The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  The odor is still with her. “It was a distinctive smell or odor that you got—you know, if you walk into a room with a lot of people that are ill, they have a distinctive odor. This was ten times worse.”

  Their priority was to get the inmates out of the barracks and into the rapidly expanding hospital as quickly as possible. “We would just get ‘em out of there, get ‘em cleaned up, put them in clean beds, and start giving them food, gradually increasing the diet. Those that couldn’t even eat gruel were given IV feedings. And that was all that we could do at the time. We worked practically day and night.” She says the nurses were overwhelmed, “always, every day. There were so many, and the children. These kids with the bloated bellies from starvation.”

  She saw the bones and the bodies behind the crematorium that the Germans had not had time to bury and was there when they brought civilians from Munich to dig graves. They were asked, “Didn’t you see anything? Didn’t you smell anything? Didn’t you see the smoke? Nothing.”

  And then they went to see the boxcars, the death train.

  Sitting in her Hollywood, Florida, apartment sixty-four years later, holding the boxes of letters she wrote home from the war, she knows that she’ll never forget her experiences at Dachau, and she doesn’t want others, especially today’s children, to forget either. “It’s always in the back of my head, even when I go out and speak to schools, to the children, I try to make them understand what happened, and to this day, we still don’t know—because for people to follow a crazy man, you know, he should have been put away.”

  And God? She questions where God was. “If there was a God above, why did this happen? To let this happen—my belief in God went way down. Even to this day, I still can’t understand. They say there is somebody up there looking after everybody. I say, how? In the Holocaust, there was nobody, nobody.”

  Shortly after the 127th Evac had set up operations at Dachau itself, arrangements were being made to transport some inmates in dire need of medical care to the 120th Evac, which had moved from Buchenwald to Cham, a town about a hundred miles northeast of Dachau. Within days the 120th was treating more than nine hundred former prisoners hospitalized in five different buildings.

  Len Herzmark, who was a medic, not a doctor, has one very precise memory of his time with the unit at Cham. “I had a patient whose hands were paralyzed for whatever reason, and while we were working the inspector came through from Army headquarters somewhere, a medical inspector, just wanted to look at what we were doing—you know, visited with some of the patients and so on. And after he left, this one patient who had the paralyzed hands, he said, ‘Did the doctor give you any recommendation for my paralysis?’ And I knew that this guy wasn’t really paralyzed, you could tell, you know? So I said ‘Yes,’ and I’d probably be shot for this today, but I got a syringe of saline, sterile saline solution, and I gave him an injection, a muscular injection in the back between the shoulder and elbow, the muscle there. And you know, the next day, he was folding blankets. I cured him.”

  Two days after the liberation of Dachau, the 45th Infantry Division’s Leonard “Pinky” Popuch, who after the war became Leonard S. Parker, an acclaimed architect who designed the Minneapolis Convention Center, the State of Minnesota Supreme Court Building, and the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, Chile, wrote a nine-page letter to his family at home in Milwaukee. In a bold hand, he assured them of his safety and assessed his life and the world around him. “I am still well and trusting in God. A little tired and worn out perhaps, and maybe a little older, now, than my 22 years—but well, never-the-less.”

  Leonard “Pinky” Popuch, later Leonard Parker, sang Yiddish songs to the Jewish Dachau inmates, who had a difficult time believing there were Jewish soldiers in the U.S. Army.

  He’d last written when his company was at Nuremberg. Now he wrote, “Many times since I have come overseas, while miserable in a wet foxhole, or sweating out a Jerry artillery barrage, or lying out in the rain pinned down by enemy small arms fire, I have asked myself what it is all about. Why am I here—why! why! why!”

  Dachau answered his questions, and he tried to help his family understand. He described the death train and the bodies and said, “We took no German prisoners that day … they are no better than swine and we treated them as such. We saw and smelled the crematorium where they cremated the dead bodies after removing the shoes and any other valuables the people might possess … we heard from the lips of the prisoners themselves as to how they were beaten and starved and made to work anywhere from 12 to 18 hours in one day. We listened to countless stories of cruelty and the inhumanity of the Nazis and it made one want to tear the eyes out of the next German soldier you saw.”

