Many of the men of the 255th Regiment of the 63rd Infantry Division were riding on tanks from either the 10th or 12th Armored Divisions as they moved into the Landsberg area, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst due to the stench. Staff Sergeant Wayne Armstrong, a rifle squad leader in Company C from Westerville, Ohio, says they were coming down a road when they reached a set of open gates. “We saw all these people in what we called blue-and-white striped pajamas. It was just unbelievable. The tanks stopped, and we’re staring at these people. They looked like they was walking dead. And corpses piled on flatcars. We didn’t know what to make of it.
“These people looked like they was starving, and we started giving them stuff out of our K rations, and it was not too long, word came down not to give them food. We couldn’t figure out how anybody could treat people like that. We’d heard rumors that they had slave labor—but the slave labor they had was in factories and they fed them enough to keep them working, you know. We’d run into a lot of that.”
Domenick Pecchia had been drafted less than six months earlier from the Chicago area, and he was just eighteen when H Company of the 255th found itself at one of the Kaufering camps. His squad was on foot when they came to open gates with prisoners in striped uniforms pouring out. “We kinda hesitated for a moment, but my squad leader said, ‘Get your butt going,’ so we went in. I was horrified. Their condition is what stuck in my mind more than anything else. They were all gaunt and stooped over, and you had the feeling that they were not as old as they looked, you know what I mean? It was a short stay at that particular place, but I can remember it vividly, seeing the little old hats without a brim and the striped uniforms.”
None of the prisoners approached him at that time. “No, no. They were moving. We were going, like, to the left, past the gates over there, and they were streaming out and going to the right. Where they were going—I’m sure somebody else was going to start picking them up and seeing if they needed immediate attention. But we went right on.”
Sergeant Vincent Koch (Kucharsky at the time), a New Yorker, was head of the mortar platoon in Company M of the 255th as they approached one of the Kaufering camps. He’d been in Europe since the previous November and had fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Koch wasn’t aware that there was any concentration camp in the Landsberg area until he and his men were walking down a small dirt road and nearly walked right past one. The gate was open, the Germans were gone, and his squad just walked in, the first Americans to see this particular camp.
“I opened up the doors. The odor coming from there was absolutely unbelievable. And I walked in [the barracks] and they picked their heads up, some of them, they were in a horrible state. They were like double-deckers, some were on the top, others on the bottom. I was able to speak German, so I spoke with them, thinking that it was pretty close to Yiddish. They really couldn’t do much talking, though.
“About three days before that, I received a huge package from home, and there were groceries. And it was in the jeep that was with our outfit. And when I started opening some of the packages, those that were able to got out of their bunks, and they started to walk toward me and the package that I had on the floor there. And that was a big mistake, because they started to claw at each other trying to get to the food. I didn’t realize that that would happen. There was crackers, there was honey cake, there was all kinds of things that they had seen.
“I walked out, and then the captain came back in with me and he said, ‘The smartest thing you can do is take that package out, because they’re going to tear each other apart to get to it.’ We tried our best.”
The discovery of the camp happened in late afternoon. By the following morning, Koch says, ambulances started to arrive.
By the time M Company got to Landsberg, Koch was the only Jew in the outfit. There had been three when the company had been formed in Mississippi, but the other two had been killed. “I was the only survivor with that background, and knowing what the story [of the Nazi persecution of the Jews] was, it was a devastating experience that you remember forever, as you can imagine.
“When we got into the town of Landsberg itself, we started to see the German people, civilians. And I started to discuss it with them, and every single one of them denied that they knew. It was so hard to believe because the stench in that area was so strong that they would have had to know something was going on there. And we took some of the civilians, and we brought them in to show ‘em this particular segment of the concentration camp, and we walked them into where these bodies were lying—you know, the trench. They were horrified, too; whether they put it on or not, it’s very hard to say.”
Tom Malan was a twenty-three-year-old 60mm mortarman with the 63rd Infantry Division on the day it arrived at Landsberg. He’d grown up in Centralia, Illinois, and worked in the oil fields before being drafted. His first combat had been on the Maginot Line, and he had been with the division at the Colmar Pocket. But Kaufering IV—the camp that Israel Cohen was in—was the first concentration camp he saw.
