The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (48 page)

Bernhard “Ben” Storch, wearing medals he earned serving with the Polish army attached to the Russians in World War II
.

In 1985, he became active in the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, ultimately becoming New York state commander. He also received his World War II medals from the Polish government, which he proudly wears every Memorial Day.

Storch makes a point of speaking to school groups about the Holocaust, not to describe the gore but to speak of the consequences of hate. And when he was interviewed in 2008, he said that talking to the kids continues to help him heal. “When I speak, I speak always for myself and for my friends which were with me, and all the other soldiers. And when we say a prayer to this day, when I go to a synagogue, which I do, I always say a prayer for the dead, regardless who they were, Jewish or not Jewish. The rabbi once asked me, ‘How come you’re praying?’ I said, ‘Listen, I can say prayer 365 days, there are so many people which are laying there, which don’t have one person to say a prayer for them.’”

Vincent Koch, né Kucharsky
Dobbs Ferry, New York
LANDSBERG

The horrors of the Kaufering camps and the war have remained with Vincent Koch. At age eighty-three, even as he acknowledges that his experiences made him “become hard, very, very hard,” he says the memories they engender are still with him and still hurt. “My kids used to tell me that I used to get up screaming in the middle of the night—even to this day. Not as much now as it was years ago—call it nightmares or whatever.”

A few years before his eightieth birthday, his daughter-in-law suggested that since his granddaughter was studying the Holocaust in school, she should ask Grandpa about it. “So right there, she started to ask me questions. And that was the first time that I remember really getting into a discussion about it. I didn’t want to talk about it, that was for sure. It brought back too many memories that I didn’t want to revive, because when I talk about it even now, it brings back some of those vivid memories and they’re all very real, that’s the remarkable part of it—that even at this stage of my life, they’re still very, very real memories.”

One of the recollections that hurt Vincent Koch the most is the realization that many of the people he found in the Kaufering camp were beyond his help. “It was a terrible thing, for the simple reason that I could not communicate with them. I was so anxious to be able to do whatever I could for them, you understand? I would have done anything for them, I felt so bad, so sorry for what they went through. And there wasn’t a thing in the world that I could do. I mean, they weren’t even there, to be frank with you. I think their mind was somewhere else. They were out of it, almost, that’s how emaciated and strictly bones, and their facial expressions, cheekbones—it was just a horrible, horrible thing.”

Vincent Koch

Koch, who was an observant Jew when he went into the service, still gets big laughs describing an experience he had at a training camp in the deep South. He had brought his tefillin with him to camp and made it a practice to get up at 5
A.M.,
an hour before the rest of the troops, in order to put on the tefillin and pray.

After several nights of this, a soldier named Clint who slept in the bunk next to his took Koch aside and asked in a deep southern voice, “Are you okay? Is your health all right?”

Koch responded, “Why do you ask?”

And Clint said, “Because the guys here are trying to figure out why you take your blood pressure every morning.”

Koch laughs and says, “I don’t think he ever saw a Jew before.”

And Koch remained a believing Jew, despite what he’d seen at Landsberg. “I hear plenty of comments today, too, where you get into social situations and people are questioning God. I never question. That’s God’s will. Maybe it’s a good thing that kind of brought you through in times when it might have been pretty difficult to get through them.”

Stanley Friedenberg

Stanley Friedenberg
Old Westbury, New York
OHRDRUF and MAUTHAUSEN

Stanley Friedenberg, who had been raised as an Orthodox Jew but was never a religious believer even though he attended temple with his father, found that his wartime experiences lessened his belief in God. “With all the rationalization that God was looking at this and God was doing that, my answer was ‘Where was he?’ Six million of us so-called chosen people were being killed, abused, perished, degraded, and he had a master plan behind it? You speak to Orthodox people today about this, and they have all kinds of rationalizations for it. Doesn’t work, doesn’t wash. I’m told by Methodists and Baptists that I’m gonna burn in the fires of Hell and my parents are burning in the fires of Hell. Well, what can I do?”

Friedenberg is much more concerned with wondering whether it could happen again. “It’s happening in other countries, and to a great extent, religion seems to be the cause of it.” He points to the religious Germans, the good Lutherans and the Catholics. “And this [Holocaust] was entirely separate from their religion. They could not see this as being barred by their religion. It just didn’t make any difference. It never seemed to occur to them that this was not just morally wrong but against their religion and everything else. A strange situation.”

And he sees parallels today. “We seem to be selective in our outrages. We can be outraged by something in one country; the same thing happens in another country, and we turn a blind eye to it. I can’t explain that.”

