Liberators

As we entered the camp, the living skeletons still able to walk crowded around us and, though we wanted to drive farther into the place, the milling, pressing crowd would not let us. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every inmate was insane with hunger. Just the sight of an American brought cheers, groans and shrieks. People crowded around to touch an American, to touch the jeep, to kiss our arms--perhaps just to make sure that it was true. The people who couldn't walk crawled out toward our jeep. Those who couldn't even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes the gratitude, the joy they felt at the arrival of Americans.

He was young, very small, and he spoke no English. Dressed in bits and pieces of everything, ragged at best, and very dirty. Chattered up a storm and I could not understand one word. First, I got him to slow down the talk, then I tried to speak to him, but he could not understand a word I said. We were at a temporary stalemate. We started again from scratch, both of us deciding that names were the proper things with which to start, so we traded names. 

As we progressed I reached over into my field jacket to pull things out of the pocket to name. I came across a chocolate bar and taught him the word “candy”. He repeated it, and I corrected him. He repeated it again, and he had the pronunciation close. I tore the wrapper off the chocolate bar and showed him the candy. He was mystified. It meant nothing to him. He had no idea what it was or what he was to do with it. I broke off a corner and put it in my mouth and chewed it. I broke off another corner and handed it to him and he mimicked my actions. His eyes opened wide. It struck me that he had never tasted chocolate. It was tough to imagine, but there it was. He took the rest of the candy bar slowly, piece by piece, chewed it, savored it. It took him a little while but he finished the candy bar, looking at me with wonderment the whole time. While he was eating the bar, I searched around for the old wrapper, found the word “chocolate” on it, pointed to the word, and pronounced the word “chocolate”. He worked on the correct pronunciation. I am sure that was the first candy the little fellow had ever had. He had no idea what candy was until then. We worked out words for those things close around us. He was learning a bit of English, but I was not learning a word of his language–I do not even know what language he spoke. This wasn’t something that happened consciously, it was just something that happened. 

I spent the rest of my four-hour tour with him. I pretty well ignored what happened in the rest of the camp. There was nothing much going on down in my corner, so it was easy to ignore. My whole world shrank to the inside of the fourth floor of the tower and the young boy. Toward the end of the tour, I found one of those blocks of compressed cocoa that came in the K-Rations in a pocket of my field jacket, and the two of us constructed a hot cup of cocoa for ourselves. We used the same method I had used the night before to make a cup of coffee. A canteen cup is a rather large cup and the two of us shared it. On the first sip he looked at me with a large smile and said the word “chocolate”. We were starting to communicate. I gave him other things from the K-Ration packages, among them a small can with cheese and bits of bacon, which we opened with the can opener I wore on my dog tag chain. This meant he had to study the dog tags. His curiosity was immense. He ate the cheese mixture (which I ate only when I was very hungry), and sorted out the words “cheese” and “bacon”, and he loved the stuff. It did not even begin to enter my mind that he might have been Jewish and shouldn’t have been eating bacon. I made up my mind to really load up before I came to the tower the next day. 

In April of 1945, as we were advancing through Germany, our division stumbled onto the Dora-Nordhausen Concentration Camp. The camp was pretty much kept secret… 

There had been rumors about concentration camps, which we dismissed as exaggerations, we were stunned by what we found-an absolute abomination. When I got there, I just couldn't believe my eyes. I got sick to my stomach because of what I saw and smelled. That traumatic experience is forever imprinted on my memory.  

I arrived at the camp in Nordhausen several hours after elements of our Division discovered the indescribably horrible mess.

On the way to Linz, we passed through Mauthausen Concentration Camp. The gates were already open, the SS commanders had fled, people were milling around; they looked haggard, very emaciated. There was a section for women where medical experiments were done on them. We could smell the burning flesh; we could see the piles of bodies. And we could see the rockpile where people from the concentration camp were forced to jump, or were pushed, unclothed, into a pile of rocks covered with time… 

I noticed a young fellow limping toward me. He was in bad shape. His right leg was bandaged, I think it had gangrene. He was dressed in the typical striped suit of the concentration camp inmate. However, his face was full. He was a young kid about fourteen. I said to him: 'Bist du a yid?' and he answered 'Yes, I come from Krakow, Poland, and I've been in a concentration camp since I was ten years old.’ I asked him: 'Where are you going? You know you cannot get past this point.' He said 'I am going to Switzerland where I will be free.' But I told him he could not walk even a half mile with that leg.  

