Sixty-eight years after the event, Leo can still remember his first combat: “All of us were gung ho, but then as soon as we entered combat, actually, it was horrifying, because here men that we trained with and that we’d come to love as comrades, we saw them getting killed and wounded all around us, and nothing happened to me. Our company was headed towards a larger force, to engage in battle, and then we got word that on the way, there’s a small town with a handful of Germans, and to wipe ‘em out and then go on your way. Well, what a surprise we were in for; when we got there to that town, on the road in front of the town, we noticed that there were three American airplanes [flying] in a circular fashion. They had come down and machine-gunned the town, then go around and rocket the town, shoot rockets, and then go around and drop bombs. The three airplanes did that for about forty-five minutes or an hour, and then after they left, we got the order to spread out and to advance. No sooner than we got the order to advance, we were sprayed with machine-gun fire; we weren’t very gung ho at that moment.”
Less than two months later, now experienced combat veterans, his outfit experienced a very different kind of horror. They were walking down a road when, several hundred feet in front of them, two large gates opened wide. “Two German trucks pulled out, and a handful of Germans jumped in and fled. It was toward the end of the war, many thousands of Germans were either fleeing or surrendering. This handful decided to flee rather than confront us, because we were a couple of hundred men.
Private Leo Serian was with elements of the 65th Infantry Division when it discovered Hersbruck, a subcamp of Flossenbürg. More than six decades later, the image of a huge, unburned pyre of bodies is never far from his mind’s eye.
“We were on foot, and they were in trucks. We couldn’t go after them. They disappeared before we could even raise our rifles. And then, slowly, we approached those open gates. We walked in, and the sight before our eyes caused us to freeze, like we almost were in a coma. To our left on the ground were dozens of bodies, like twigs that fell off from a tree. And most of them were dead. Some came crawling towards us.”
Nineteen-year-old Private Serian and his buddies had known virtually nothing about concentration camps. Without warning, they’d walked into one.
“There was a pyre of human bodies about maybe eight feet high. They all appeared to be dead, but there could have been some alive on the verge of death. They didn’t have any furnaces there to burn bodies, so I’m assuming they were going to just throw gasoline on them.
“Some came walking towards us, haltingly, and some came crawling on their hands and knees. You could almost see their bones protruding out of their bodies and wondered how they still remained alive. Some of them were completely nude. When they approached us, we didn’t know what to say to them. Some of them spoke, but we didn’t understand. Some embraced us and clung to us, standing and on their knees.”
The camp they’d discovered was Hersbruck, one of seventy-four subcamps of Flossenbürg, later described by the Third U.S. Army Judge Advocate Section, War Crimes Branch, as “one of the worst … a factory dealing in death.” On Easter Sunday, just three weeks before the Americans arrived, the Nazis had marched the prisoners still able to walk out of Hersbruck to Dachau, a hundred miles away. The survivors that Serian’s unit found were the ones too debilitated to walk.
The image of the unburned pyre of bodies is never far from Leo Serian’s mind’s eye. In 1994, just prior to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, with the country experiencing renewed interest in what World War II veterans had to say, Serian wrote to the U.S. Army Center of Military History. He wanted to know the name of the camp he’d helped liberate. After learning that it was Hersbruck, he got in touch with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and asked for help in finding survivors. Eventually he received a list of twenty-seven people and wrote to them; he’s heard back from about a dozen who live in the United States, Israel, Prague, the Czech Republic, and South America. Each described daily life in Hersbruck; some told of the death marches to Dachau and beyond.
And Serian, who is motivated not only by his own family’s tragedy during the Armenian genocide but by disgust with the Holocaust deniers who continually pop up to spread their lies, continues to speak often as a personal witness of the Holocaust.
CHAPTER 11
I START CRYING AND I CAN’T TALK ANYMORE
APRIL 22, 1945
Near Rötz, Germany
75 miles east of Nuremberg
It was late on the night of April 22, and most of the remaining 169 American POWs from Berga were bedded down in a barn near the village of Rötz when word went from survivor to survivor: “We can’t continue on this way.” Morton Brooks says they reached a consensus: “When morning comes, we don’t move.”
