The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  As darkness settled over Dachau, Jim Dorris and the men of Company A of the 222nd Regiment were told that they would be spending the night inside the SS garrison barracks, in the building where the on-duty SS guards had eaten and slept. Dorris says the building was about seventy-five yards inside the main gate, and their cook had come in to prepare a big meal for the American troops. “The building had a nice kitchen in it,” Dorris recalls, “and a big part of it had bunks. Everybody was just kind of numb from what we’d seen. You couldn’t describe. I mean, everybody had seen something so bad that they just didn’t want to talk. We just sat there eating and not saying a whole lot.

  “After we ate—we’d had a hard day of it—we went in and picked out different bunks. They all looked like maybe the guards had been awakened, hearing that we were coming, and they’d just thrown the covers back and jumped up and took off to resist us or whatever they did. And I remember getting in that bunk and thinking, ‘What kind of guy was laying here in this bunk last night?’ I thought about that for quite a while.”

  APRIL 30, 1945

  DACHAU, GERMANY

  By the next morning, other outfits had come in, bringing food and medical care for the prisoners. Dorris’s company got something to eat around dawn and then loaded onto tanks and headed for Munich, about fifteen miles away. They expected a battle but were surprised. “The people were lined up on both sides, cheering us, and we were completely taken aback by that. That was the first time we’d had that happen, but they were giving us bottles of champagne and throwing flowers on us. And we were wondering how much they knew about what was going on out there at Dachau.”

  Jim Dorris never had a chance to find out. He’d made it through the war with nothing more than some minor shrapnel wounds, but while he was sitting in a house with three of his buddies, one of them pulled out a .38 revolver, gave the cylinder a twirl, and pulled the trigger. The bullet went into the top of Dorris’s leg and out the back, leaving powder burns. The guy with the gun asked if he’d shot him, and Dorris claims that all he said was “Hell, yes!” He was taken to the hospital, where they took his clothes. The cigarette butt in the can that he’d been given by the Dachau prisoner was in a pocket. He never saw it again.

  Dee Eberhart was also one of the 42nd Division guys riding tanks on their way from Dachau to Munich. It was a memorable morning, not only because of what they had left behind at Dachau, but because the ugliness continued. “We were in the outskirts of Munich, and I was on this lead tank, nobody ahead of us, and maybe three or four other guys on the tank, and here was a German soldier who was running straight down the street, maybe a block ahead of us. And behind him, pounding along, was not one of the emaciated prisoners but one of the blue-and-white prisoners, a husky guy, and he caught that German and tackled him and then kicked him to death before we got there. And here was the tank with machine guns pointed forward and all of us with rifles, we didn’t raise a damn hand, not a hand. We saw this premeditated murder, killed him dead. And that guy was just a bundle of dead rags when our tank rumbled by, and the other guy was standing around, looking at the man he’d just killed. So there was a lot of residual violence, on both sides, during that day.”

  New Yorker Jerome Klein was part of the 48th Tank Battalion of the 14th Armored Division when, on April 30, his outfit was told they were being taken to see a most unusual sight. The sight was the concentration camp at Dachau, and, just as he had with Ohrdruf and Buchenwald, Eisenhower had ordered that as many American soldiers as possible should be given time to see the horrors firsthand.

  Jerome Klein with his mother, Bessie, in Brooklyn, shortly after he completed basic training. After the war, at Jerry’s request, she would help bring Holocaust survivor Sidney Glucksman to live with them.

  Klein’s arrival happened to coincide with another instance of the inmates discovering a guard hiding inside the camp. He describes the scene as upsetting. “I didn’t realize at the moment what it was that was happening, but these wasted inmates had ganged up on somebody and were stoning him and killed him. Then I learned it was a prison guard who had not gotten out and had put on civilian clothes and thought he could escape, but they recognized him.” Klein watched from no more than ten yards away, listened to the “enormous amount of noise,” and noticed that other Americans were doing the same thing he was doing—gaping. “I don’t think anyone tried to intrude on it. We had already had some explanation of what this was all about. I took a photograph and walked on.”

  The camera he used was one he’d been given a few days earlier by a German army doctor he’d captured in a small town. The doctor had asked if Klein would permit him to say good-bye to his wife before taking him to a POW camp. Klein agreed, and to thank him, the doctor took him down in the cellar of his home, removed bricks from the wall—an act that made Klein briefly wonder if he’d made a huge mistake and was about to be shot—and withdrew an unusual military camera from its hiding place and gave it to him.

  After leaving the scene of the killing near the Dachau gate, Klein went inside the prisoner compound and began walking around, saying hello to some of the inmates. Initially he spoke German, but when he met a Jewish inmate, the language swiftly morphed to Yiddish. At one point in the camp, he met a sixteen-year-old boy, a Polish Jew named Stashek Gleiksman, who had survived in the camps as a tailor. “He was extremely friendly. He was much more alert. He seemed to be less damaged than the other inmates.”

  Klein remembers Gleiksman as being slender but not emaciated. “He hadn’t been in Dachau all that long. He’d gone through a succession of other camps, and I have a feeling since he was valued as a tailor, they probably kept him in somewhat better shape.”

