Steven Karras
Page 35
In 1934—the year after Hitler took power—the headquarters of that organization wrote him a very complimentary letter, expressing admiration for what he had done for the organization. In the letter they also wrote, “You know how things are going, and we would appreciate it if you would resign from the organization,” which he did. He kept this letter in his artificial leg wherever he went and always had it on him, showing what he had done.
In the fall of 1944, I heard from my uncle in New York that he had received word from a family friend in Switzerland who had heard that my parents were rumored to be alive in Theresianstadt, the concentration camp outside of Prague. Well, as far as I was concerned, the war was over on May 7, and I persuaded my unit to let me go, give me a jeep and a driver, and go find my parents. Theresianstadt was 150 miles away, through unconquered southern Germany and into Czechoslovakia.
I tried to go through territory that was known to me. Essentially, I tried to hit the eastward autobahn as soon as I could. I wasn’t really scared; I was more worried about the brakes on the jeep than about getting behind enemy lines. When my driver and I reached Aue, the town was undamaged and had not been looted. German police and thousands of German soldiers were on the street. Two and half German divisions had yet to surrender and were still intact. We passed a lot of positions that were still completely manned. There were roadblocks with perfectly good antitank guns guarding them, but no one went behind their guns or put their finger on their triggers. They actually let us through. Nobody had expected us.
Soon I picked up a wounded German soldier and his girlfriend because I felt safer having people like them in the jeep. All of the Germans who I encountered broached the subject of whether they could surrender to me and I said, “No, you can’t. You are fighting the Russians and you’ll surrender to them.”
A German woman said, “You know, the Russians will rape everybody, they’re so cruel. How can you do this to us?”
In a snappy reply, I said, “This is what you people did in Russia and Poland, too. You were very cruel.”
Their reaction to that was, “There are bad people among all nations.”
I remember thinking, “What the hell am I saying, here amongst the last two divisions of the German Army who have yet to officially surrender?” Imagine me accusing them of being cruel to Eastern Europe!
When we got down from the Sudeten Mountains into Czech territory, we ran into the Russian Army. That was a great experience. They were so happy to see us! You would not believe their enthusiasm—they had seen American and British liberated prisoners, but they had never met an officer in a vehicle who had weapons before, and they were beside themselves with joy. Most of the MPs directing the traffic were women, and they all embraced us. In fact, they practically raped us.
When we reached the Russians, I still had another hundred miles to go, but we were making good time. The Russian Army was coming in the opposite direction, but there was no heavy traffic. We continued to make good time, driving about a hundred miles in two and a half hours. Toward evening, we managed to get to Theresianstadt.
The camp was behind heavily barbed wire, with Russian guards outside. I walked up to the Russian guards at the gate, and once again everybody was delighted to see us. After all of the handshaking, congratulating, slapping each other on the back, and saying how happy we were to meet each other, I told him what I wanted. The beam went up and we drove into the camp. There were a massive number of people in there, all terribly crowded; most were too weak to get out of the way. People were practically crawling through our legs.
I did not know where to start looking. Somebody drew my attention to the fact that there was a central register, so I made my way there. The camp, having just been in German hands, was of course very organized as far as lists and things like that went.
There was a girl there who spoke English, and I told her that I was looking for my parents, Moritz and Else Gans. There was an endless list. After a few moments, she looked up and said, “You’re lucky, they’re still here. They are alive.”
I said to her, “Well, there’s no two ways about it. You’re going to show me, and you’re going to take me to them now.”
She came with us on the jeep and took us to the house where my parents were registered to live. My parents were living on the second floor of a house in the Dutch section of the ghetto. I told the girl to go upstairs and tell them that their son was there, but to prepare them a little bit for it first. I just waited outside.
She went inside and said, “I have a very joyous message for you.”
My mother asked, “Are we getting some extra food?”
The girl said, “No, your son is here.”
I stood outside in the dark, and after maybe a minute, my parents came out. Of course, they were in an unbelievable state. My father was so decimated, if I had met him on the street, I would not have recognized him.
When they saw me, my parents were totally swept up—crying, shocked, I don’t know how to describe it. They could hardly speak. I said, “Calm down, let’s go and sit down somewhere.” And then, of course, people collected. Everyone crowded around downstairs on the street and started singing. A group of Zionist girls came and gave my mother flowers; friends of my parents came to congratulate them on my arrival. My driver was just a kid. He said at one stage, “All this experience is no use to me. Nobody is going to believe it when I get home.” He was right.