Hours later, as the sun was rising, the guards began yelling, “Heraus, heraus!” (Get out!)
Brooks says no one moved. “We stayed still. And then we heard some shots, and the guards took off. We waited about ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and one of the fellows looked out the back end of the barn and saw the 11th Armored coming down the road. Tanks, trucks, whatever. And when they said ‘Americans!’ the door back there opened up, and we went down this hill and they couldn’t believe who we were, and they pulled us up onto the tanks and trucks and the group went on to their destination.”
Tony Acevedo, the former medic, recalls one of their German guards handing his rifle to an American and saying, “I am your prisoner now.” He says the POWs immediately recognized the American tanks, but there was a tense moment when the American liberators couldn’t comprehend what—who, actually—they were seeing. Acevedo says that moment didn’t last long, and a tanker grabbed him by one arm and swung him up onto the tank as though he weighed nothing. Now in his eighties, when talking about the experience, Tony still has to pause a moment to grieve for the men he had tried to save in Berga and Stalag IX-B and couldn’t. It’s the curse of the medics in all our wars: they never forgive themselves for the men they weren’t able to save.
Brooks, who’d been a POW and slave laborer for more than three months, says the liberators tried to give them food and water. “I remember I had a K ration—a cheese thing that was in this K ration, and I tried to eat it and I couldn’t get it into my mouth, really. I was so hungry, and yet I couldn’t eat. Which was lucky. Some guys ate and then became violently ill.”
The 11th Armored Division brought them to the city of Cham, where they took over a building and quickly converted it into an emergency hospital. The POWs were deloused with DDT, put on stretchers, and given medical care. Brooks says that some Red Cross people came through with toothpaste and toothbrushes—he sighs, then laughs as he recalls the moment—“I mean, it was just so inappropriate to what our needs were.”
Norman Fellman was with a different group of Berga prisoners on the death march. His memory of liberation two days earlier, on April 20, begins with lying at the side of the road, waiting to be lifted into the vegetable cart and pushed or pulled down the road. But he suddenly realized that the German guards had disappeared. “Next thing I know a tank comes over the hill, and there’s a bunch of dirty, scruffy guys. They were members of the 90th Division, and they were the best-looking guys I ever saw.” His liberators were most likely members of Company D of the 712th Armored Battalion, attached to the 90th Infantry Division.
It was only when he saw the reaction of the GIs on the tanks that he got a sense of how bad off he really was. “I never realized how bad we looked until I saw other people’s faces when they saw us for the first time.” When he was rescued, Fellman had cellulitis, a precursor of gangrene, in one leg. The problem had originated with bites from lice that had become infected at Berga. When he got to a U.S. Army field hospital, they weighed him: he was down to 86 pounds. He knew that death hadn’t been that remote a possibility. “I don’t know whether any of us that were in the carts—or even on the road—would’ve lived another week.”
Mort Brooks wasn’t abl
e to get word to his family that he’d survived captivity until he arrived at a field hospital near Manchester, England. Brooks had an epiphany during his recovery there. “They saw I couldn’t eat, and they started me on a liquid kind of diet, almost like milk shakes, that I could sip out of a straw. I would get food, and I would gag. And after a while, I was looking at myself in the mirror, and I said, ‘You gotta do something about this. You’ve got to control it,’ and gradually it improved. I learned what the power of thought was; maybe that’s why I became interested in psychology. I could determine that I had to do something about that situation, and I would look in the mirror and say, ‘Look, just calm down. And get over the gagging,’ and I would talk to myself, essentially, and say that I had to improve, that this was not a tolerable situation. And gradually it improved.”
Brooks spent about six weeks in the hospital and was then sent to London, where he and other former POWs were interrogated with an eye toward future prosecution of German war criminals. The commandant and assistant commandant of Berga were eventually tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The SS commander, Hans Kasten, was ultimately hanged by Communist authorities in 1952. His deputy, Erwin Metz, who had directly caused the death of many of the prisoners at Berga and had continued to cause deaths on the long march, was sentenced to death in 1946. The sentence was commuted, and he was released eight years later. To this day Brooks regrets that he was never called to testify against them formally at Nuremberg.
