The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (20 page)

“But they were all of them in the chronic state of diarrhea and diseases of all kinds, and the odor was indescribable. They were not using the toilets, and the bedding, the clothing scattered about, you can imagine what the odor must’ve been. And I kind of held my nose and walked through, checking as quickly as possible. Went down to the end of the barracks and about to turn to come back, and I saw a movement in the far corner. I took—I think it was the pole of a broom—and I poked the clothing aside, and there was a little girl in a fetal position. And I grabbed her by the ankle, pulled her out and wrapped her in my jacket, and I started running toward the aid station, because I sensed that there was life there. I heard a kind of a whimper. And I got about halfway to the aid station, and then I felt the little body collapse. She died in my arms. I think that, as much as anything, represented a kind of a turning point in my whole experience with Buchenwald, that here were young people so affected by the folly of what the elders were doing, and she was the symbolic victim, as young people are so often, of the terrible things that we do as adults. So that, I think, was as powerful a persuasion for me to focus my life on schools and education and young people as I did.”

That incident and the smell of the children’s barracks has stayed with Priest for more than half a century. In a memoir he wrote:

As I recall my exposure to the children’s barracks, I remember the litter everywhere, piled one or two feet high in places, making access to several parts of the barracks impossible. Everything was covered with excrement, urine, vomit—blankets, clothing, shoes, jackets, underclothes—to call the scene indescribable is inadequate. The human urine, diseased flesh mixed with the wafting smells of the burning bodies from the ovens—all this is beyond the human capacity to forget.

Members of the 120th Evac not directly involved in patient care were utilized to transport the very sick out of the camp, across the road, to the SS hospital, where the more than three thousand guards had received high-quality German army medical care. It was rescue by assembly line. Milt Silva recalls that it began the first night they were in the camp, using two-and-a-half-ton trucks to take twelve to fifteen people at a time. They continued the evacuation until in excess of two thousand very sick people had been moved.

During most of that time, Silva did his best not to personally interact with the survivors. “They looked so bad—if you gave them anything, they wanted to respond by hugging you, and I was just afraid to get a disease from them.” Years later, the now-retired Judge Silva went to hear author Elie Wiesel speak at the Dartmouth campus of the University of Massachusetts. Silva’s eyes mist up as he tells the story. “I went over and talked to him and told him that I was with the 120th Evac Hospital, and he put his arms around me and said, ‘Thank you,’ and then I said, ‘Let me hug you,’ and I hugged him. It’s redemption, because I wouldn’t let those other guys hug me in the old days.” And then Judge Silva cried.

First Lieutenant May Macdonald (later Horton), a registered nurse, was in charge of the contingent of nurses assigned to the 120th Evac. She was born in 1916 and recently celebrated her ninety-fourth birthday at her home in Healdsburg, California, in the wine country. She still speaks publicly about her experiences in the Army and at Buchenwald in particular. Toward the end of the war, when censorship of mail was less stringent, she sent a series of lengthy typewritten letters home. On April 28, 1945, she described the prisoners at Buchenwald and her interaction with them:

With few exceptions, all were ragged, dirty and unkempt. Whenever we passed them in groups or singly, they saluted, smiled and in every way tried to show how much they appreciated us. We could see that they were dazed and happy, yet so weak that they could not show their enthusiasm. Some of them spoke English and whenever we stopped to talk to one a crowd would gather around us, nodding assent to all the stories of horror he told us and every once in a while interjecting comments in their own language, so anxious were they to have someone know what had happened to them. They showed us the prison number that was tattooed on their arms and other marks where they had been wounded or tortured. I recall in particular a Jewish inmate from Vienna. He had been a lawyer and spoke excellent English. He was about 40 years old and looked 60. You could see that it was only his spirit that had kept him alive during the six years he had spent in concentration camps. He spoke intensely, eagerly, his frail body trembling with the weakness of excitement.

“I shall remember the 11th day of April 1945 as the day of my rebirth,” he said. “On that day I became a free man again.”

We spoke to many others. Everywhere it was the same story of brutality, long years of imprisonment, and thankfulness at their deliverance. The ex-prisoners seemed to be agreed on two points: 1) Shortly before the Americans arrived about half their number, some 25,000, were carted off by the SS and killed. 2) If the Americans had arrived a few hours later all of them would have been dead.

Her letter on that day concludes with this account:

When we told a French inmate that the civilians at Weimar claimed not to have known of Buchenwald, you could have touched off a match with the fire in his eyes.

“Not know,” he croaked fiercely, “when we fell out of the box cars into which they had herded us naked in the winter to travel from France to Weimar, the people of Weimar spat on us and called us dogs.” His indignation was so great that he could hardly talk. Today, no German citizens of Weimar can claim “not to know” of Buchenwald. By command of General Patton every civilian in Weimar capable of walking has been led through the camp and forcibly shown the things “they had not seen.”

