The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  It’s a conclusion that requires the free-will counterargument, that God gave mankind free will and therefore God can’t interfere with whatever man does. “Then God did a lousy job,” responds Klein without hesitation, “and I can’t believe that this almighty creature would have, if it existed, done such a lousy job.”

  Sidney Glucksman, on the other hand, is a believer. Even more, he believes God has given him a mission to make certain that people don’t forget the Holocaust. “I’m still working. I have my own shop, but when they call me [to speak], I say, ‘Anytime.’ I drop everything, and I make a date, and I go. Because I always say that I’m alive because God wanted me to be alive so I should be able to tell the story about it.”

  One of those calls got him involved with the production in New Haven of The Gray Zone, a dramatic play by Tim Blake Nelson that takes place in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Sidney became, in essence, a technical adviser. At the conclusion of one performance in front of an audience of hundreds of people, a woman stood up to ask him a question. “She says, do I feel guilty to be alive? So you know what my answer was? I asked, ‘What nationality are you?’ She told me, ‘German.’ So I said to her, ‘Well, God wanted me to be alive so I should be able to tell the true story of what happened, what you people did to us. That’s why I am alive. And that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. And now you can go to hell,’ and I walked out.” To hearty applause, he added.

  Morton Brooks, né Brimberg

  Boynton Beach, Florida

  BERGA

  The soldiers who liberated the concentration camps came home to the United States intent on getting on with their lives. They had the GI Bill, and most of them had the thanks of a grateful nation. There were exceptions …

  Morton Brimberg, who managed to survive as a prisoner of war in the slave labor camp at Berga, was physically rehabilitated, discharged from the Army at the end of 1945, and enrolled in college at Buffalo a month later. He completed his undergraduate program in a little over two years. Then Brimberg the veteran, Brimberg the ex-POW, Brimberg the Jew ran smack into the lack of that gratitude of a grateful nation everyone hears about during those Veterans Day speeches.

  “I wrote letters asking for applications to graduate schools, and I wasn’t getting a response just asking for the application, and someone said to me, ‘Maybe it’s because of your name.’ I had written letters [signed Brimberg, and then] I sent out postcards to the same schools under Brent, Brandt, and Brooks, and I got immediate responses to the postcards. So I said to my wife, ‘Maybe it is the name, and how do you feel about changing it?’ She says, ‘Fine,’ so I put in for a name change.”

  So Morton Brimberg, who was sent to die in a Nazi slave-labor camp because he was a Jew, came home and had to deny his Jewishness. He was accepted to graduate school and became a PhD clinical psychologist and assistant director of a department at the University of Buffalo Medical School, where he was responsible for integrating the behavioral sciences with the medical. The discipline that had helped him survive Berga helped him survive overt discrimination in postwar America. “I learned about camouflage, and I felt, if this is helpful, the hell with it. It’s dealing with the situation, just doing something to cope and deal with the situation.”

  U.S. Army veteran and Berga survivor Morton Brooks, PhD.

  Brooks dealt with dreams and nightmares from the beginning and, when interviewed for this book, said he still has post-traumatic stress disorder and still goes to an ex-POW group at a VA hospital. He’s been able to deal with the hate, to deal with the dreams of pinning the Berga commandant up against a wall and carving him up with a knife. But he had difficulty with the final years of the Bush presidency. “It scares me with Bush that in terms of how close his behavior has been to Hitler in terms of legally making rules and regulations in violation of constitutional law. And that the Congress didn’t stand up more to him with some of the things that he’s done. When they pass a law that says he shall go to court and prove the need to examine someone’s communications and just disregard it, to me this is Hitler behavior, and it’s scary.”

  Norman Fellman

  Bedminster, New Jersey

  BERGA

  Unlike Mort Brooks, Norman Fellman kept his Berga experiences bottled up, in part because before the Army would discharge him, it made him sign an official, classified document agreeing that he wouldn’t disclose anything that had happened to him while he was a prisoner of war. The ostensible purpose of the document was to keep other enemy countries from knowing what activities American POWs might have undertaken that were inimical to their captors.

  Nevertheless, Fellman told his parents what he’d been through, and he did tell Ruth, his future wife, about his experiences. “When I realized that we were serious and I wanted to ask her to marry me, I thought she had a right to know that she was getting damaged goods. And so we talked for hours, and I answered her questions.” But for the first fifty years after the war, he says, “nobody even knew I was in the service. I never spoke of it.”

  He didn’t tell his older daughter until she was eighteen or nineteen. His younger twin daughters didn’t know about Berga until they were grown up and married. The first time they heard the story was when he gave a talk at their temple.

  Keeping the secret had consequences. “I knew I was sitting on a ton of anger and I was repressing it, and when I was younger, I was able to repress it pretty good, but it has been spilling out. It still spills out. It’s the chief reason that we have marital differences that we have now, and we’re married fifty-eight years. And they tell me at the VA that it’s PTSD spilling out, so the anger has been coming out in bits and pieces.” Except that he didn’t begin going to the VA POW rap sessions until 1986.