Shortly after his liberation, Norman Fellman was flown from a field hospital to Paris, where his leg required extensive treatment. But when he got to the hospital, a makeshift facility in a converted school, there were no rooms. “Casualties were coming in so damned fast, and the prison camps were beginning to empty out, the hospitals were just overflowing. They had me in a bed out in the hall, and people would come by, and kids would look at me and cry. So I felt like a freak.
“The care couldn’t have been better, and the empathy was fantastic. They couldn’t do enough for me. I lay in the bed, and I listened to a doctor, a lieutenant, and a chief medical officer, a colonel, and they were having an argument. The colonel is saying, ‘That leg’s gotta come off; we are loaded with people. We gotta move this man along.’ And the lieutenant says, ‘I think we can save the leg. We’ve got this new medication, it’s working marvels. I’d like to try it.’ And don’t you know, the colonel finally decided, he said, ‘I’ll give you two days. If we don’t see remarkable improvement, that leg comes off.’ And he’s talking about penicillin. And they gave me shots around the clock, every two hours. They had no idea how to dose it. There was twenty thousand units every two hours. You feel sorry for the poor sonofabitch who had to give me a shot, because all I had was bone. I had no fat. So he gave me a shot like you’d give it to a dog. He’d pick up the skin, which was loose, and you shot it under the skin. And then penicillin washes. I had these lice-bite holes in my ankle, and there were maybe six or eight of them going up my ankle and down into the foot. And you could take a medical probe and actually go from one hole to the other, like tunnels in my leg. And they would wash me—have the liquid penicillin go through, and in the end of two days’ time, you could actually see the healing begin. It was a miracle, there’s no question about it.”
At the time, Fellman was indifferent to the discussions about his leg. He just wanted to sleep. “I was a bystander; I was divorced from the person who they were talking about. They were talking about cutting off my leg. They may as well been talking about squashing a fly. It just didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to be left alone. I kept thinking to myself, Goddammit, go argue somewhere else.”
A few days later, when it was clear that his leg was going to be saved, Fellman became interested in food. He remembers it as though it were yesterday. “They wanted me to have anything I wanted to eat. I told them I wanted eggs, and they said, ‘How do you want them fixed?’ I said, ‘I want them every way you can fix one,’ and I think they served me a dozen eggs. Two fried, two over easy, you know, two boiled, whatnot. And I ate them, every damned one of them. And about thirty minutes later I threw every one up. But it was good going down, I gotta tell you.”
After about a month in the hospital, Fellman was put aboard a DC-3 and flown from Paris to Lisbon, then to the Azores, ultimately landing at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. Morton Brooks came home on the Queen Mary, sailing from Scotland to New York harbor. He still thinks one of the most exciting things he’s ever seen was the Statue of Liberty as the ship came in. Fireboats were spraying water, horns were blaring, and a band on one of the boats greeted the former prisoners of war, the former inmates of a Nazi slave-labor camp, with one of the most popular songs of that year, “Don’t Fence Me In.”*
APRIL 22, 1945
SACHSENHAUSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP
ORANIENBURG, GERMANY
21 miles north of Berlin
Bernhard “Ben” Storch is an American, a veteran, a witness to the Holocaust, and a past state commander of the New York Jewish War Veterans. He saw things that no other American saw during World War II. That’s because during the war, Storch was a Polish citizen, fighting first as part of the Polish army as a mortarman and then as an artillery sergeant, attached to the White Russian Front. As part of the Soviet forces moving west, Storch’s unit was among the first at several of the Nazis’ worst death camps, but Sachsenhausen was the only one liberated by his unit where there were still live prisoners to be saved.
Storch was born in 1922 in the small town of Chorzów, Poland, not far from Katowice in Upper Silesia. His father had served in the Russian army from 1912 to 1919. When the Germans invaded Poland at the start of the Second World War, his family fled east, to Russia. And the Russians promptly sent them to Siberia.