On April 12, before the 120th arrived at Buchenwald, CBS war correspondent Edward R. Murrow reached the camp with one of the early units. He spent the better part of a day there, wrote his report, but, because of problems accessing shortwave radio transmission facilities, was unable to broadcast to the United States until April 15. The recording of that broadcast is available online. Murrow’s report is somber; it is straightforward. It uses the language of journalism. It is not especially eloquent. Murrow was holding back, and he said as much. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only parts of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

The Army press release managed to find words for one component of the Buchenwald horrors Murrow refused to mention:

C. Tattooing: The April 20 Paris edition of the Stars and Stripes carried on page two a story regarding the use, by the SS officers of tattooed human skin for souvenirs. The story is true in every respect. Commandant L’Hopital stated that the wife of one of the SS officers started the fad; that any prisoner who happened to have extensive tattooing of any sort on his body was brought to her; that if she found the tattooing satisfactory the prisoner was killed and skinned; the skin with the tattooing was then tanned and made into souvenirs such as lamp shades, wall pictures, bookends, etc; that about 40 examples of this artistry were found in SS officers’ quarters in the camp. This statement was confirmed by 1st Lt Walter F. Emmons, and we ourselves saw six examples at Camp headquarters including a lampshade.

At the 120th Evac’s Buchenwald facility, Warren Priest met a man in relatively good health who had been part of an underground group in Belgium. The man, whose name he never learned, had been a former superintendent of bridges and highways there, and they were able to converse in German. On the day the 120th was to leave the camp, he gave Priest a handmade model sailboat which he had taken from the home of Ilse Koch, the wife of the former commandant of Buchenwald, and urged Priest to send it home. He placed the boat in Priest’s hands, then pointed to the sails and said,
“Diese—.”
The man searched his mind for the proper word, but it didn’t come to his lips. “And then,” Priest says, “he took my hand and squeezed the skin at my wrist.”

Pointing to the sails again, the Belgian said,
“Menschen, viel Menschen, tot—alles tot, alles kaput!”
People, lots of people, dead; everything dead, everything destroyed!

“
Then he turned away as he began to sob,” Priest recalls, his voice quivering.

Had it not been for the good that they could see they were doing, the men and women of the 120th might not have been able to cope. It’s something that Warren Priest has thought about for years. “Well, it happened that the time was so brief, and we did see good things happening. You understand that we were the liberators. That expression on the faces of those men that I saw walking up the hill [the men he referred to in his poem], we saw again and again and again. That softened in so many ways the inhuman conditions that we saw.”

They were also aware that the death rate had dropped from hundreds daily to a handful. He attributed it not to medical miracles but to hope. “They suddenly had hope, they suddenly had some reason for living, and it showed up in their reactions and their relationships.

“And, of course, we had by that time stabilized their eating conditions so they could feed, and we were aware that the best thing we could do was to give them whole blood, especially those more severely impacted, that they couldn’t tolerate food in the stomach; they could tolerate whole blood with some nutrients from a healthy person, which we did. We had to get blood from everybody we could. I think all of us gave some blood.”

Eleven days after the 120th arrived at Buchenwald, on April 26, the unit received orders to pack up and move to Cham, where they’d be available to care for inmates of some of the concentration camps, including Dachau, which would be liberated in the last two weeks of the war. Even while their medical teams were caring for Buchenwald inmates, their truck drivers, including Milt Silva, had helped move another U.S. Army hospital unit into the Nordhausen area, to care for the survivors of Dora-Mittelbau, which had been liberated by the 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions.

Upon leaving, Priest reflected on the mission of the 120th. “We had done what they had wanted us to do. We had brought a certain stabilized living condition there. The prisoners were not dying wholesale, and the medical personnel in the camp, who themselves had been prisoners, were in a position with the medicine we could provide for them to take care of their own. So there was not the need for the kind of emergency role we were playing there. We were not actually medical people; we were people who were taking care of people in terrible conditions of suffering and near death.”

Priest did not exactly take the easy way out of Buchenwald. He left with what appeared to be a very heavy cold, but as soon as he got to the hospital at Cham, he was diagnosed with typhus and bedridden for a couple of weeks. Without sulfa drugs, he would have died.

SHAEF
INCOMING MESSAGE

SECRET
PRIORITY

FROM: TWELFTH ARMY GROUP SIGNED BRADLEY
TO: ETOUSA
PASSED TO: SHAEF MAIN FOR ACTION

This is a paraphrase of First US Army message.

BUCHENWALD concentration camp has been cleaned up, the sick segregated and burials completed to such an extent that very little evidence of atrocities remain.

This negatives any educational value of having various groups visit this camp to secure firsthand information of German atrocities. In fact, many feel quite skeptical that previous conditions actually existed.

Suggest that further visits to this camp be discontinued.

9 MAY ‘45

*
Commandant René L’Hopital, former aide-de-camp to Marshal Ferdinand Foch (supreme commander of the Allied armies in World War I) and a personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Admiral Richard Byrd, accompanied the Americans inspecting Buchenwald. According to the report, “[L’Hopital] weighed 95 pounds as against a normal weight of 175 pounds; but was in far better physical condition than the average of his fellow prisoners (due to his having been in this camp only two months).”

CHAPTER 9

GARDELEGEN

EVEN THE GOOD GERMANS HAD BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS

APRIL 14, 1945
GARDELEGEN, GERMANY
    25 miles south of Salzwedel
    125 miles east of Berlin
    130 miles north of Buchenwald