“I will never forget, I ran across a Jewish fellow, I gave him a piece of bread. All he could eat at one time was a little piece, about the size of the end of my finger, because he was thin and had been starving.” The man he fed was outside the camp. The scene that awaited Malan once he walked through the gates and into the camp was also something he’ll never forget.
Tom Malan, a mortarman with the 63rd Infantry Division, tried to find survivors among the charred bodies in Kaufering IV, one of the Landsberg camps.
Before they left in the face of the American onslaught, the Nazis had used the last of their gasoline to set all the barracks in Kaufering IV afire with the inmates locked inside. The Kaufering barracks were about fifty feet long and about fifteen feet wide. They’d been built by first digging a rectangular hole in the ground, perhaps three feet deep. A triangular wall was built at each end, with a door no more than five feet high in the wall at the front. A peaked wooden roof, often covered with dirt, covered the minimalist structure, its eaves going all the way down to the ground. There were no provisions for drainage, so the slightest bit of rain created a mess inside. A central aisle ran from the door to the far end of the structure, and on either side were wooden shelves, usually two decks high, on which the inmates slept.
When Malan came into the camp, all but two of the buildings were still smoldering. Charred corpses were everywhere, some arrested in the act of trying to crawl out beneath the walls. He recalls, “They were burnt from the neck on down—or depending on how far they got out, from their waist on down. They tried to dig out underneath, and they didn’t make it.”
He and his buddies went into some of the barracks that hadn’t been totally consumed by the flames. They were looking for survivors, and he acknowledges that they didn’t go into any more than they had to. All that was left to see was dead bodies.
Malan’s response was to try to get through the camp as quickly as possible, to try to help the survivors who were wandering the camp, one of whom could very easily have been Israel Cohen.
In the final days, it’s estimated that as many as 12,000 prisoners were marched away from the eleven Kaufering camps. Thousands were loaded into boxcars at the nearby railway station. It’s unclear how many of them survived the war.
Cohen says he and his friends saw what was happening when the Germans returned after having run the first time, and they made a decision. “I said, ‘I’m not going to go anymore, I’ve had enough.’”
On April 26, they decided to hide among the sickest prisoners in the camp, people who could be talking one minute and dead the next. “We didn’t care about the consequences, that they were contagious. We were hiding the whole day, the whole night, and then the next day, we didn’t see the Germans. We thought the Germans left. And then they came back. We were hiding there in the belief that the Germans wouldn’t come into those tents. But they did come in, and they evacuated the rest of the people and put them on trucks, these people
that couldn’t move. And we were on the trucks. I weighed about seventy pounds, I was skin and bones. We had no strength. But we tried.”
He and one of his friends rolled off the truck when the Germans weren’t looking. They went back into the hut and hid, and they were caught again. And once again they managed to get off the truck and back into the hut. It was nighttime, and Cohen turned off the single light in the hut, and they hid again. Once more the SS came to the door, but this time, they didn’t come in. They stood at the opening and called for anyone inside to come out. Cohen and his friend didn’t move.
The next morning they thought the Germans were gone for good. Some of his friends wanted to celebrate, but he said, “No, we can’t celebrate until the Americans come. Don’t show that we are alive here.” They posted a guard outside to keep watch, and in a short time, he came back in and said that things were not good.
“The Germans came back with dogs, and we’re hiding again, under shmatas—rags—and other people were hiding in the straw. They came in, and there were shots and shots and shots. And our luck, one of the people which were hiding in the back by the window got up and they wanted to shoot him, but their gun jammed.”
Several of the prisoners then jumped out the window and hid in the ditches that had been dug behind the hut in preparation for the mass burial of hundreds of bodies. There was more shooting, and Cohen could hear people moaning. Once again, the SS came into the hut and began poking through the straw. Moments later they left and set the structure on fire.