  The sessions were a start at changing his life. “The first time I walked into that room, it was like somebody took a ton off my shoulders, and I had never realized. Not having to guard myself, not having people disbelieve. I’ve had doctors who don’t believe some of the things that happened—and said so.”

  One of them was a VA doctor, who some years back said to Fellman that he was making it all up, that it had never happened. “I would’ve gone over the counter for him, but luckily, I didn’t. No, it’s been a long road. [And I’m] still walking it. I find that each time I tell the story, there’s a little less anger.”

  U.S. Army veteran and Berga survivor Norman Fellman and his wife, Ruth, outside their home in Bedminster, New Jersey.

  He’s able to talk about his experiences now, and he can calmly put them into context and perspective. “We were just one little element. We had 350 military. The rest in Berga were all civilians, and there was torture going on and everything else. Everything else that went on in a concentration camp was happening there. It was a work camp, but they worked you to death, and I’m serious. The purpose of a POW camp, and they had slave labor in those POW camps, but the idea was to feed you enough to get the most amount of work out of you for the least amount of food and keep you alive. In a concentration camp, the idea was to work you until you couldn’t work anymore, and when you couldn’t work anymore, they killed you or you died on the job. The end result was your demise.”

  He didn’t grasp the magnitude of the Holocaust until long after the war. “I don’t think I did while I was there, because it was a microcosm that I was in; it was all I knew. But when you begin to see the number of camps—Dachau and on and on and on, only then could you begin to get the magnitude. We were a pimple; we were a blister. What happened in our camp was a very tiny part of what was going on, but whatever happened in any camp happened there.”

  And then there’s the matter of survival. “Your mind has a lot to do with whether you manage to live or not. You can endure more than you can conceive of if you refuse to believe that it’s going to kill you. If you don’t give up.”

  Ultimately, there’s the question about God. “Do you still believe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

 
“Why not? I’m here, you know.”

  “It’s the quintessential Jewish response.”

  “Exactly. Voo den? [What else?]”

  Bernhard “Ben” Storch

  Nyack, New York

  SACHSENHAUSEN, SOBIBOR, MAJDANEK, and CHELMNO

  It didn’t take long for Ben Storch and his new bride, Ruth, to realize that not only was there no life to rebuild after the war in their native Poland, the odds were high that as returning Jews, they’d both be killed by anti-Semitic Poles who didn’t want the Jews coming back and reclaiming their property. So they set off on an odyssey that took them through several displaced persons camps before arriving in Munich, where they registered to immigrate to either the United States or Palestine.

  In March 1947, they were notified that they’d been granted a visa to go to the United States. They sailed for New York from Bremen on April 10 and arrived on April 22. They were met by his uncle, who lived in Brooklyn. Ben Storch spoke no English, but he was a master tailor and was able to get a job working in a factory in Long Island City. At the end of 1952, he became an American citizen.

  “I did not speak about the Holocaust stories for twenty-eight years,” he says. “My head was not healthy. I had headaches, dreams. I’d smoke overnight.” He saw a psychiatrist and “got healed, mentally. Everything cooled down. Then children came, and I stopped smoking. Mentally, the children brought me back to life, really. When I came back after the war, I never hated. Don’t ask me how, I did. I just want to have peace.” His equanimity is all the more remarkable when one considers that his mother died in the extermination camp at Belzec, Poland, along with 400,000 other Jews, and his three brothers were murdered in Auschwitz. But he bears no malice toward the German people. He says, “I want to have those kids, when they grow up in Germany, they should have peace. [But] they should be told everything.”

  Bernhard “Ben” Storch, wearing medals he earned serving with the Polish army attached to the Russians in World War II.

  In 1985, he became active in the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, ultimately becoming New York state commander. He also received his World War II medals from the Polish government, which he proudly wears every Memorial Day.

  Storch makes a point of speaking to school groups about the Holocaust, not to describe the gore but to speak of the consequences of hate. And when he was interviewed in 2008, he said that talking to the kids continues to help him heal. “When I speak, I speak always for myself and for my friends which were with me, and all the other soldiers. And when we say a prayer to this day, when I go to a synagogue, which I do, I always say a prayer for the dead, regardless who they were, Jewish or not Jewish. The rabbi once asked me, ‘How come you’re praying?’ I said, ‘Listen, I can say prayer 365 days, there are so many people which are laying there, which don’t have one person to say a prayer for them.’”

  Vincent Koch, né Kucharsky

  Dobbs Ferry, New York

  LANDSBERG

  The horrors of the Kaufering camps and the war have remained with Vincent Koch. At age eighty-three, even as he acknowledges that his experiences made him “become hard, very, very hard,” he says the memories they engender are still with him and still hurt. “My kids used to tell me that I used to get up screaming in the middle of the night—even to this day. Not as much now as it was years ago—call it nightmares or whatever.”

