The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (3 page)

They were taken to a holding area for prisoners of war, then packed into boxcars—sixty to ninety men to a car. The doors were locked and didn’t open again for four or five days. The train sat on sidings during the day and moved mostly at night. Allied aircraft strafed them, and there were casualties in most of the cars. They stopped in Frankfurt for a day and a half and then moved to the town of Bad Orb, the location of Stalag IX-B, the German’s largest POW camp for low-ranking enlisted men. His memory is more of being cold than of being afraid. “Maybe I was too young or too stupid to know just how bad the predicament was.” He also underestimated the capacity the Nazis had for evil, but in his defense, in January 1945, American GIs in general knew little, if anything at all, about the thousands of concentration and slave-labor camps scattered all across Germany.

They were processed into the camp by other American POWs functioning as clerks who never asked what religious preference was stamped on their dog tags—P for Protestant, C for Catholic, or H for Hebrew. “Everyone was put in as a Protestant, and I said, ‘How come?’ And he said, ‘They don’t like Jews. They don’t like Catholics, either.’ So as far as the German records were concerned, everybody was a Protestant.”

Combat didn’t go any better for Morton Brooks. His company was moved from south of Strasbourg to north of the city, where it was overwhelmed by the more powerful German forces. He recalls, “In a way, I was fortunate. I was in a forward foxhole, and we were overrun. And before I knew it, the Germans were behind us, hitting the town of Hatten.” There were a number of times during those first days of combat when Brooks was terrified. The way he puts it, “I crawled into my helmet.”

The men who survived the initial attack gathered in the command post—a tank trap. Friendly artillery fire was beginning to fall on their position, and their telephone lines were cut. Brooks volunteered to trace the wire back to the breaks to repair it. He made it to a bunker that was part of the French defensive position known as the Maginot Line, but he was unable to make contact with the artillery units that were blasting his unit.

Waiting in the bunker with other Americans, he knew that their situation was dire. They couldn’t remain in the bunker because the Germans were all around them, and they couldn’t get back to the American lines. They were pondering their options when the ranking sergeant looked out into the early daylight and saw a German tank coming up the road. Brooks recalls him saying, “We gotta surrender.” He didn’t want to and said so, but the sergeant said, “Look, they’ll just put the nozzle into this opening, and they’ll blast us to pieces.” It was clear that they didn’t have much of a choice.

“It’s interesting—when you’re in training in the States, they tell you you’re going to know what’s going on, who’s on your right, who’s on your left. But in a combat situation, it’s madness. You really don’t know what’s going on. He felt we better surrender.”

Surrendering was a frightening thing to do. “I knew that the Germans would not be kind to us. I had heard about their attitude towards Jews; I didn’t know about concentration camps or anything like that, but I knew about some of the pogroms.” That was going through his mind as the Germans marched their new POWs across the road into a trench where they’d set up a machinegun nest. That’s when Brooks realized how lucky he’d been not to have been discovered as he approached the bunker.

Once things quieted down, the Nazis marched the prisoners back to a farmhouse where they’d gathered a number of Americans and were interrogating them. Brooks was shocked to learn how much the enemy knew about his outfit, such as the names of the officers and the date they’d sailed from the United States. After a couple of days, all the prisoners were marched to a railhead and packed into boxcars. He was given a bit of food but remembers going at least three days without eating as the train made its way to Frankfurt, parked on sidings during the day, occasionally being strafed by Allied fighter pilots who had no idea that they were wounding and killing American POWs. Ultimately, they arrived at Bad Orb and were marched into Stalag IX-B, a former children’s camp set amid eighty-five acres of pine forest.

The POWs at Bad Orb wore the clothes they’d had on when they were captured. They were ripe—but the good news was that the cold kept down the odor. Their daily ration was a loaf of half-flour, half-sawdust bread, shared by seven to ten men depending upon its size. They had a poor excuse for soup at supper. Brooks remembers it being no better than hot grease with something floating in it on occasion. On the weekends they got what their captors called jelly or jam. The Americans were beginning to know what hunger was like.

On January 27, Norman Fellman marked his twenty-first birthday. It was the day he and his comrades were lined up and threatened with being machine-gunned because some prisoners had broken into the food stores and beaten a guard. According to Fellman, the episode ended when a chaplain convinced the perpetrators to turn themselves in. He never saw the men again.

Early in February, the barracks leaders were told by the guards that at the next roll call, all the men who were Jewish were to step forward. The guy he was closest to knew Fellman was Jewish but advised him strongly not to step forward. He promised to keep the secret, but Fellman still had reasons for being concerned.

“During training, there was some anti-Semitism that we ran into. I didn’t want to tempt anybody into turning me in [as being Jewish] for food or whatever. You get hungry enough, God knows what a person will do. And we were beginning to get on the hungry side. The other thing is, I’ve never been ashamed of what I am—maybe I was cocky or more guts than brains—but I decided to step forward. I told my buddies no, I didn’t want to be on anybody’s conscience.”

At the next roll call, Fellman and somewhere between forty and sixty other men stepped forward. Over the next several days they were transferred to the newly designated Jewish barracks.