Somehow Cohen and his friend were able to crawl out the door unseen. Nearby was a pile of corpses that had already been soaked with gasoline and burned. They burrowed in among the bodies and lay there. After two hours, he was ready to surrender. “Yeah, then I gave up almost, lying there, and I see that the Americans are still not here, and I said, ‘We can’t go another time, to hide and run around. We’re not able to do it.’ So my friend encouraged me again. He said, ‘Now, you told me in Auschwitz we should not give up, never give up.’ So we lay down.”
They were hiding in the kitchen, a brick building that had not burned, when they heard another inmate shouting, “Yidden, zaynen frei!” “Jews, we are free, the Americans are here.”
Cohen remembers thinking about the date—one month after Passover. “I said, ‘It’s Pesach Sheni.’ We are liberated the same day as the second Passover.” (Certain Chasidic Jews recognize a second Passover as an opportunity given to persons who were unable to offer the Passover sacrifice to do so one month later.)
One man whom Israel Cohen wanted to talk about was a friend who had been part of a block of thirty French prisoners. When the Germans left the first or second time, the French inmates took over the kitchen and were boiling potatoes and singing. Then the Germans came back, lined them all up against the wall, and shot them all point-blank. His friend, who spoke German and had the temerity to ask the SS why they were doing that, was also shot, but the bullet went in one check and out the other, and the man pretended to be dead. He was lying on the floor with his mouth open when one of the SS saw that he had gold teeth. Cohen says the SS man took pliers and tore out his teeth, together with the gums. And all the while the man pretended to be dead. “When I came, he stood there with the gums down and the teeth on the gums, and he was bleeding badly.” Cohen says that when the Americans arrived, they rushed the man to a nearby German hospital and in no uncertain terms told the surgeons that if the man died, they would die, too.
The GIs removed the remaining survivors, putting those who were too weak to walk, like Cohen, in a wagon. They were taken to a nearby farm, and it was made clear to the farmer that nothing bad had better happen to the survivors. Cohen says the farmer, who’d been doing the “We didn’t know, nicht Nazi” routine, was very scared. “They thought that the Americans are going to do to them what they did to us.
“When I came to the farm, they wanted to give me [something] to eat. I said, ‘No, I don’t want to eat. I need a hot bath.’ And I took off my clothes, and the clothes were full of lice. They would walk away themselves. And then I took the tub in the stable. My skin was burning from the bites of the lice, but I relaxed so much. And then they came and fed me.”
Israel Cohen was bounced among several different hospitals until his medical conditions were controlled and he began putting on weight. He tried to reconnect with family members, only to learn that they’d all perished in the Holocaust. He spent three years in a TB sanatorium in Switzerland. In 1951, he moved to Canada, where he lives today with his wife, five children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
He never lost his faith in God. “I talk to people, and they ask me, ‘Why did it happen?,’ and I say, ‘I don’t know, and nobody knows.’ Hashem [God] wanted him to be saved. I know that someone lately had a video and said he was rescued by chance. I got up, and I said that ‘You win the lottery, it could be chance. You win twice the lottery, it could be chance. But if you win the lottery seven, eight times in a row, it can’t be chance.’ I was seven, eight times just before being killed, and I was saved at the last minute, and this can’t be chance.”
Monroe “Monty” Nachman at home in Skokie, Illinois, with the 103rd Infantry Division yearbook showing pictures at the Landsberg area camps. Note the triangular, semiunderground barracks that were unique to the Kaufering camps.
Five-foot, five-inch Monroe “Monty” Isadore Nachman was a tough kid from Detroit who, just before Pearl Harbor, joined the National Guard’s 6th Cavalry unit because he had a low draft number and didn’t want to be in the infantry. He was in the twelfth grade when he got tossed out of high school for fighting in class. “A guy called me a sheeny, and I hit him.” His mother wanted him to go back, but he was tired of fighting. “I lived in a half-Jewish, half-gentile neighborhood, and every day I had to go by St. Mary’s Church, and every day I was fighting. My mother called me a vilde chaya—a wild animal—but she didn’t understand. It was ‘Here comes the Jews, or here comes the kikes.’ [My friends and I are] the type of guys who don’t take that kind of stuff, so every day, we would fight.”