Dallas Peyton
Tucson, Arizona
DACHAU

Dallas Peyton is another World War II veteran who didn’t tell anyone about what he’d seen in the war—not his wife, nor his children. It wasn’t until 2002, when one of his grandsons who was teaching high school history in Tucson asked him to be a guest lecturer and talk about the war, that he opened up. “I started talking to these kids and didn’t do bad until I got to Dachau, and then from there on, I was crying more than I was talking.”

His fear was that the kids were thinking, “You old fool, up there crying,” but when he saw the looks on their faces, he knew it wasn’t so. The word spread after that first class, and before the day was out, students from all over the school asked to hear him speak. Even with that positive experience, it took time for him to accept the fact that he had a story to tell. The encouragement of Jewish survivors helped.

Now he speaks often about his personal experience with the Holocaust, and he’s reached the point where he can do it without breaking down. He ends most of his talks to school kids with the famous words of a onetime inmate at Sachsenhausen and Dachau, Reverend Martin Niemöller, who himself was answering a student who asked, “How could it happen?”:

First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.

Leonard Lubin
St. Petersburg, Florida
WELS II

Leonard Lubin is able to describe his witnessing of the opening of the Wels II camp in precise detail, yet he is openly hostile to being called a liberator in its most common context. He knows there is a relative handful of Americans who were at the camps that the Germans had fled, and he acknowledges being one of them. But liberator? “It all sounds so exalted, so glamorous. But we didn’t do anything to liberate anybody. It’s a bunch of bull. Just a soldier, putting one foot in front of another like I was told to do, happened to be walking down that road like I was told to do, and walked into this thing. No Germans there to fight, so I didn’t do anything heroic. I hate the term ‘liberator.’ It’s a false thing.

“Most of us were draftees, and even if we weren’t, we were just ordinary people like lots of people today, nothing special. People hear you’re a liberator, their eyes glass over and they speak in hushed terms.”

But he’ll accept “eyewitness,” even as he acknowledges that from 1945 to 2006 he never discussed his personal contact with the Holocaust with anyone. But unlike many of the other veterans, he can explain why, in emotional detail. “I’ll answer you about that, what it’s all about. You come back here, ‘Oh, great, happy to have you home. Tell us, what was it like?’ So you tell ‘em. ‘Concentration camp?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, what was it like?’ ‘Well, all these dead people.’ ‘Well, tell me about it.’ ‘Whaddya want me to tell you? They were dead people, stacked up, dead.’ And then if you look like you’re getting emotional or anything, they say, ‘Hey, forget it! It’s over now, you’re back home, whoopee! Let’s have a picnic. Let’s have a party. Let’s buy a car, get some clothes, get a beer.’

“So here you are and you’ve got this dichotomy—here, a great society, cars, happy people, well-fed, happy people. Over there, destroyed society, gone to rubble, the men gone, the women you could have all you wanted for a pack of cigarettes. And cigarettes were free to us, so the women were free. And a destroyed society. One of the most advanced cultures in the world. You look through
Who’s Who
of the 1800s on through until the advent of Hitler, every other name of achievement, the Germans. They had Social Security long before we did; it was gone. People’s savings were gone. The currency was worthless, a totally destroyed society. Spiritually gone and confused.

Leonard Lubin

“Over here, the other end of the dichotomy, everything was fantastic, terrific, get on with it, good. Forget it, like you could turn the spigot off and forget it. So you didn’t. And there was, for Jewish soldiers like myself, not that I was an observant person, nothing like that, very American, assimilated like so many American Jews are, not just Jews—Catholics, Irishmen—all of us were assimilated as Americans. But nonetheless, have to say it’s true—a certain embarrassment here—over there you’re talking to these people, you asked me what they smelled like. They stunk. They were whining and pleading and crying and begging and assuming postures of begging and adoration, kissing your feet or trying to. Humiliating, the whole thing. And you’re thinking to yourself, there but for the grace of somebody, why them and not I?

“But you talk to a German, they’re well fed, no matter what you’ve heard to the contrary. They’ve got cigarettes to smoke, they’re healthy, they can talk to you on an intellectual level, they can tell a joke. Over here you’ve got these whining, filthy people, abhorrent. Your instinct is just to get away from them. And I think—I can’t speak for others—but I believe most Jewish soldiers who saw that, were involved in that way, had to be embarrassed and humiliated and torn. I know I was.

“Embarrassed because you want your people to be strong and healthy and well. And these were not strong and healthy and well at all; you could almost have contempt for them. You know, why did you allow the bastards to do this to you? Why didn’t you resist? Why didn’t you fight? Why didn’t you take a bullet? It’s hard to explain.”