Mort Brooks remembers his initial interrogation somewhat differently. The Americans doing the interviewing told Brooks they were required to tell the Germans his religion. Brooks thought about it, then said that he was Jewish. “I wasn’t going to hide it. I felt I was an American soldier. I had to be treated like a soldier.” At the time, his surname was Brimberg, a Jewish-sounding name. Shortly after the interrogation, he was moved to what was designated the all-Jewish barrack, by then holding approximately eighty men.

Strange as it seems, neither Brooks nor Fellman recalls the Germans ever actually inspecting their dog tags. And while some of their fellow Jewish POWs threw theirs away, they didn’t, perhaps because it was tangible proof that the wearer was an American soldier and they clung to the notion that it provided some protection. The Americans were issued German prisoner-of-war dog tags, and at the morning roll calls they had to call out the number stamped on them.

The roll calls for the prisoners in the Jewish barracks seemed to last longer than they did for the general POW population. It was January in the worst winter in decades, and the men had to stand in the freezing cold for hours. They’d been allowed to keep the clothing they were wearing when captured, so many of them still had snow boots and winter jackets. Nevertheless, on their reduced rations, the cold wasn’t easy to handle. Brooks still had several packets of cigarettes that had come with military K rations, and he traded them to other prisoners for their bread ration.

On February 8, the guards told them that a contingent of 350 men was to be shipped to another camp, ostensibly to relieve overcrowding (4,700 American infantrymen captured during the Battle of the Bulge had been packed into the camp). The Germans insisted that all the Jews, between seventy-seven and eighty men, be sent on the transport. Survivors claimed that the camp authorities made a point of also including Catholics and “troublemakers.” One way or another, the order was to ship 350 men, and 350 were marched by guards with dogs out of the camp, to the train on the tracks that ran along the outskirts of Bad Orb. The guards had fixed bayonets and prodded the men along. Brooks says, “They were a little rougher, shoving us in, packed in so that you couldn’t sit down.” They gave each man a piece of bread, and there was a little water, which didn’t last long.

Brooks recalls the trip lasting five days; Fellman isn’t sure but thought it was just three or four. As during their trip to Stalag IX-B from the battlefield, the train was strafed by Allied aircraft. The Germans had no control of the air, and he remembers that American or Allied planes were constantly overhead, “and if they could shoot up a train, they did. There were no markings on the train to tell them what was in it. In every car there was at least one person hit.” Helping the wounded was virtually impossible. “You can’t move,” remembers Fellman, “you can’t get across the car. You’re packed, you’re a sardine. Whoever was hit in the car with me, I couldn’t get over there, I couldn’t see. For that I was thankful in a way, too.”

In addition to enduring friendly fire, the men had to survive the cold. “If you were lucky, you were in the middle of the car, because that way you were warmer,” Fellman says. “If you were near the outside, you had chinks in the wood, and the cold could come through and you’d freeze your ass. Your hands would be frozen, your feet would be frozen, and you couldn’t lie down and you couldn’t stand. I don’t remember a lot of conversation, to tell the truth. I think we were more concentrating on just getting through the day.”

The train’s route took them east, deep into Germany, passing south of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp, which had administrative control of the hellhole to which they’d been consigned, the slave-labor camp at Berga an der Elster—Berga on the Elster River. On or about February 13, the train stopped on the tracks just south of the Berga town center, across from a camp identified as Berga One.

The POWs were driven from the boxcars by SS officers supervising elderly Volkssturm guards accompanied by dogs. (Volkssturm was the militia started late in 1944, made up of conscripted males between age sixteen and sixty who were not already part of the home guard.) Facing the tracks were extremely high barbed-wire fences—picture the high fences used at golf driving ranges to keep errant balls from flying out—with towers on each corner and searchlights. As they were marched south toward the separate camp they would occupy, they were spat upon by the townsfolk. But that was a minor annoyance. What really terrified them was the sight through the fence into Berga One.

Norman Fellman will never forget it. “The compounds were packed with the skinniest people you ever saw in your life. Huge, huge eyes. The eyes is what I remember most. And they had pajamalike garb on, blue and white stripes. There were hundreds that we could see, and we never did see the full extent of the camp. And the eeriest thing about it was, there was not a sound. It was just incredible; not a sound out of them. You never saw people like this before.”

Norman Fellman didn’t know it at the time, but he’d just seen his future.

CHAPTER 2

LIFE AND DEATH IN BERGA

APRIL 1, 1945

B
etween the time Norm Fellman and Morton Brooks arrived in Berga and the start of spring, the tide of the war had turned. The German army was clearly on the run even as the Americans continued to pour fresh troops off boats and into the conflict. Fellman and Brooks had survived their first six weeks at Berga, but around them men were dying at an increasing pace.

Shortly after arrival they were given showers and a delousing treatment, and their clothing was deloused and returned to them. Unfortunately, when they were assigned to shared bunks in barracks heated only by a wood-burning stove at one end, the straw bedding they received was lice-infested. Fellman says rather sardonically, “So maybe for a period of twelve or fourteen hours we had no lice. [After that] whatever leisure time we had was spent going through the seams of our clothing, trying to catch them and squash them between our fingernails. Oh, yeah, that was an occupation that never stopped.”