  A few years before his eightieth birthday, his daughter-in-law suggested that since his granddaughter was studying the Holocaust in school, she should ask Grandpa about it. “So right there, she started to ask me questions. And that was the first time that I remember really getting into a discussion about it. I didn’t want to talk about it, that was for sure. It brought back too many memories that I didn’t want to revive, because when I talk about it even now, it brings back some of those vivid memories and they’re all very real, that’s the remarkable part of it—that even at this stage of my life, they’re still very, very real memories.”

  One of the recollections that hurt Vincent Koch the most is the realization that many of the people he found in the Kaufering camp were beyond his help. “It was a terrible thing, for the simple reason that I could not communicate with them. I was so anxious to be able to do whatever I could for them, you understand? I would have done anything for them, I felt so bad, so sorry for what they went through. And there wasn’t a thing in the world that I could do. I mean, they weren’t even there, to be frank with you. I think their mind was somewhere else. They were out of it, almost, that’s how emaciated and strictly bones, and their facial expressions, cheekbones—it was just a horrible, horrible thing.”

  Vincent Koch

  Koch, who was an observant Jew when he went into the service, still gets big laughs describing an experience he had at a training camp in the deep South. He had brought his tefillin with him to camp and made it a practice to get up at 5 A.M., an hour before the rest of the troops, in order to put on the tefillin and pray.

  After several nights of this, a soldier named Clint who slept in the bunk next to his took Koch aside and asked in a deep southern voice, “Are you okay? Is your health all right?”

  Koch responded, “Why do you ask?”

  And Clint said, “Because the guys here are trying to figure out why you take your blood pressure every morning.”

  Koch laughs and says, “I don’t think he ever saw a Jew before.”

  And Koch remained a believing Jew, despite what he’d seen at Landsberg. “I hear plenty of comments today, too, where you get into social situations and people are questioning God. I never question. That’s God’s will. Maybe it’s a good thing that kind of brought you through in times when it might have been pretty difficult to get through them.”

  Stanley Friedenberg

  Stanley Friedenberg

  Old Westbury, New York

  OHRDRUF and MAUTHAUSEN

  Stanley Friedenberg, who had been raised as an Orthodox Jew but was never a religious believer even though he attended temple with his father, found that his wartime experiences lessened his belief in God. “With all the rationalization that God was looking at this and God was doing that, my answer was ‘Where was he?’ Six million of us so-called chosen people were being killed, abused, perished, degraded, and he had a master plan behind it? You speak to Orthodox people today about this, and they have all kinds of rationalizations for it. Doesn’t work, doesn’t wash. I’m told by Methodists and Baptists that I’m gonna burn in the fires of Hell and my parents are burning in the fires of Hell. Well, what can I do?”

  Friedenberg is much more concerned with wondering whether it could happen again. “It’s happening in other countries, and to a great extent, religion seems to be the cause of it.” He points to the religious Germans, the good Lutherans and the Catholics. “And this [Holocaust] was entirely separate from their religion. They could not see this as being barred by their religion. It just didn’t make any difference. It never seemed to occur to them that this was not just morally wrong but against their religion and everything else. A strange situation.”

  And he sees parallels today. “We seem to be selective in our outrages. We can be outraged by something in one country; the same thing happens in another country, and we turn a blind eye to it. I can’t explain that.”

  Dallas Peyton

  Tucson, Arizona

  DACHAU

  Dallas Peyton is another World War II veteran who didn’t tell anyone about what he’d seen in the war—not his wife, nor his children. It wasn’t until 2002, when one of his grandsons who was teaching high school history in Tucson asked him to be a guest lecturer and talk about the war, that he opened up. “I started talking to these kids and didn’t do bad until I got to Dachau, and then from there on, I was crying more than I was talking.”

  His fear was that the kids were thinking, “You old fool, up there crying,” but when he saw the looks on their faces, he knew it wasn’t so. The word spread after that first class, and before the da
y was out, students from all over the school asked to hear him speak. Even with that positive experience, it took time for him to accept the fact that he had a story to tell. The encouragement of Jewish survivors helped.

  Now he speaks often about his personal experience with the Holocaust, and he’s reached the point where he can do it without breaking down. He ends most of his talks to school kids with the famous words of a onetime inmate at Sachsenhausen and Dachau, Reverend Martin Niemöller, who himself was answering a student who asked, “How could it happen?”:

  First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.

  Leonard Lubin

  St. Petersburg, Florida

  WELS II

  Leonard Lubin is able to describe his witnessing of the opening of the Wels II camp in precise detail, yet he is openly hostile to being called a liberator in its most common context. He knows there is a relative handful of Americans who were at the camps that the Germans had fled, and he acknowledges being one of them. But liberator? “It all sounds so exalted, so glamorous. But we didn’t do anything to liberate anybody. It’s a bunch of bull. Just a soldier, putting one foot in front of another like I was told to do, happened to be walking down that road like I was told to do, and walked into this thing. No Germans there to fight, so I didn’t do anything heroic. I hate the term ‘liberator.’ It’s a false thing.

  “Most of us were draftees, and even if we weren’t, we were just ordinary people like lots of people today, nothing special. People hear you’re a liberator, their eyes glass over and they speak in hushed terms.”