‘Kartofel, kartofel, bitte,’ (potatoes, potatoes, please) I whispered. At that moment, the woman started to scream. I didn’t understand a word. She pushed us out. I ran to the trees and began to shake them, so the blossoms fell off the branches. A large stone flew at me. We ran away. That was the first and last time I asked for food. I felt ashamed. Mirka and I decided not to tell Mother about it.
That night we were right in the frontline. We spent the night lying under the carriages. We did not dare flee from there, there was nowhere to go. To hide in the German village? They’ll chase us away like dogs and hand us over to the authorities. We had no choice but to remain in the carriages and underneath them. Whatever happens to the others will also happen to us. Cannon shells flew above us with a terrifying noise.
Before dawn the locomotive returned with our escort.[*] People who got out of the carriages in the morning were amazed to see lots of pieces of paper floating on the small pond. They looked strange, and they had not been there on the previous day. When they went to look at them, they were devastated—these were our certificates and other papers protecting us! So we did have such papers—it wasn’t just a deception by the Germans! Now, at the end of the war, the Germans found them useless.
But the Germans escorting us had a different plan for getting rid of us. They didn’t want to let the birds in their hands escape, even though the Allies had already encircled them on all sides. Someone ran from carriage to carriage, screaming in terror: ‘The Germans want to drown the train in the river Elbe. Save yourselves!’
At the height of the [rumor], when we heard shots in the distance, we ran outside. People burst out of the carriages. Suddenly someone shouted, ‘The Americans are coming!’
To our great surprise, a tank came slowly down the hill opposite, followed by another one. I ran towards the tank, laughing hysterically. It stopped. I embraced the wheels, kissed the iron plates.
The amazed soldier who came out called his friends and they immediately started throwing chocolate to us. They smiled in embarrassment and didn’t know what to do.
Arie Selinger was from Poland, and had just turned eight years old.
Arie Selinger
Suddenly the trees behind the hill start to fall and I think, how come these trees are falling? You are a child, every hill looks like a mountain, the proportions are different, and as I see the trees falling down, I see tanks following them. The Americans came…
Arie picked up some of the chocolate tossed by the soldiers.
Mother was a nurse, so she knew; she kept saying, ‘You don't eat anything, except for what I give you.’ American jeeps passed there and threw chocolate. I took the chocolate and I ate it. I had marks on my face. My mother said: ‘You ate, I can tell you did!’ And she slapped me on the face: ‘I told you not to touch anything!’ It was the only time my mother ever hit me.
Lajos Reti of Hungary was twenty-four years old.
Lajos Reti
The day of April 13, 1945, was a Friday, a sunny and windy day. In the morning, the SS opened the doors of the freight cars, after they had argued with each other whether they should kill us with their submachine guns.[*] But the US troops were too close.
Several hundred people wrapped in rags streamed through the open doors, if they could be called people at all. We were all mere skeletons.
The train was idling in a deepening, so I climbed uphill, across a road and to a field. I was pulling out potatoes planted on the field, when a motorcycle approached. It was a motorcycle with a sidecar. There was an elegant SS or Nazi leader in the front—I could not decide which, since he was wearing a mixture of uniform and civilian clothes; it must have been his wife sitting behind him and his child in the sidecar. He pulled over and offered me a cigarette. I told him I did not smoke, so he closed his silver cigarette case and started the engine. He seemed to hesitate about the direction he should take.
Then two small American tanks arrived. I was standing in the middle of the road, and noticed that the American soldier leaning out of the turret of one of the tanks was aiming his gun at me.
The tank came closer and closer, and the soldier lowered his submachine gun. I must have looked terrible, so he did not take me for an enemy. I was lucky he had not shot me from the distance, since my small coat and boots vaguely resembled a military uniform. Lice were crawling all over my clothes and skin.
