The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (51 page)

Harry Feinberg
Elmwood Park, New Jersey
OHRDRUF

The two dozen men gathered in a New Jersey hotel dining room in spring 2008 had brought wives, children, even grandchildren with them. The occasion was not a happy one. Harry Feinberg, who’d been president of their chapter of the 4th Armored Division Association since 1985, had to tell the membership that the time had come to disband—maybe one or two more meetings after that, no more. They used to meet four times a year, men only. Then they’d cut it to twice a year and let the wives in. Harry says they came from all over the area: Long Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn, south Jersey, upstate New York, Connecticut. But no more. “We’re losing them, we’re losing them too fast. I get these phone calls, I hate to get on the phone. Every time, [my wife will] say, ‘Harry, it’s for you,’ and one of the children or a wife would tell me, ‘Sorry to tell you this, but Bernie just passed away,’ or Charlie. I just got one the other day, a son called. They’re like brothers to me. What we went through, the bond from what we went through, we would do anything for each other. Believe it or not. You go to any of these meetings, and you’ll see guys hugging each other, a kiss on the cheek, you know. And we’re all straight men. But that’s the way it is. I never saw anything like it in my life.”

If reunions give the veterans a chance to remember the good times in the war—a concept nonveterans may find difficult to understand—they also have a chance to talk about the stuff that still screws with their heads. And the wives have a chance to talk among themselves about their husbands—the physical ailments and the mental.

Harry acknowledges that his wife, Edie, still has to help him keep it together. The memories of the concentration camps are still there, still vivid. And when the couple moved from the house they’d lived in for decades, the flashbacks got worse. The VA finally sent him to see a psychiatrist—this is more than sixty years after the war. “I go there every three months, every six months, whenever he gives me an appointment. And he wants to hear stories, and I keep telling him these stories, and he questions me. And I said, ‘Doc, do you want me to pull punches?’

“And I start bawling myself, tears come out of my eyes, which I try to hold back. ‘No, no, I want to hear you. Don’t hold anything back,’ he says. I never went to a psychiatrist in my life, but he wants to hear these stories. ‘Do you dream about it?’ I said, ‘Yes, you know, at times my wife has to nudge me because I’ll start moaning and jumping all over the bed, not vertically, but start tumbling around, and she’ll say, ‘Harry, what’s the matter? Is it the war?’ I’ll say, ‘Yeah, Edie, I was just dreaming about the war.’”

Feinberg says the dreams increased after he retired, and they got bad enough that he wanted to be medicated. “I asked Dr. Falcone, ‘Isn’t there a magic bullet? Give me a pill.’ He says, ‘Mr. Feinberg, you cannot forget it. You will never forget it.’

“I said, ‘Why am I coming here? I want to forget about this; I want a pill that’s going to soften everything. I don’t want to think about this anymore.’ So he says, ‘There’s no such pill, and you will never forget about it.’”

Ultimately, the psychiatrist put Harry on a medication that is supposed to help him relax. But he’s still dealing with back problems that began during the war. “My back started acting up. You get up on the tank; to get down, you jump down. Every time I jumped, I would complain to my first sergeant. All he wanted to know is ‘Any bones broken?’ No. ‘Any blood?’ No. ‘Get outta here.’ And he wouldn’t let me see a doctor. If I went over his head, I would be dead now. He would give me some detail.”

Harry had his first back surgery in 1953; since then, he’s had two more, but he’s coping. And he’s being very careful.

In 1999, he and some other 4th Armored veterans were invited to return to Gotha, Germany, where they were surprised to discover that the American soldiers were looked upon as saviors. Harry says the German officials insisted that the Americans had liberated them. “I said, ‘How in the hell did we liberate you? We were fighting the German army.’ And he said, ‘No, no, you weren’t fighting the German people; you were fighting the Nazis. All Germans are not Nazis.’ And I opened my mouth, and I said, ‘I can’t believe this. I was there. Imagine that, all these things were kept from us. We thought we were fighting Germans. We were fighting Nazis. Can you believe that?”

Morris Eisenstein
Delray Beach,
Florida DACHAU

By the time he participated in the capture of Munich, Morris Eisenstein couldn’t count the number of German civilians who had pleaded with the American soldiers,
“Nicht Nazi.”
“That was the favorite expression of all the Germans,
‘Bitte, bitte, nicht Nazi.’”
One German, in particular, sticks in his mind. “He had been an exchange professor at the University of Chicago, in English or German literature. I said to him, ‘How could you possibly have done some of this? You people who gave the world all the great minds in music and culture and art.’ He says, ‘What can I say? We were obeying orders.’ Typical German.”

Russel R. Weiskircher, PhD
Cleveland, Georgia
DACHAU

Russ Weiskircher knew that the Holocaust would be part of his life forever within minutes of his arrival outside Dachau. He puts it less elegantly. “Right after I tossed my cookies in the first boxcar, you know right then and there that you aren’t going to live this one down. And when we got away from there, I didn’t tell the world. I didn’t even put a mention of it—not a word of it—in my letters home. I couldn’t express it. I wanted to see what was going on, but I couldn’t describe it, and I didn’t really find myself able to discuss it until I got back to the States and I ran into the deniers, telling me that it was a Churchill/Roosevelt/Stalin myth, that there were no concentration camps, and my pictures were lies and I was brainwashed.”