  The boy Klein connected with had been taken from his home in the small Polish town of Chrzanów, near Auschwitz, in 1939, when he was twelve and a half. He, along with the other Jewish boys in his school, had been loaded onto a truck and taken to a Nazi SA camp several hundred miles away, where the brown-shirted guards made them build the barracks. While they were constructing the foundations, a bag of cement fell on him and broke his arm, and he was sent to another camp to stay until it healed.

  From there he was sent to the death camp known as Gross-Rosen, where he stayed for three years working on construction of barracks. It was while he was there that he learned the fate of his family. “They brought in some more people from my town, and I asked them how my parents were, how’s my brother doing, how’s my sister doing? They just put the finger in front of their mouth and said ‘Shh!’ like that, and since then I never heard from anybody.”

  About a year and a half before the liberation, Gleiksman and other prisoners were taken out of Gross-Rosen and set on a death march to Dachau. “One day they took us out, we were young, we were able to walk. But every night when it got dark, they put us on the field where it was nothing there, no trees or anything, and we had to lay down like an animal on the grass until daylight came. Because they were watching us. But there was no way to go away, to run away. If you had to pee, you had to pee right there where you were. We didn’t have anything to eat. A lot of people died during the march.

  “Once we got to Dachau, there we had to again line up. There were chairs and tables and SS, a woman and an SS man, sitting on one side. And I remember they called out ‘Next!’ to come over. I got to the table, and I remember [from previous camps] when they say, ‘Jews on one side, every other nationality to stay where you are,’ and I could smell the stink from the crematorium, you saw the smoke coming out. It stunk like terrible, you know, when flesh burns and the bones. So I said to myself, I’m going to take the name of my friend who we lived together in the same building, so I gave them a Polish name. And they brought me over to the other side where I was with the Polish people.”

  After being put in a barrack with young people from different countries, he became quite ill. “I got sick, typhoid, because an epidemic broke out. And I don’t remember anything what happened, I just remember that I fell down while I w
as talking to somebody, and that was the end. How I survived, who put me up in my bunk, I don’t remember. I don’t know. I woke up after that, maybe my fever left me. I wasn’t able to walk at all. Just to try, you know, you didn’t care at that time. Just that you wanted to live. So somehow I was holding on to the walls and tried to walk, to look for some water to get washed. I must have been laying there in filth without washing myself, without taking a drink of water, even. I still don’t know how I survived.”

  He recovered from the typhoid but still had to survive months of hard labor until liberation. “I just put on my striped shmata on myself and the shoes with the wooden soles, which you could hardly walk, and they put us in trucks. And what we had to do is clean up after the bombardments, you know, bigger towns like Munich or any other place. If they bombarded during the night, that was like being on vacation, in paradise, because there we were able to find some kind of food. If it was a rotten potato or even a dead cat or whatever. Just to eat. At that time, I was weighing about eighty-seven pounds.”

  At 6:30 on the morning of April 29, in the dark, Gleiksman and the other inmates had lined up outside as they did every other day before being taken to work. “That day, we were lined up, waiting for the SS to come and get us, to count us up and get to work. They didn’t show. It was very quiet.”

  The kapos—the inmate guards who got special favors from the Nazis in exchange for being overseers and goons—never showed up. When daylight came, the prisoners saw white rags tied around the machine guns in the guard towers, but they still had no idea what was going on. He says somewhat matter-of-factly, “You know, I didn’t see a newspaper for six years. We don’t have radio. We didn’t know what day it was. At nine o’clock in the morning, it was really bright, and those guards are still staying in the towers. Shaved their heads off. They didn’t have any helmets on, and they had uniforms on from what we wore, striped uniforms.”

  Shortly, the prisoners heard shooting—Gleiksman believes tanks were firing, but he may have actually been hearing explosions and seeing rising smoke to the northwest when the Germans blew the bridge over the Amper River in the face of the advancing L Company of the 45th. When the gate was opened and soldiers in jeeps and trucks poured into the camp, “Whoever was able to walk, you know, was not sick anymore, they started to run towards the gates. We saw a color green, and German tanks were dark gray, so we knew that something happened. We saw a different marker on the truck, a white star, and the jeeps’ white stars, and they started to surround the whole camp, staying on guard.

  “And they started to go in deeper into the camp, and the people were laying there, half dead all over the ground, with flies all over the bodies, maybe rot even. People were still with typhoid, and they were not able to stand up, they were too weak. They were breathing, but that’s all. And some soldiers I saw, when they bend down, they started to cry like children. That’s how bad it was. It stunk terrible. And they still found bodies in the crematorium, in the ovens, and there were bodies laying in the front to be burned with those big pliers to be picked up and thrown in the fire. Those things I do remember.”

  And what did he do? “I just sat down. I was too weak to go back to the barracks.”

