he was put into one of these cubicles, a place from which he would never leave alive. He was just left there to die. While the camp ration for all prisoners consisted of a small cup of soup made from potato peels and a small chunk of stale bread once a day, the prisoners in the dispensary received neither medication nor the standard meager rations. They were just left there without attention to die a horrible death. There was a twenty-hour guard stationed inside to prevent any inmate from leaving the dispensary.
When I first walked into the dispensary, I could not believe the sight that my eyes beheld. Almost all the cubicles were filled. Some of the occupants were dead. The stench of death was overpowering. Weak, almost indecipherable voices were emanating from those still alive. Bony, fleshless fingers were reaching out to me. They were trying to tell me something but I could hardly hear them, no less understand what they were saying.
Twelve months of fighting and chasing the German Army across Europe should have inured me to a sight like this. Did I not see fellow soldiers killed and wounded in front of me? I saw German soldiers as well as dead French civilians blown apart and rotting away on the ground. And yet, somehow, the sight of these dead and barely living skeletons directly in front of me was different. They were totally innocent human beings caught up in a world gone mad. It was too much for me to handle. I got sick to my stomach and raced out the back door to relieve myself and catch some fresh air. When I opened the heavy metal back door, I was immediately confronted by a thirty-foot-high mound of dead human skeletons, just left there to rot, until some unfortunate prisoners were forced to remove them and bury them in a mass grave or burn them. My guide informed me that this pile of bodies was an accumulation of dead patients from the dispensary.
After taking a few minutes to try to calm myself down, I took some photographs and again began to wonder whether what I had just seen was real or whether I was just dreaming it all.
Our next stop was a large, one-story brick building with smokestacks protruding from its roof. My Polish prisoner guide, whose name I cannot remember, told me that this building housed a number of ovens for the burning of dead bodies. We proceeded to go into the building, and I opened one of the ovens. Inside were human remains still smoldering.
From the crematorium, he directed me to a brick building without windows that was used as an execution room as well as a punishment room. Prisoners were taken there to either be severely punished or to be executed. I noticed several steel hooks mounted on the inside walls of the building and many more holes in the wall where hooks had apparently been removed. There were also signs of bloodstains on the walls and floor of the building. It seemed that there might have been an attempt by fleeing guards to remove some of the evidence of murder and torture that was carried on there. I examined the walls very carefully and found scratches that looked very much like human fingernail scratches. According to my Polish guide, prisoners were brought there for minor offenses, like collapsing during roll call, or walking too close to the electrified fences. They were hung up like cattle and either executed by stabbing or clubbing, or whipped unconscious by the ruthless guards. This building had all the appearances of a slaughterhouse right after the slaughter.
We walked out of this building and went to my jeep where I needed time to recover my senses. We rested in the jeep for a few minutes, staring at each other with neither one of us saying a word.
For the first time since my arrival, I began to notice other American soldiers and officers walking around the camp. We passed each other quietly, politely acknowledging each other’s presence, and occasionally shaking heads in disbelief of what we were witnessing. An eerie silence prevailed during the entire visit, interrupted only by occasional moaning sounds coming from distressed prisoners.
Since it was already dark, I decided to spend a little more time at the camp with my Polish guide showing me a few more sights of horror and bestiality. One of these sights was an infirmary where medical experiments were carried out on hapless prisoners.
By now, I had spent six hours at Buchenwald and, for the first time in my life, I felt completely drained emotionally. I was overtaken by a desperate need for revenge. I emptied my pockets and handed my Polish guide a few more candy bars that I brought with me and gave him whatever German money I had with me. We embraced and said goodbye to one another. I wished him well, but I had an instinctive feeling that his problems were just beginning. We never saw each other again since my unit left Weimar a few days later, and I do not know what happened to him.
Many of the badly starved survivors did not make it since little was known then about the proper nutritional requirements of badly starved humans. Their systems could not take the sudden intake of rich foods that we supplied them with after liberation. Other prisoners who made their way home, especially those that returned to Poland, found hostile receptions awaiting them, and quite a large number of them were murdered by Polish mobs. They survived the worst that Nazi Germany had to offer them, only to be killed by Polish anti-Semites after their liberation.
I drove away that night, totally shaken, and feeling very depressed, but vowing to keep the scenes of horror that I just had witnessed forever engraved in my mind. I made a firm commitment to myself that I would tell the outside world what I had just witnessed and that I would do so for as long as I lived.
