Liberators and Survivors: The First Moments

A man came up to us and said: "There is a factory a mile up the road" and you will find there many Jewish women "who were thrown there, "and the SS are guarding them." We opened this shed. , we went in there... (SOFIA THE SOB) Although fighting was still raging in the Pacific theater, World War II in Europe officially ended with Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. (EXPLOSION) The Allied armed forces They advanced across Europe in the war. In the final stages, relentlessly pursuing the retreating German army, they ran into camps, often accidentally, that had been established and run by the Nazis and their local collaborators. the east, liberated the Nazi camps in Poland including Majdanek and Auschwitz.

The British and Canadians, advancing from the west, liberated Bergen Belsen and the camps in northern Germany. The Americans, our focus here, liberated Dachau, Buchenwald and others. fields. thousands of people imprisoned in camps. They encountered piles of corpses and thousands of skeletal prisoners on the brink of death from malnutrition and disease. This was his

first

encounter with the horror of what would become known as the Holocaust. They began to understand that the Nazis had committed atrocities against civilians, the vast majority of them Jews, on an unimaginable scale, and that these atrocities were very different from the deaths caused by conventional warfare.

It was necessary to recognize a new category of crime to describe the intentional attempt to destroy a people. This crime became known as "genocide." The soldiers were the

first

outside witnesses to the Holocaust, an unprecedented case of genocide. The testimonies of the first soldiers to enter the camps, known as the "

liberators

", are important testimonies of the mass atrocities committed against the Jews of Europe by the Nazis and their collaborators. American soldiers, hardened combat veterans, were accustomed to death; many had been fighting for years. But they had never seen civilian killings on the massive scale they discovered.

His first encounters with Holocaust

survivors

at this unique moment give us an essential and intensely human perspective on the difference between military war and genocide. Leon Bass was 20 years old and one of the first American soldiers to arrive at Buchenwald. I will never be able to forget that day, because when I entered through that door I saw in front of me what I call the living dead. I saw human beings, human beings who had been beaten, who had been starved, who had been tortured, who had been denied everything. They had skeletal faces with sunken eyes. They had clean shaven heads.

They were standing there and clinging to each other to keep from falling. I saw the clothes of the little children, the little children who didn't survive. Against the wall were piles of clothes. I saw the caps, the sweaters, the socks, the shoes, but I never saw a child. Harry Mogan was a Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution. He came to the United States and became a soldier and liberator. And...and he dresses women on...on the ground, on...on wooden platforms. When I say women, he wears skeletons. Rags hanging on them, no shoes. Bones instead of faces.

And the stench was so horrible... It's hard to describe. (VOICE BREAKS) What American soldiers found at Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, was so gruesome that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, along with Generals Patton and Bradley, They came to inspect the campsite for themselves. After his visit, Eisenhower telegraphed: "The things I saw are indescribable." The visual evidence and verbal testimony of hunger, "cruelty and bestiality were so overwhelming" that they left me a little sick. "I made the visit deliberately, "so as to be in a position to "give first-hand evidence of these things" if ever, in the future, "a tendency develops" to accuse these accusations of simply 'propaganda.' These words are now engraved on the wall of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Eisenhower's witness testimony reveals that what he saw at Ohrdruf left a powerful impression. Eisenhower foresaw the problem of disbelief that could fuel denial of the atrocities committed by the Holocaust. The Nazis and their collaborators emphasized that he witnessed these horrors on purpose so that no one could deny what he saw with his own eyes. Eisenhower was convinced that the world needed to know. They were taken to see the camp. He had all nearby soldiers whose units were not on the front also visit him and wrote: "We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. "Now at least he will know what he is fighting against." US Army Sgt.

Horace Evers was one of the first Allied soldiers to enter Adolf Hitler's abandoned barracks in Munich. He discovered Hitler's personal stationery. He crossed out "Adolf Hitler," inserted his own name, and wrote a letter home about the camp. had seen on the outskirts of Munich. "Dear Mom and Lou: "A railway passes by the camp" and as we walked towards the carriages on the track "I thought about some of the stories I had read before about Dachau" and I was glad to have it. the opportunity to see with my own eyes to prove once and for all "that what I had heard was propaganda." "- But no, it wasn't propaganda at all - "in any case, part of the truth had been hidden. "In two years of combat, as you can imagine, I have seen a lot of death," mostly angry deaths. "But nothing has ever moved me as much as this. "The first carriage I arrived at had about 30 people who were once humans. "Bodies on top of each other, no one knows how many. "And then to the field itself.