  He went on to describe the first prisoner he heard speak—of all things, a U.S. Army captain who had parachuted into France before D-Day and been captured by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau. And he wrote about the prisoners who kissed the Americans, crying for joy:

  They fell on the ground at our feet and kissed our boots and grabbed our hands and kissed them, and these suffering, crying Jewish people yelled, “Dank gott was ze haben gekumen—yetzt zenen mir frie” [Thank God you came—now we are free].” There were women, children and men alike—those that were able to walk—all crying, half mad with happiness.

  A Jewish man came up to me and asked me if it were true that there were Jewish soldiers in the American army. When I told him that I was a Jewish “unteroffizier” he nearly went mad. Soon I had about 50 Jewish men and women around me hugging and kissing me. They were starved also for “das Yiddishe giest” [Jewish spirit], and I wanted so much to make them happy. I sang some “chazonish shticklach” [Jewish cantorial music] for them, and all, “A Yiddishe Mama.”

  I saw firsthand the things that I have heard about and which I had never quite believed. Now, I know what this war is all about. Now I know why we are fighting. To me, all the suffering and misery I’ve had to put up with these past 8 months has been well worthwhile. Just to see the joy on the faces of these tortured, suffering people repaid all of us that saw, a thousand fold…. I’m proud to be one of the many who finally helped free those poor souls who have been through a hell that the decent mind cannot imagine possible here on God’s own earth….

  … I wanted to let you know of how our people have suffered and that we’re (I mean the Americans) are bringing light in their hearts and maybe in the homes they may have again some day. I have hopes that you’ll feel as I feel, that the anxiety and worry and heart suffering you are going thru is for something. To stamp out the poison Hitler and his kind have spread over the world.

  I will write again when I can. I love you all and miss you very much.

  Still your same devoted Sammy.

  CHAPTER 14

  THEY’RE KILLING JEWS-WHO CARES?

  MAY 2, 1945

  AMPFING, GERMANY

  52 miles east of Dachau

  35 miles southeast of Moosburg

  Coenraad Rood lay in the hole in the ground the Germans had assigned to him and roughly a dozen others when he had arrived at the Waldlager V concentration camp five days earlier. There were only two facts the twenty-eight-year-old Dutch Jew thought relevant at that moment: the Americans were coming, and he would not live to see them.

  Just three days earlier, those Americans—the tankers and infantrymen of the U.S. Army’s 14th Armored Division—had liberated Stalag VII-A, the POW camp at Moosburg near the Isar River, freeing an astounding 110,000 Allied prisoners of war.

  Nathan Melman was part of a mechanized cavalry reconnaissance platoon attached to the 48th Tank Battalion when Moosburg was liberated, and the twenty-three-year-old enlistee from Trenton, New Jersey, was one of the first Americans into Waldlager V—it means Forest Camp 5—at Ampfing. The 48th didn’t even know the place existed until they stumbled across strange-looking people in striped uniforms. Melman was driving a jeep convoying with a couple of tanks and armored cars traveling down a dirt road through the woods when they happened up
on the camp.

  He recalls some shooting, but mostly, he says, the Germans “were trying to get the hell outta there, and the prisoners, as weak as they were, they got hold of”—he pauses briefly, then continues, “I think there were five Germans they captured that were guards, and two of them must’ve been so mean and rotten that as weak as the prisoners were, they beat them to death with their bare hands.” This happened after the Americans arrived. “And the other three, they told us they were half decent, not to hurt them, so we let those three go. They just left the bodies of these two lying near the front gate, and when the officers told them, ‘We let you kill them, we didn’t stop you. Now pick them up and take them some place and bury them, we don’t want them laying there.’ Bury them? They all lined up, the ones that were able to walk, and they urinated on them.”

  Melman recalls that the gates to the camp were open when the GIs arrived, and some of the prisoners walked out of the gate, then walked back in, just to see if anybody would harm them.