  There’s some confusion as to whether the man now known as Sidney Glucksman of New Haven, Connecticut, met his future lifelong friend, Jerome Klein of Manhattan, on liberation day or on the day after, as Klein recalls. What the former inmate does clearly remember is his own disbelief that the American soldier was a Jew. Sidney says, “I myself, I couldn’t believe it. But I didn’t know that he’s a Jew, because all the Jews in the whole world are dead. I didn’t know that Jews were still alive when I was liberated. I thought the Germans killed all the Jews, because in so many years, what I saw [them] bringing in, hundreds of thousands of men, women, even children.

  “It’s sometimes so hard to talk about it, but in Gross-Rosen when I was there, I remember when they brought in trainloads of women with children on their hands. They were lined up. I was already an old-timer there, and they made the women get undressed and the little children, set them down on the ground. And the women were all naked, and they told them they have to go in to get showered up, and they already had new clothes on their hands, like going to take a shower. They never came back. And the children were on the ground. We had to go over there, you know, all the younger prisoners, and undress them, shoes take off, take off the clothes, whatever they had on, and take off eyeglasses, and bring all the stuff into the barracks.

  “The children, I cry whenever I start talking about it. They threw them in bags and hit them against barracks until you didn’t hear a child cry anymore. When I start talking about it, it makes me sick. So many years after.”

  MAY 2, 1945

  DACHAU, GERMANY

  Second Lieutenant Charlotte Chaney, all five feet, 1½ inches of her, had been told by the first nursing school she applied to in New York that she was too short to be a nurse. Too short to move patients, to change the bed, to do everything nurses had to do. So she went back to New Jersey, to Beth Israel, which gladly accepted her in its three-year course. She went through all the rotations but fell in love with surgery. She graduated at the age of twenty-one, and in 1943, having seen most of the doctors and nurses at the hospital leaving to join the Army, she did the same. She shipped overseas as part of the 127th Evacuation Hospital in January 1945 but managed to get married first, to a soldier.

  After landing at Le Havre, they were shipped to northern France, near Reims, where they lived in what had been a children’s boarding school. In April—she remembers because it was after Passover—life changed for the 127th. “We suddenly got orders that they’re coming to pick us up, and we’re heading south. They put straw on the bottom of the truck, and we slept foot to foot. We finally got orders to go into Germany, cross over, and that’s what we did. We had orders to go to Munich, and then we still didn’t know anything about the Holocaust. Nobody said anything.

  “We got into Munich, and they told us we had to go ten miles past Munich, and they said there’s some kind of a camp there. Some camp. We went into the courtyard, they had something above the entrance.” She’s talking about an enormous Nazi eagle with outstretched wings, a swastika in its talons, mounted over the main entrance.

  Their arrival came three days after the liberation of Dachau, and she doesn’t remember seeing a huge number of GIs when the 127th arrived. The combat units that had freed the camp had moved on. “When we went in, we were told the Army had been right before us. And they said, ‘You’ll probably find some dead bodies around.’”

  As the trucks drove into the center of the compound, she got her first glimpse of the horror. “We looked to the right of us, and we saw all these people, you know, behind barbed wire. So that’s the first time we saw them. I thought to myself, where in the world am I? What happened here? How could this happen?”

  They took over the four-story SS barrack that was inside the administrative area of the camp. “We were told to be careful, because if you touch anything, it may explode.”

  Not long after their arrival, the nurses were assigned to go into the prisoner enclosure behind the barbed wire. They were warned that reprisals were still being taken against German guards or kapos found in the camp; they were being killed. “And we were told just to—don’t even bother with it—let them do what they want.”

  Nurse Charlotte Chaney married her late husband, Bernie, in 1944. A few months later she went to Europe with the 127th Evacuation Hospital, which eventually was assigned to care for survivors of Dachau. In one of her letters home she wrote, “Our job was to separate the living, the half-living and the dead.”

  The prisoners who were outside the barracks were apparently those in the best physical condition. It’s when she went into the buildings that she was confronted with the ultimate in horror on bunks stacked three high. “We’d walk into a barrack, and there you saw what it was. They were like skeletons, so close together. We started to go
in and clean out. We took them over to where the German GIs stayed, it was on the other side of the camp, and the Army came in with beds and linens, and we would delouse them. We had sprays, we shaved them, put on clean clothes. We had to do it for some of them. We set up like a triage, and then we realized we were going to need help, lots of help, because there were so many people there.”

  When the Americans first came to Dachau, they reported that as many as three hundred or four hundred inmates died each day. Chaney remembers fifty to one hundred dying daily, for several days. Their job was to separate the living from the half-living from the dead. “We couldn’t stop to even think, because there’s so many hundreds and hundreds of people. There were children there that we tried to get to. And then to feed these people, we couldn’t give them regular food right away, we had to start off with a gruel because their digestive systems were shot, you know? And even if we gave them a crust of bread, they would hide it under their pillow. We’d try to tell them, ‘You’ll get more, you don’t have to do that anymore.’ But …” her voice trails off, her eyes misting, the scene playing over in her mind.

  The fact that she spoke Yiddish helped somewhat in communicating with her patients, many of whom were suffering from typhus and TB. To try to avoid succumbing to the diseases they were treating, the doctors and nurses wore long gowns and masks, had their heads wrapped, and wore rubber gloves. And they were regularly sprayed with DDT powder.