The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (46 page)

Though you claim no knowledge of those acts you are still individually and collectively responsible for these atrocities, for they were committed by a government elected to office by yourselves in 1933 and continued in office by your indifference to organized brutality. It should be the firm resolve of the German people that never again should any leader or party bring them to such moral degradation as is exhibited here.

It is the custom of the Unites States Army through its Chaplain’s Corps to insure a proper and decent burial to any deceased person whether he be civilian or soldier, friend or foe, according to religious preference. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces has ordered that all atrocity victims be buried in a public place, and that the cemetery be given the same personal care that is given to all military cemeteries. Crosses will be placed at the heads of the graves of Christians and Stars of David at the heads of the graves of Jews; a stone monument will be set up in memory of those deceased. Protestant, Catholic and Jewish prayers will be said by Chaplains Wood, Hannah and Wall of the 82nd Airborne Division for these victims as we lay them to rest and commit them into the hands of our Heavenly Father in the hope that the world will not again face such barbarity.
^*

MAY 8, 1945
SCHWÄBISCH HALL, GERMANY
    
107 miles southeast of Frankfurt am Main
    140 miles northwest of Munich

D
avid Nichols Pardoe spent no more than fifteen or twenty minutes with the 255th Regiment of the 63rd Infantry Division at Landsberg, but it was enough. He saw the walking skeletons tottering around in striped uniforms. He observed that they walked as though they were lost. “Suddenly they had their freedom, and they didn’t know what to do. Where were they going to go? Where was their family? What happened, and how do we get there? We have no one—no anything.”

He knew the job of the Americans was to get rid of this kind of thing. And he acknowledges a sense of accomplishment when he says, “I guess one of the big success stories of the twentieth century, which has very few success stories, [was] to liberate people.”

Former Army nurse May Macdonald Horton on her seventy-fifth birthday in 1988
.

Pardoe refuses to glorify his participation. If anything, he minimizes his personal war. “I just want to tell you one thing. I had one of the luckiest wars. Everywhere our company was sent, it seemed that the battle was just over. And somebody else had done the dirty work, and we got sent in for relief. And this may not be at all what happened, but it seemed that way to me.”

It’s correct to infer from his humility that the honor of being called “liberator” should accrue, as was stated in this book’s introduction, to all the Americans—and the Allied forces as well—who fought and died to free Europe.

On VE Day, David Pardoe’s unit was in a town called Schwäbisch Hall, and they were celebrating in a community center with French soldiers from General Jacques Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division. “There were all these French guys who all seemed to know how to sing, and one guy after another would get up. One guy would give an imitation of Hitler, another would sing ‘[Lili] Marlene,’ and it was just a beautiful time. One of the happiest memories of World War II was that afternoon with the French soldiers.”

The 120th Evacuation Hospital’s nursing supervisor, Lieutenant May Macdonald, wrote home at war’s end, “This is VE day in Germany, but so far the only change is in our head-gear. We wear the helmet liner now instead of the whole business. All we live for right now is our day of release and the fact that Roosevelt is dead or VE is proclaimed doesn’t cut too much ice with us as long as we can’t see our way out of the Army.”

At the time she wrote this, Macdonald’s nurses were occupying a German family’s home, sleeping on real beds, using indoor plumbing, eating on china in a modern café with radio and piano that served as their mess. “The lights are shaded, soft music plays, and we sit in comfortable chairs or divans thinking of cafes like this one where we’ve spent many a pleasant evening in days gone by.”

Macdonald wrote that the attitude of the troops to the Germans was standoffish but admitted that it was difficult to be an enemy of little children begging for candy. “We know that it’s very important not to be taken in by flattering words or kind attitudes of German civilians. You find yourself saying, ‘Someone must be guilty of the atrocities we’ve seen.’ And then you look around trying to find the criminals. Can you blame the old peasant in the field helping a pair of oxen plow the soil while his wife and children pitch manure? Or the woman who scrubs the hospital floor and helps feed the patients? Obviously they’re not war criminals. I can’t help wondering where the boys are who were behind this whole thing. We saw a few SS men who were caught at Buchenwald and some of our soldiers got a lot of steam off by letting them have it, but these, after all were only the dogs of the masters. I haven’t seen the masters brought to justice yet. It’s too early for the War Crimes Branch to start wholesale trials, but unless and until they do, I for one won’t be satisfied even though I’ve seen German cities razed to the ground. A city is made of bricks and labor. It’s not the equivalent of three to ten years in a concentration camp.”