Rüssel Weiskircher

He was invited to speak at a German Evangelical United Brethren Church in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. And the pastor, who he says was a Nazi, told his congregation that everything Weiskircher had to say was a lie. “This was an ordained minister of God. A U.S. citizen. I got up and made him look like two cents, and I’ve been spieling ever since.”

He’d been afflicted with nightmares immediately after the war, always about the crematory and the bodies stacked up. They came back when he was eighty-two years old, when his old commanding officer, Felix Sparks, died. They’d maintained a telephone relationship, and suddenly it ended.

He says that Dachau was the building block for the rest of his life. “I decided that bad things happened when good people shut up and don’t do anything, so I started out on a crusade of one to let the world know you gotta get off the dime and do something.” He drifts into the practiced cadence of the southern preacher he became, saying, “You ought to wake up, you gotta get up, you gotta stand up, you gotta speak up, and you don’t dare shut up. That’s been my creed for years and years and years.”

Russ Weiskircher came home from the war with his belief in God strengthened. He believes he survived and that he’s doing what he’s doing because God wants it that way. He says, “The mission now is to do as much as I can to get people involved to study what happened, to overcome bias and prejudice to see that it doesn’t happen again. To get people in a position where they speak up when it’s wrong and when they’re not afraid to do it. If we had opened our borders when the Jewish immigrants needed a place to go, we could’ve lessened the impact of the Holocaust by close to five percent. FDR didn’t do one damn thing.”

And he’s not sure that if it were put to a vote today, Americans would save 200,000 people from certain death in Darfur. “It would be tough. I know how I would vote, but it would be tough to sell it. There’d be people who’d genuinely want to save them and people who didn’t give a damn.”

Which prompts the question, what do you think we learned from the Holocaust?

“What I think we learned is, you can’t sit still and wait it out. You can’t let the bastards get away with it. That’s as simple as I know how to put it. You gotta speak up for your neighbor before they come for him and end up coming for you. The last man to go is me,” he says, paraphrasing Reverend Niemöller.

Yet he’s realistic. He believes the future depends on the impact his generation makes in spreading the word, and he, personally, is doing everything he can. The legacy of which he’s proudest can be found in his work with the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, which has established an institute that teaches public-school teachers how to use the Holocaust to overcome prejudice and bias.

“Teachers come to learn how to teach, and they get paid. If the school year is going, we pay a substitute to stand in for them. And they get their room and board, and promotional credits. We teach them how to handle diversity, how to create diversity, accept diversity in the classroom, and we teach them how to fight prejudice. We cover a lot of ground when we teach teachers.”

Russel Weiskircher heard the call at Anzio, and it set him on a religious path for life. But it was at Dachau where he learned that bad things happened when good people shut up and do nothing. And that’s what started him on “a crusade of one to let the world know you gotta get off the dime and do something.”

David Nichols Pardoe

David Pardoe, né Nichols
Huntington, Massachusetts
LANDSBERG

The story told by David Pardoe of the VE Day party with the French troops in Germany was an example of how men and women who’ve been through the worst that war has to offer can find good memories to talk about when they get together. He’s pondered that effect and takes it a step further. “You know, I’ve thought about why it is that all the veterans’ organizations support the government and support the wars that the government undertakes. None of them, the veterans’ organizations like ours, ever oppose that kind of thing. And one of the essential reasons is that veterans’ organizations are made up of, first of all, the survivors. And they—the memory system, our minds—tend to bury the unpleasant, the ugly, the things that are best forgotten, and to remember the good times, the happy times, the comradeship, the loyalty. And that’s why so many veterans still support war. Because they survived, and the memory plays this terrible trick. It suppresses the ugly and the real brutality. It’s true. But this is true in our personal lives, too, you know. It’s much easier to remember the happy times than the hard times.”

Frederick “Fritz” Krenkler
Lake Havasu City, Arizona
DACHAU

Driving to the reunion of the few remaining guys who served together in the 42nd Infantry Division, the Rainbow, Fritz Krenkler was listening to talk radio when someone called in to agree with the president of Iran saying the Holocaust never happened. At that moment, Krenkler’s blood pressure probably went off the charts. “I’m still mad about it. I would like to go over there and grab him by the balls and pull his tongue out. That SOB that called in telling [talk-show host] Mike Savage it never happened…. I don’t know where these people get this idea.”

Fritz is another World War II veteran who has exhibited classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but he lived with it without getting help. Truth is, there was no help for it that was readily available at the postwar VA when it began chewing up the lives of guys like Krenkler, who was at Dachau with the 42nd. “I’m afraid I was a different person when I came back than when I went over. I had an anger in me that I didn’t understand. As a matter of fact, I didn’t understand that anger until ten years ago, when I got a little psychiatric help. That anger expressed itself in many ways. I got pretty nasty, probably never realized why.”

What got Fritz to a therapist was a severe blowup, the kind of anger that goes from A to Z in a second. And it nearly tore his family apart. “I never realized what was happening to me. I could have enjoyable weeks on end and have one, two, three days where my wife would want to just plain get rid of me. And I’d bury myself in work.”