Afterward, we sat down and spent the night talking. They knew very little, almost nothing, of what had happened in the world. I knew more about places like Auschwitz than they did. They did not realize the full extent of the murder. They knew that a lot of people had disappeared from Theresianstadt and never came back, including my aunt and uncle, but they didn’t know a thing about the gas chambers.
At one point, my father said, “We’ll never get our own back after what the Germans did to us.” I told him that we had, perhaps not in the way we would have liked, but we did get back at them. I gave him a rough idea about what fights I had been in on D-Day and the assaults we made in Normandy. I told him about seeing the dead bodies of three SS divisions in Falaise, killed by the air pressure of our bombers during the breakout in Normandy. Since our hometown was only twelve miles from Holland, the seat of the Gans family, my father was particularly interested in my participation in the Walcheren landings; I told him about the inner city of our hometown, that everything was gone. I said, “I can’t even recognize the spot where our synagogue was standing. Everything was totally destroyed.” I described to him my unit, which consisted largely of German Austrian Jews, and the qualification of getting into the unit.
Since I had gotten to the camp at five o’clock in the evening, by ten o’clock, I thought I would take my parents over to the commandant of the camp. He was delighted and with great sincerity said he was happy that I had found them. Then he turned around and said, “Look, I have to close both my eyes to allow you to be in this camp. There are diseases here, they are communicable, and you will go back to your army and carry these diseases with you.”
The next morning I gave my parents all of my spare clothing, all the spare food, and everything that I had and set off. When we were leaving the gate, the guards stopped us again and I thought, “Now I’m getting into trouble.” Actually, there was a bunch of officers who had not shaken my hand and who wanted to come out and celebrate. When this was over, I raced past the camp to show my parents that I did get out, and that was it. My parents told me later it gave them the will to live. Knowing that their three children had survived the war was a tremendous boost to rebuild their lives. Three days after I returned from Theresianstadt, I traveled to Breda to where the temporary Dutch government had been set up and met with Princess Juliana, who was handling all Dutch returnees. She arranged a plane to take my parents from Prague to Holland, where they arrived three weeks later.
Manfred Gans is a retired engineer living in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He worked for Scientific Design Company for thir
ty-four years and rose from the rank of a process engineer to senior vice president in charge of technology, while the company expanded from a dozen employees to become a global engineering company. He recently completed a book about his life.
First published in 2009 by Zenith Press, an imprint of MBI Publishing Company,
400 First Avenue North, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA
Copyright © 2009, 2010 by Steven Karras
Hardcover edition published in 2009. Digital edition 2010.
All rights reserved. With the exception of quoting brief passages for the purposes of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the Publisher. The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge.
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Digital edition: 978-1-61673-249-3
Hardcover edition: 978-0-7603-3586-4
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Karras, Steven, 1970-
The enemy I knew : German Jews in the allied military in World War II / Steven Karras.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7603-3586-4 (hb w/jkt)
1. Jews, German—United States—Biography. 2. Jews, German—United States—Interviews. 3. Jewish soldiers—United States—Biography. 4. Jewish soldiers—United States—Interviews. 5. World War, 1939-1945—Participation, Jewish. 6. World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, Jewish. I. Title.
E184.37.A147 2009
940.53089’924073—dc22
2009015510
Design Manager: Brenda C. Canales
Designer: Jennie Tischler
Cover: Matt Simmons
On the back cover: Soldiers from the 29th Division search captured German soldiers in
France 1944. Harry Lorch
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Prologue
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Siegmund Spiegel
Chapter 2: Jerry Bechhofer
Chapter 3: Adelyn Bonin
Chapter 4: Eric Hamberg
Chapter 5: Bernard Fridberg
Chapter 6: Fritz Weinschenk
Chapter 7: Peter Terry
Chapter 8: William Katzenstein
Chapter 9: Karl Goldsmith
Chapter 10: Henry Kissinger
Chapter 11: John Stern
Chapter 12: Ralph Baer
Chapter 13: Bernard Baum
Chapter 14: Harold Baum
Chapter 15: Edmund Schloss
Chapter 16: Walter Reed
Chapter 17: Manfred Steinfeld
Chapter 18: Jack Hochwald
Chapter 19: Norbert Grunwald
Chapter 20: Eric Boehm
Chapter 21: Fred Fields
Chapter 22: Peter Masters
Chapter 23: John Brunswick
Chapter 24: Otto Stern
Chapter 25: Kurt Klein
Chapter 26: Harry Lorch
Chapter 27: Manfred Gans
Copyright Page