She went on to bemoan that the Germans felt the American forces should be taking care of them, transporting them home, and “be the Big White Father from across the seas.” That attitude made her angry, made her want to say, “Dammit all, don’t you——”—here she left out the epithets that truly conveyed what she thought of them—“know you started this bloody mess and you’re the cause of all this loss of life, home and cities?

“They just don’t seem to understand that we’re supposed to be their enemies and not their big brothers. Perhaps it’s just a pose and the soft nature of the American is again being utilized by a practical people. But actually we don’t give a damn what they think or how they feel. All we want to do is to get the hell out of Germany, Europe, and every other theater and go home.”

*
The Army Signal Corps’ silent film of the interment and services can be seen online in the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive on the Web site of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

CHAPTER 17

AFTER THE WAR, AND LONG AFTER THE WAR

M
any of the nearly 150 veterans interviewed for this book have stories of postwar experiences that need to be heard if we are to have a complete understanding of their time in the service and how it impacted their lives. Some are unique, while others could be told by tens of thousands of war veterans. Here is a sampling.

Jerome Klein
New York, New York
and
Sidney Glucksman, né Stashek Gleiksman
New Haven, Connecticut
DACHAU

Freedom was not necessarily pretty for the former prisoners of Dachau. Shortly after liberation, Stashek Gleiksman and others took revenge on civilians living in the town of Dachau, close to the concentration camp. “We went into some of the buildings, just asking, ‘Did you know what went on right next door at the camp?’ They claimed they didn’t know there was a camp. They didn’t smell it? It stunk, the whole city stunk, but they didn’t know that there was a camp. That’s how they lied. And that’s what made us so mad, because everybody said the same thing. We thought, maybe those people killed my parents, my family, somebody from my family. They were all mostly Gestapo people.”

Holocaust survivor Sidney Glucksman (left) and 14th Armored Division veteran Jerome Klein at the wedding of Sidney’s granddaughter in 2009
.

A few weeks after liberation, Stashek began riding a bicycle once or twice a week from Dachau to Munich, an eleven-mile trip, to meet with some former prisoners. Then he and his friends moved to Munich. “We saw a house; we would throw out the German family. We all had guns, you know, the American soldiers gave us guns. And we were not afraid to kill a German. We were full of hate. We went into a house and said to leave everything and to get out of the house. We’re taking over the house. Nobody would stop us. We could do everything we wanted, maybe, for three, four weeks. Even kill in the street, Germans. We went around looking for a few that we thought would be somewhere in Munich, and we found a couple.”

It was in Munich that Stashek reconnected with Jerry Klein, who had befriended him inside Dachau, and it was the special camera the soldier had been given by the German army doctor he’d captured that brought the two of them together. The camera was called a Robot. It was designed to be quick-loading and to take a series of rapid exposures without the photographer having to use a lever to advance the film. Klein was looking for a way to modify the spring that powered the autoadvance; he didn’t need to take thirty quick exposures. Stashek discovered that the inventor of the camera was living in Munich, and he made arrangements for the camera to be modified, which led to frequent visits between the former concentration camp prisoner and the American GI.

Eventually Klein was shipped back to the United States, but he’d taken film to a Munich film processor before he left and was unable to pick it up. He gave Stashek his New York address and asked him to pick up the film when it was ready and send it to him. That led to a series of letters back and forth.

It took some time, but one day the young Dachau survivor received a letter from Jerry’s mother asking him if he would like to come to America. “I wasn’t able to read it, English. I had it translated, and then I said to myself, ‘How can I go to America?’” He had no relatives in the United States, but he also knew he had no relatives alive in his hometown near Auschwitz in Poland. He wrote back, saying he wanted to come but didn’t know how. And then he heard again from Jerry’s mother. She’d made arrangements through the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). It would provide the papers and bring him to America.