I had a feeling that I must help this boy (Adam Weinreb) at any cost, so I took him with me back to the house where I was staying. On the ground floor we had set up a surgical and medical unit and for four days we treated Adam; he made a great recovery. Shortly after, I took Adam to my outfit and asked if he could be used as a sort of mascot, or as a kitchen helper. My officers agreed, so I went out and got Adam a U.S. Army uniform and he looked like a typical Army soldier- only a short one! 

My concern was for Adam and the other Jewish survivors at Mauthausen. I helped organize a group of 104 survivors to assist in restarting their lives. Most of the Jewish survivors that I talked to opted to go to Palestine; very few wanted to go to the United States. 

Adam was very concerned about the whereabouts of his family. He had seen his sister die at the hands of the SS. He had seen the ashes of his father handed to him in Gestapo headquarters in Kraków. He was not sure his mother had died in Auschwitz: 'Maybe she wasn't at Auschwitz; maybe she was in another camp.' So I traveled with him from camp to camp, but we never found her. 

The memories of the war, make me proud to have been where I was. Hopefully I was able to help someone. 

I took out my camera and began to take some photos, but that only lasted for a few pictures. As the scenes became more gruesome, I put my camera in its case and walked in a daze with the survivors as we viewed all forms of dismemberment of the human body. We learned that 31,000 of the 51,000 persons there had been killed in a two-week period prior to our arrival.  

I began to realize why few, if any, people would believe the atrocities I had seen. HOLOCAUST was the word used to describe it, but one has to witness it to even begin to believe it. And finally, after going through several buildings with various displays — my mind closed the door on this horror. 

And I don’t know what the answer is to what we ran into in Buchenwald. As a matter of fact, it gave me a different attitude, a perspective, I suspect, on some of the ideas that we had always heard, and that is that one of the best ways to get away from the -- this type of attitude or functioning by humans was to become more educated.And here we were in a country that we had always been lead to believe was one of the most educated and literate nations in the world, producing great scientists, far advanced in art, literature, having great names of music, classical music: And it came up -- well, after I saw what I saw, possibly the worst crimes that you could imagine humans committing and this was done, I don’t know in what -- in what was the conclusion of how they arrived at an idea that this should be done, but it just lead me to have a reevaluation of this whole notion of what we refer to as literate and education. 

I was just sort of moving along with the tide and not really thinking a great deal about it at that time, but since I’ve been back I had been an interested observer, not necessarily a casual observer of the idea that would relate to education and how we use people.” 

Leon Bass Taking Photos

When the gates swung open, we got our first good look at the prisoners. Many of them were Jews. They were wearing black and white striped prison suits and round caps. A few had blanket rags draped over their shoulders. It was cold and the snow was two feet deep in some places. There were no German guards. They had taken off before we reached the camp. The prisoners struggled to their feet after the gates were opened. They shuffled weakly out of the compound. They were like skeletons — all skin and bones.

We were patrolling around May 1 or 2. I remember those dates, because it was near my birthday. 
We were about forty or fifty miles south of Dachau, in a little town that I remember being called Waakirchen. In an open field, we found several hundred prisoners lying, in many cases unable to move. Some were shot, and some were dead from exposure. 

[We] found the road flooded with Hungarian women who had been captive in a concentration camp there. German troops abandoned the camp and fled before the advancing GIs. 

So I started singing in Hungarian ... and immediately the women mobbed me. There were probably 150 women in this group. One woman started telling me about her relatives in New York. It turned out this woman was my cousin. It was an emotional experience ... she grabbed me and was hysterical.... She asked me to help find out where her husband and two daughters were. I provided her with food and clothing. That was the last I saw of her ... until I visited her in Israel in 1981-82. She never found her relatives; they never came back.