  As the Americans made their way through the camp, they discovered a mass grave containing as many as two thousand bodies. It was identical in construction to one found at Buchenwald. Melman says prisoners were made to dig a trench perhaps thirty or forty feet long; then a removable barrier was placed at the end. Bodies—some still alive—were tossed into the trench. When more space was needed, the trench was extended beyond the barrier, which was then pulled up and moved.

  Melman’s small unit stayed in Ampfing overnight, as did C Company of the 62nd Armored Infantry Battalion. Robert Highsmith, now of Las Cruces, New Mexico, was not quite twenty-two years old when his unit made an overnight stop at Waldlager V. He has just one vivid memory of that moment. “There were about four or five of the prisoners that were standing there. They spoke German, and I spoke English only. Four of them were tall. Their hair was unkempt. They were very, very, very, very skinny. They’d lost a lot of weight, with one exception: there was one of the persons there, he had a haircut, was shaved, skinhead. He was fat. When he smiled, you could see a stainless-steel tooth there in his mouth, and I know to this good day that he was a collaborator, because his physical appearance was so much different from all the others that were there.”

  Highsmith, who got a commission after the war and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1967, recalls moving through the Ampfing camp, his rifle at the ready. “When you’re infantry and on the attack like that, you’re always at the ready, because you don’t know what you’re gonna get when you get into there. Only a few days before we had gone to another prisoner-of-war camp [Moosburg]. We went into that camp, and there were German guards there.” Highsmith chokes up as he recalls finding a soldier from his company in the POW camp. The man had been captured two or three months earlier and had lost almost 40 pounds in the interim. So as he walked through Ampfing with twenty-five or thirty members of his platoon, he was remembering his buddy. “I’m thinking that if there are any German guards there, that we’re going to do everything we can to eliminate them.”

  But they found no guards, just prisoners who were nearly dead. “Most of them were emaciated, starved, ill, and as I understand, a lot of them died later, because they had been maltreated, malnourished, and then no medication.”

  Karl Pauzar of Dayton, Ohio, was a sergeant in Company A of the 62nd Armored Infantry Battalion when his outfit came upon Ampfing. “We didn’t know anything about it being there. I was in a half-track, come up upon this town, said, ‘Ampfing,’ and there’s this camp. There’s not a guard or anything around it, so I drove around to the right side of it and I saw—this is the only individual I remember—this elderly gentleman, very emaciated. Emotionless. The only thing was a shuffle, blank stare, striped uniform. And he come up to the fence. And I kept going; we were instructed not to give them any food or anything else because of this-and-this. I understand that they dropped some medics off, and they were there about six weeks doing what they could with them.”

  Pauzar, who also stayed in the military and retired as a lieutenant colonel, says that staying to help out at the camp just wasn’t their priority at the time. “Oh, no, no. Go, go, go, we had the Germans on the run. We didn’t give them a chance to set their defenses. We just run, run.”

  But while some units kept going, the outfits that stopped, even for a few hours, saved lives. Consider Coenraad Rood. Ampfing was his tenth concentration camp since he’d been arrested by the Nazis on April 25, 1942, in Amsterdam. Speaking from his home in White Oak, Texas, between Dallas and Shreveport, Rood recalled that most of the moves from camp to camp were part of the effort to keep prisoners, especially slave laborers, from falling into Allied hands. A week earlier, he’d been at another of the Dachau subcamps, Mühldorf. Asked to evaluate his five days at Ampfing, he says, “They were not too bad compared to what I already experienced.” Here, then, is what he calls “not too bad”:

  “We lived practically on the ground, in holes in the ground, with a movable roof over it, and we lived ten to twenty in a ditch, you could say. We came there from several camps, and Ampfing was one of those places where they could place us. We had two camps next to each other; I had to work in Camp Six, but I belonged to Camp Five. Six was already evacuated because the Americans came too close. We were waiting to be evacuated, and at the last moment, that all went into smoke, you can say, because the American Army was faster.”