Dirty barracks. "How can people do things like that? "I never believed they could... "until now." As American troops approached Dachau, they saw gruesome evidence of recent mass executions of prisoners. Anger led some to shoot at the SS guards still in the field. But Dachau not only fueled his anger, it also aroused his compassion. Paul Parks was a 22-year-old American soldier from Indianapolis who witnessed Dachau after its liberation. These people came out of these barracks-like buildings with their striped uniforms on and... in a devastating state. One of the guys who spoke English came out. And he said, "Are you Americans?" and I said, "Yes." He said, "Thank God!" and he fell to the ground and began to pray.

Who were the people these soldiers found? They were victims of Nazi ideology and hatred. The Jews among them had managed to survive the Holocaust, whose goal was total annihilation. Other prisoners, including Roma, homosexuals and communists, had managed to survive persecution and murder. For many, liberation came too late. Hundreds of people continued to die every day from hunger, exhaustion and disease. But for others, the soldiers were larger than life. They represented the moment of salvation that many

survivors

had despaired of not living to see. Helen Greenbaum survived imprisonment in the Warsaw ghetto, forced labor in several camps, including Majdanek and Ravensbruck, and a death march to Dachau, where she was eventually freed.

They opened all the gates and we started, some of us four, because they told us that the soldiers were coming. And we went out to greet the American soldiers, and we stood up and kissed their boots. They, some of them who couldn't walk, just crawled, and they picked them up and brought them to the camp. Some of the soldiers broke down and cried when they saw the survivors. Many made the conscious decision to temporarily suspend their military objectives to care for the broken and dying prisoners they encountered. In most cases, the

liberators

treated them with sympathy and kindness.

After the Germans mercilessly stripped them of their dignity, the liberators were the first to restore their humanity. Anton Mason was about 18 years old when he was liberated by American soldiers in Buchenwald. He had survived Auschwitz, where most of his family was murdered. I found out my father was dead and he was really at the end of my rope. I said, "I don't know if I can continue." But there is something that is simply impossible to explain. I just decided that... I won't give up, I'll try. And then, out of nowhere (LAUGHTER) on April 11, the Americans arrived.

I could not believe it! I could not believe it! I said, "How is this possible?" I walked towards a G.I. and...young boy, and I asked him if he could give me some food. He was very hungry. Then he took it out, gave me a Nestlé bar and gave me a gold... a little gold sachet, it said Nescafé, I didn't know what he was. (LAUGHTER) Then he gave me some food. Now, do you know how much that meal was worth? I could have achieved anything in Weimar! But he gave it to me. Solly Ganor lay half dead in the snow after a death march from Dachau.

He remembers the tired, unshaven soldier who knelt down, gently touched him on the shoulder and said, "You are free, boy. You are free now." Solly was surprised by the soldier's Japanese features. His liberator, Clarence Matsumura, was a member of a segregated regiment of Nisei soldiers, American children of Japanese immigrants. Clarence smiled at Solly, a smile that has stayed with him ever since. Solly has called Clarence his angel. Ironically, African American soldiers such as Paul Parks and Leon Bass, and Japanese Americans such as Clarence Matsumura, served in segregated units of the US military. They fought for freedom and democracy despite facing discrimination at home and within the military.

Nisei soldiers celebrated the freedom of survivors even though racial tension and fear during the war had caused many of their own families to be interned in camps in the United States. For countless Holocaust survivors, that first contact with the liberators was the moment they began to feel safe after years of fear, loss and brokenness. But for many, the liberation was the saddest moment of their lives. It was the moment they realized they were completely alone in the world. For many liberators, their first contact with survivors was a powerful moment of understanding. Trained to wage war, many chose to suspend their military missions for the humanitarian mission of providing care and respect to survivors.

The experiences of survivors and liberators moved many to become a moral voice, sharing their stories. I've been trying to witness for a long time, just going and talking to people. And I think it's important for me to talk about what I saw and for others to talk about what they saw. Do we look for credit? No. Nobody looks for credit. Nobody wants a pat on the back. All we want to do is say: will this be prevented from happening again? That's the most basic thing.