In the spring of 1943, because he had to find some way to help support the family, he joined the army and was assigned to carry the tube in a three-man 82mm mortar squad. Their first engagement against the German army was on October 12. His unit was equipped with Studebaker and Buick trucks provided by the American Lend-Lease Plan.
Throughout the war, Storch offered morning Jewish prayers, laying tefillin, the small, square black leather boxes, one on the forehead, the other on the upper left arm and held in place by leather straps, that contain a handwritten copy of the Sh’ma, the sacred prayer that begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is One.” Despite his belief that anti-Semitism flows in the blood of the Polish people, he says it was not a problem in the Polish army.
By January 1945, there were two Polish divisions fighting alongside the Russians. In June, they’d pushed the Germans in their sector all the way back to the Polish border. A month later, they discovered their first death camp, Sobibor. Storch says, “We would have never found it, but there was this one guy telling us, ‘Down there, in the forest, there is a camp. Follow the railroad track about five miles.’ There was a railroad stop named Sobibor. The guy had simply said they were killing Jews there and Russian soldiers.” Storch says when they got to the camp, there was nothing but an empty field, where they discovered mass graves and thousands of saplings that the Germans had planted to hide the evidence. The camp had operated for eighteen months, until an uprising in October 1943, when the inmates had been liquidated and the camp razed. In that short time, an estimated 250,000 people, the majority of them Jews, were murdered with carbon monoxide generated by a diesel engine in six gas chambers with a total capacity of 1,200 at a time. It was at Sobibor that the Jews of the Vilna, Minsk, and Lida ghettoes were killed. The camp had no crematoria; victims were buried in pits; some were ultimately burned.
Storch says his men were not quite sure what they were seeing at Sobibor. “We had no idea then about concentration camps.”
Their next objective was Lublin, about sixty miles to the southeast, which they took on July 23, 1944, in what he says was a horrible massacre. About two miles outside the city they discovered the death camp called Majdanek. Storch was now a sergeant in an
artillery unit, traveling in a truck towing a 122mm howitzer. When they arrived at the camp, they simply drove in. “This camp was complete. The doors were not even locked, we didn’t have to break in anything. We went in and saw the gas chambers. We had no idea what it is. We thought it was a factory. The gas chambers didn’t look like anything special. There were about six of them; they had benches on the side but no marks, not even any blood on the floor. There was a skylight in the ceiling for the SS guys to check and see if the people were already dead. The sign said BATH DISINFECTION—FOR SANITARY REASONS. They had steel doors, showerheads. No lights; no electricity. We walked into them.”
Storch and his men then walked about a quarter mile down the road, where they discovered six crematoria, and the horror began to sink in. “We saw some parts of human bodies, bones. We started to think about it, said, ‘It couldn’t be.’ But in Poland, the Catholics don’t cremate people. We said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Finally someone from the outside showed up, and he told us that this is a death camp. Nobody had told us to be prepared for it. At that point I was twenty years old.” Storch has had this conversation with hundreds of American veterans of World War II who were blindsided by their own discovery of Nazi death camps in the spring of 1945. “The [U.S.] government knew about [the death camps liberated by the Russian army]. That was 1944. Those two camps were liberated, Sobibor and Majdanek, in 1944.” Treblinka was also liberated in 1944; Auschwitz was taken by the Russians in January 1945.
By the time Storch got to Majdanek, his outfit had seen death on a wholesale scale, but they still had the capacity to be horrified. “It was terrible. You had the ovens, you had the bones, and you go over to the side and you have this huge mountain of ash, [but] you don’t think that it is ash. One thing that struck me is that when I was walking through the grounds—our shoes were black shoes—all of a sudden the shoes became white. It was white, light grayish white. And for some reason we couldn’t figure out what it is; we were told later. The wind was blowing, it was fertilizing the fields there. The grass was so gorgeous, fertilized with bone meal. The commandant had a beautiful garden there.
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