The few hundred former inhabitants of the concentration camp surrounded the tanks right away. Suddenly somebody remembered that [some of] the SS guarding us were still in the carriages. The SS were caught quickly, and lined up. The ‘intrepid’ SS were trembling so heavily that their pants were flapping.[*]
My attention was drawn to something else; in the rear of the tank there was a box of canned food. I climbed under the tank, emerged at its end, and pulled out a can. It turned out that I stole a can of oranges. This was my luck. I ate the potatoes charred in the can with the oranges, and probably this combination saved my life. Everyone who ate meat or anything greasy died within hours or within one or two days at the latest.
I felt fever in my body, undressed completely naked in front of staring women, and went into the ice-cold water of the lake next to the railroad. People warned me not to do this, but I went into the water, felt good, felt that I got rid of the lice and the burning heat of the fever. When I put on my rags again, I felt the fever ever stronger.
In the evening, there was news that we should flee, because the Germans pushed back the Americans. The Germans would massacre us for sure; the women had pulled out material for parachutes from a carriage in order to make clothes.
I was already so weak that I did not care whether the returning Germans would kill me. I stayed in one of the carriages, and fell asleep.
On Saturday, April 14, German peasant horse-drawn carts came for us by some order, so I was carried to Hillersleben. I dragged myself to the first floor of the first building. It looked like an office building, so I lay down under the sink of the bathroom, and fell asleep.
I am sure the American soldiers had no idea who we were and what we went through.
Leslie Meisels of Hungary had turned 18 by the time of the liberation.
Leslie Meisels
After a while the guards opened all the doors and the commandant ordered all males above the age of twelve to get out of the wagons and go over to a little embankment across from the train. Then, while we were facing our respective cattle wagons that contained our family members, a machine gun was set up in front of each wagon, although not every machine gun was manned by an SS guard. We stood there facing the machine guns—and death—for a couple of hours; then, inexplicably, the guns were removed and we were ordered to return to our wagons. Even now, I do not know for sure what happened, but I think that it being so close to the end of the war, the guards couldn’t be forced to carry out executions—they had to volunteer. Very fortunately for us, only eight SS guards volunteered, and I guess the commandant wouldn’t dare try to carry out his plan with so few men. It is a very sad fact that all those volunteers were vehement antisemites from Hungary, our own native land.
That night, a fierce air battle developed around and above our train. The guns were blazing, bombs were falling, and explosions were shaking our wagons, but again, none of them fell on us. In the morning, the first thing we noticed was there were no SS guards—they had fled during the night, leaving us to our fate, which turned out to be our salvation. These are things that I cannot explain, that no one can explain, but to me it looks like God was looking after us and creating these miracles.
People were milling around outside of the wagons, talking about what had happened. Sometime around midday, I had made a fire from some twigs and I was starting to boil some of the remaining red beets in a pot when suddenly a huge cry went up. When I looked over to the top of that little embankment, I saw some dirty, sweating American soldiers—the most beautiful human beings imaginable—appear with their guns ready. Instead of the enemy, they found us an
d heard our screams and our cries of ‘Oh God, we are free! We are going to be human beings again!’
I remember going back and forth between that pot of beets and the door of the wagon, telling my mother and brothers that we were free, crying at the same time. That feeling was not, and still is not, possible to express in words—after more than sixty years, whenever I think about that moment, my skin still shivers! Those soldiers from the United States Army not only liberated us, they gave us back our lives.
Steve Barry of Hungary, now 20, also remembered mounted SS troops appearing and ordering the men and boys out of the train. Barry and his friends remained where they were.
Steve Barry
I was still in the passenger car, and no way would I have gotten out of there. In other words, if they wanted to kill me, they had to come into the car and shoot me…They could see me in there, of course. But, see, it’s a huge, I don’t know how many railroad cars were needed to contain twenty-five hundred people, but, you know, it’s a long line of railroad cars. I mean, the only thing they could have done at that point was probably just keep shooting, but it just didn’t make much sense, even to them. So when they saw that nobody was getting out of the car, they just packed up and rode away.[*]
A very short while later, they came back again in the opposite direction. My friends and I say, ‘Uh-oh, we know what’s going on. We are surrounded!’ These guys can’t get out because they went from left to right and they just disappeared…
It was April and it was close to the Baltic Sea so the nights were chilly. I took one of these German overcoats [I had found] and I put it on because I was very cold. I wrapped it around myself and we spent that night sitting on the embankment next to the train and watched the most unbelievable carpet bombing of Magdeburg.