Anti-Semitism wasn’t a theoretical concept for Monty Nachman. They listened to Father Charles Coughlin’s broadcasts on Detroit radio—“he was a mamzer [bastard] from the first go, he was a bad guy”—and they paid attention to the headlines from Germany. He knew about Kristallnacht, about the Jews being killed.
He ultimately found himself enrolled in OCS and doing well, but the Army wanted him in the infantry, and he said no. So he was tossed from officers’ school and sent to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, to join E Company, 2nd Battalion, 411th Regiment, of the 103rd Infantry Division. It’s where he found out how the Army works. He’d made it all the way up to sergeant, only to get a new commander, an anti-Semitic captain, and he ended up being busted back down to private.
In October 1944, the 103rd went to Marseilles, rode boxcars north, and was committed to action at Saint-Dié, near Strasbourg. They lost fifty-five men, wounded and killed, the first day. Though Monty was aware of Germans’ mistreatment of the Jews, the Army had never told the troops about concentration camps. His introduction was much the same as most other combat soldiers’: the smell. On April 27, his outfit was walking near Landsberg. He was carrying the burp gun he’d traded for; it’s a tanker’s weapon, but an armored guy had wanted a carbine, so they’d swapped. “All of a sudden, when we’re approaching this place here, it started to smell like a different smell, a terrible, terrible smell. And it never goes out of your nostrils. You always remember that smell, you can never forget what you see. And we came into this place, and, my God, it was horrendous. A few of my guys threw up.
“These underground huts, and bodies are lying all over the place, filthy, and the stink around there was unbelievable. I talked to some people there in Yiddish, and they said that whoever could walk, the Nazis were taking to Dachau to kill off. So we left, we got in our jeeps. We caught up with them.”
It took his company about forty-five minut
es to come upon the death march. “We saw a line of people, walking if they could walk, stumbling all over the place. The guards were around, and we caught up and killed them. They threw down their arms, and I just plain shot them. There were about a dozen or so. And the other guys shot them, too. We didn’t take any prisoners.” They turned the forty or fifty surviving inmates over to another outfit, “and we went back to our task, because we were way into Germany now.”
His hands-on contact with the Holocaust lasted less than half a day, but, as he said, the memories don’t go away. Flashbacks happen without warning. Nightmares occur. “I used to get crazy, you know. It’d come back. You see the bodies. We were living with my in-laws in [Chicago’s Albany Park area], and they had this party to introduce the new son-in-law. Now, I never lacked for words in my life. I’m talking, and all of a sudden, I’m seeing bodies laying all over there. I felt like a shtumi [mute]—you know what I mean? I couldn’t talk.”
Monty Nachman never spoke about what he saw at Landsberg until 2003, when a veteran at one of their reunions urged the men to go on the record. Since then he’s been outspoken, taking on the Holocaust deniers, including the tenured professor at nearby Northwestern University whose book made big headlines in Skokie, Illinois, where Nachman and his wife live. He recognizes the bookends of his life—fighting anti-Semitism as a high school kid and now again as a ninety-year-old. He quotes his mother, who used to say “Shvertz azayan Yid”—It’s hard to be a Jew.
APRIL 28, 1945
LANDSBERG, GERMANY
Jack Kerins was born on March 30, 1912, making him the oldest veteran interviewed for this book. In fact, he was one of the oldest draftees in the 63rd Division on its last day in Landsberg. Kerins was thirty-one when he was drafted; he’d had deferments because he was the sole support of his mother in the tiny town of Farrell, Pennsylvania, about seventy-five miles north of Pittsburgh, but when the Army got desperate for bodies, the deferments were taken away, and in late 1943, he was shipped to Europe with just part of his division—no artillery, no support units. They were thrown into combat without really being ready and took on the 17th SS Panzers while units farther north fought in the Bulge. After a year and a half of combat, he’d earned a Purple Heart at the Siegfried Line for a concussion from an incoming oversized German artillery round that killed his company commander and by all rights should have killed him. He was also awarded a Silver Star and an unwanted battlefield commission from tech sergeant to second lieutenant and platoon leader.
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