The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (49 page)

And Leonard Lubin comes back to the original question: why didn’t he talk? And he acknowledges finally figuring out, after participating in a program at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, that it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. A non-Jew said he’d never talked. “People didn’t talk. I always thought it was because of the Jewish context that I just described, but it was something else as well. Part of it was, really, nobody wanted to hear it. They’d say to you, ‘Tell me about it,’ [but then it was] ‘Let’s get on with it, have a good time, forget it. It’s over, forget it, we won. Hooray.’ And something about that tells you people don’t want to hear about it. I have talked to survivors, not liberators, survivors of concentration camps with numbers on their arms, and they’ll tell you the same thing. People didn’t want to hear it.”

When the war ended, Lubin’s squad occupied a house in a little mountain village in the Alps that was owned by an old farmer and his wife. He went out to the field by day, and she was a housewife. “There over the mantle of the fireplace were pictures of four Germans, black-and-white pictures of four German soldiers. They were sons, every single one of them, killed on the Russian front. These were the loveliest people in the world. I didn’t like Germans. I was prepared to kill ‘em. Here was a mother, she lost all four of her sons, had no idea what the hell it was all about. And she somehow chose to believe that I reminded her of her youngest son, so she wanted to feed me and clean my clothes and press my clothes, and these were people—here were my corpuscles fighting with each other: hate, love, love, hate. A mother, a parent. It’s just too much. I had enough conflict for a number of lifetimes, my mind and my spirit and my emotions.

“I was speaking to a graduating class at a Christian religious school, twelve-, fourteen-year-olds, and one little girl raised her hand. She says, ‘Mr. Lubin, do you hate Germans? I’m German.’ And I said, ‘My God, child, no, of course not. They’re people. Of course not.’ And so all of this stuff in your head [is] the content of my nightmares. The minute I hear the word ‘Holocaust,’ what flashes through my mind is that engraving in my brain of that guy cutting himself to pieces trying to get some nourishment out of that tin can. That to me is the Holocaust. The content of my nightmares.”

LeRoy “Pete” Petersohn
Montgomery, Illinois
and
Hana Berger Moran
Orinda, California
MAUTHAUSEN

It took fifty-eight years for Pete Petersohn to learn the fate of Hana, the three-week-old baby he’d rescued from the filthy woman’s barracks at Mauthausen in the final days of the war. In 2003, he learned that the baby had grown up and become Hana Berger Moran, PhD, a U.S. citizen living in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband. Here’s how it happened.

On a trip to the United States from her home in Czechoslovakia in 1981, Hana’s mother had begun encouraging her to find the soldiers who saved her. But Hana is a self-acknowledged procrastinator as well as being a very private person who admits she “didn’t have the gumption to start looking for them.” Nevertheless, she tried, but her initial attempts through the National Archives and the Simon Wiesenthal Center came to naught.

In 2003, around the time her son, Thomas, was married, she found the 11th Armored Division Association Web site and wrote a letter asking for help in locating the men who’d saved her life. The responses came quickly from veterans who’d been at Mauthausen, and soon she heard in writing from Petersohn, who said, “I always wondered what happened to that baby.”

Hana Berger Moran and LeRoy Petersohn, reunited at the 60th-anniversary celebration of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria
.

It took a lot of e-mail between them before Pete decided to call her. “I just happened to catch her at home, and boy, she let out a scream, ‘Pete! Pete!’ She wanted to know how I’d been, and the last thing she said to me was that she loved me and thank you for keeping her alive, and that I promise her to keep in contact with her.”

Through regular e-mails and occasional phone calls, he learned that Hana had fled Czechoslovakia when the Soviets had invaded in 1968 and gone to Israel, where she had family members. She’d received her doctorate at the Weizmann Institute of Science and in 1977 had come to the United States on a fellowship at the University of Chicago as an organic and natural products chemist with expertise in governmental and scientific affairs. The baby Petersohn helped save now speaks five languages and has been responsible for more than thirty investigational new-drug filings with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and nine drugs approved by regulatory authorities in both the United States and Europe.

Since Petersohn was in the Chicago area and Hana lived near San Francisco, they never had the opportunity to meet in person until she was invited to attend ceremonies being held by the Austrian government to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen. Hana had visited the former death camp when she was twenty years old with her mother, and she describes it as having been a difficult trip. She was not looking forward to repeating the experience, but when told that Pete was going to be there, she agreed to attend.

In May 2005, Petersohn and his two sons were flown, all expenses paid, to Frankfurt and then on to Linz, where they were taken to a hotel at Mauthausen the evening before the official events began. Hana was already in the restaurant with other invited guests. She can replay the moment in her mind, second by second. “Suddenly I heard these people coming through, and I knew it was him. So I kind of waited until he settled down, and he was very tired, and I kind of crept in next to him, and I just sat next to him. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t talk. He described the trip, and suddenly I noticed that everybody went quiet. His sons were quiet, and Pete was still talking. I’m not saying anything, I’m just looking at him, thinking, ‘Wow!’ And then I put my hand on his knee and he turned around and he said, ‘Hana.’ And of course it was very emotional. And here as I’m talking about it I have goose bumps.”