  Coen and his new friend Maupy were assigned to walk each day to Camp Six, where they were to whitewash empty prefabricated huts. The walk gave them a chance to find food along the way, usually potato peels in an adjacent field, which was more than anything being provided to the inmates of Camp Five. During his captivity, the five-foot-eight Coen’s weight had dropped from 143 down to 60 pounds at liberation. They walked between camps without a guard, which, Coen explains, did not offer them an opportunity to escape. “Where should we go, anyway? We were prisoners, we wore prisoner clothes, we were tattooed, we had numbers. The danger outside the camp was very great that we should be detected as prisoners, especially if you were a Jewish prisoner, you know, that’s the end of the day for you.” He said it obliquely, but the danger he refers to is from local German civilians—the same people who would soon protest, “Nicht Nazi.”

  Just a couple of days before the 14th Armored arrived, Coen learned that the Germans were intent on liquidating almost the entire camp population. “There was a roll call early in the morning. It was just as daylight came through, and we had to line up along a rail track that went across the camp from one end to the other. We were about 1,100 or 1,200 men standing there. And the camp commander, which we had barely seen before, talked to us. He said, first, all the Jews from Western Europe have to stand on the side. So we had about sixty men, and he talked to us in German. He explained that he expected that the Americans are coming, and he would leave us. The camp will be evacuated; all the people from East Europe would be removed. And he said, ‘You know what’s going to happen to them.’ He talked openly about it. ‘And you stay here.’ And then the Americans—he talked about the enemy, you understand that? When the enemy was coming, we had to report that we were handled humanely. And if we should tell them how it was, he called it, ‘Where you start lying, we know how to get to you, so you better don’t tell them what actually happens at the camp.’”

  Coen said the thousand or so Eastern European prisoners were marched down to the gate. “And they went through, out the gate, and then we heard suddenly like a motor. We heard tat-tat-tat-tat, and we thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, they shoot them already. They didn’t even wait until they have them in the woods.’ But it was a motor sound, a motorcycle, and it was the commander and a German officer. He came into the camp and said, ‘Close the doors. The enemy is surrounding the camp. You cannot go nowhere.’” After being sent to a big tent and then a warehouse tent next to the kitchen, they were ordered back to their so-called buddahs—the below-ground hovels about the size of a single carport.

  “And we went back,” he recalls,
“and I lay down. A few days before, I had lost a very good friend in the camp, and that was tremendous on my mind. He is called Nico, and we were very close. We took always care of each of us in kind of choosing to go to another job; we took care that we were together always. We helped each other, with food and with friendship, mostly. And I had lost him in Mühldorf, where we stayed two and a half days before we reached Ampfing. During an attack from American airplanes.”

  Coen tells of being in a truck with many other prisoners when the planes attacked, saying, “I’m the only one not wounded on that truck, although I felt like I was wounded. And that’s when I lost my last friend, together more than two years. And that was still on my mind. When we had to go back to the buddahs and I lay down, I thought, ‘Well, this is the end of it. They are shooting, they are fighting.’ And I was very sick, also, and I felt I was dying. And in that situation, I was liberated.

  “I was laying down, losing my conscious. I had the feeling that I was floating through the air, and I knew that this was the end. It was my turn, now, to go, to leave everything.”

  That’s when he heard Maupy, who spoke English. “They’re here, they’re here, they opened the gates!” Others yelled, “Americanski are komen!”

  More than sixty years later, Coen can still re-create the experiences, almost second by second. “I had a feeling I was floating through the air, looking at myself lying down, and I was yelling at myself. I thought I was yelling, but I don’t think I made any sound. It was like a séance that I float through the air, that I saw myself laying and yelling at myself, ‘Stand up! Go by the people outside.’ And I couldn’t; I couldn’t move. And suddenly I heard, outside the buddah, my friend Maupy, I heard him talking English, saying, ‘Go in there. My friend is dying. He should know that he is free now.’ There was a little trapdoor entrance of the buddah with a hole in it, like a window. And that got dark, and then it opened up, and there was an American soldier there.