Pete Petersohn remembers the moment a bit differently. “She came in the door, and she hugged me so tight I thought she was going to kill me.”

In Hana’s mind, she’d always held the image of a young soldier. She never thought of him as being an adult in his early eighties. “When I met him,” she says, “it just kind of made sense. It just felt very safe. It felt very comfortable to meet him. I was just totally choked up.

“As hokey as this may sound, I have two birthdays. I was born on April 12, and then, thanks to LeRoy Petersohn and the 11th Armored, I was born again on May 5.”

Bernard Schutz
Skokie, Illinois
LANDSBERG

When Bernie Schutz came back to Chicago, he went with two other bachelors to a social at Temple Sholom, the prestigious Reform Jewish Congregation facing Lincoln Park on the city’s North Side. There he met Elizabeth Knoop—Betty—a Jewish Dutch girl who had survived the war only because she’d been helped by a church that was part of the underground. It had smuggled her out of the Amsterdam ghetto, and with her fair complexion and blond hair she was able to work as a housekeeper in the home of a gentile family. Her parents also survived the war, hidden by the underground in a clothes closet for two years.

Bernie learned that the only way Betty could stay in America legally was if she married a citizen. He qualified. And that’s what happened. It’s also how he ended up in the art business, with her relatives in Holland buying European art and shipping it to his gallery in Illinois to be sold.

Before the Army, Bernie describes himself as being “very Jewish but not practicing religion.” Before he saw Landsberg, he believed in God—he says he’d often say, “God help me.” After Landsberg, he had a big question. “I still have a feeling that there is something, but I have no knowledge of what it is, and after what I saw—” He doesn’t complete the thought. He recalls a conversation about the Holocaust with an Orthodox Jewish man whose answer was “He knows best.”

Schutz says, “You know, I envy people who have blind faith. I think that’s wonderful, no matter what you say or what happens, they believe. I question. I want to believe, but it’s very difficult.”

Don Timmer
Mansfield,
Ohio OHRDRUF

Don Timmer came home and didn’t talk about the two days he’d spent in and around the concentration camp at Ohrdruf. His family knew, but no one else. He finally broke his silence and went public after hearing about a board of education meeting in Loudonville, Ohio. A high school teacher was reviewing her itinerary for the senior class trip to Washington. Proposed stops included the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the Smithsonian, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Don Timmer

He says that one of the school board members “flew into a rage and said that the Holocaust was grossly exaggerated and that the students shouldn’t be forced to go to the museum and listen to ‘a fabrication.’ He said he’d ‘had enough of those damn Jews.’

“When I heard what the guy said, it made me go back to my memory of those days in April 1945,” he said, anger rising in his voice. Since then, he’s spoken often about the Holocaust.

Ernest James
Santa Rosa, California
NORDHAUSEN

By his own estimation, Ernest James has talked about the Holocaust to more than 15,000 high school students, primarily telling them they have a responsibility to remember how it came about and why, and what they can do about it. Most of the time, he says, this is new to them. But a couple of times—these are the ones that really stick in his memory—he has run smack into deniers.

There was “the little town in the gold country here in California, a lot of redneck types, and the school was hearing from the kids that they didn’t believe it happened. And so I went up and talked to them about it—these kids had been told by their parents that it didn’t happen. And after it was over, I was surprised, girls would come up and throw their arms around me and thank me, and guys would come up and shake my hand and almost to a person would say, ‘We didn’t realize that that happened that way.’ What they were really saying is that ‘Our parents told us different.’

“Then I had another one where the school in Elk Grove, California, where the teacher warned me that there was a girl that didn’t believe it happened. Her parents, her grandparents had moved over here from Germany because they wanted to get away from Hitler. But they were Hitler supporters. And the grandparents convinced the [girl’s] parents that all of this did not happen, that it was a big lie.”

When it was announced at the school that James was going to speak, the granddaughter objected and her parents refused to give permission for her to attend. Somehow, however, she was at his presentation. “Afterwards, I talked a little to her, and she was absolutely convinced that I was wrong, it didn’t happen. No matter what my arguments were. And then she wrote a thesis where she put down all of her arguments, and they were, right down the line, the arguments you hear from the nasty types. And there was nothing I could do to convince her. She absolutely refused to believe it. Here’s two generations that had refused to believe it and were passing it along to a third.”

James says that kind of reaction is unusual, certainly the exception. But he believes that it does point out the need for continuing education on the subject and raises concerns about finding credible people to engage and enlighten schoolchildren once the World War II generation of eyewitnesses is gone.