Q. Were you afraid at that time that the bombs might fall on the train as well?
We couldn’t care less if they fell on us, as long as it was falling. [Chuckles] And I’m not kidding; I’m dead serious. As long as they were killing Germans, we didn’t care if we went with them…
It’s an unbelievable sight and sound because the roar of hundreds and hundreds of planes coming in waves over you is a gut-wrenching experience. And the sound of the bomb and the sight of the explosions, it was something to watch. We did see a couple of German planes, fighter planes, take off, and they were shot down almost instantly.
The next morning, Barry encountered his first American soldiers.
Q. Were they in trucks or tanks? What did you see?
Well, actually there were two tanks. I still get tears in my eyes; that’s what it was. Right now I have tears in my eyes and I always will when I think about it. That [was the moment that] we knew we were safe.
We found some matches in those German soldiers’ [rail]cars. We had this tiny little fire going and we were sitting next to it, and I was sitting there with this great big SS overcoat on. One GI walked down the embankment, came over to the fire, sat next to me, took out his pen knife, and he cut off the SS insignia from my coat, and slowly dropped it into the fire. [Gets emotional] If my voice breaks up right now, it always does when I say that, because it’s a moment that just can never be forgotten. I don’t know who the GI was, but it just signaled something to me that maybe I’m safe and maybe the war ended and the Germans, or the Nazis, were defeated. It was an unbelievable symbol to me. And all I can tell you is, it still touches me very deeply, and probably always will.
Martin Spett of Tarnow, Poland, was seventeen years old at the time of his family’s liberation. In a letter to his liberators in 2009, he wrote the following.
Martin Spett
The German commandant, who was in charge of the train, not knowing what to do with us, went to a nearby village to call Berlin for instructions. When he returned, we found out that he had orders to kill everyone aboard the train. You have to visualize this situation. Here we were in the middle of a forest with seventy German guards that set up heavy machine guns for our execution, waiting for orders from their commandant. But, he apparently had a change of heart and did not wish to follow Berlin’s instructions because the American army was closing in on all sides.
During the night, we saw the German army retreating near our train and we saw the American artillery fire that was aimed in our direction. We huddled together in fear, not knowing what our fate was.
The morning found us still on the train with only a small number of guards and a commandant who was waving to us from a bicycle as he was riding away. It was a beautiful sunny morning in the forest. All was calm and quiet.
Later that morning, we heard a loud metallic rumbling sound. A few minutes later, an American army tank came into view. As the tank stopped, an American soldier came from behind the tank and he started walking down the hill towards the train. He could only go a few steps when our people, in their great excitement, fell before his feet, kissing him.[*] At that time, the German guards surrendered and we then realized that we were liberated.
The soldier stood there with tears in his eyes, telling us that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died the day before.
Agnes Fleischer of Hungary was now ten years old.
Agnes Fleischer Baker
The first sight I had of the Americans from inside the train was of a vehicle such as we had never seen before—it had a great white star on it, and someone familiar with that star said, ‘Oh my God, the Americans are here!’
Now I know that it was a jeep—and it must have been on a reconnaissance mission, and it was empty maybe, because the soldiers took cover, seeing the train. I will forever see the white star and that amazing jeep in my heart!
Soon, the soldiers came and told us sadly that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died the day before on April 12. They told us that it was Friday, April 13, 1945—we did not know the months and the days anymore, we had lost count of time in Bergen–Belsen long before. The soldiers came, and were gentle, and gave us food.
As I was a child I fantasized that the soldiers were angels, with their wings hidden under their uniform shirts. Today I know that this was no fantasy. In that place and at that time the American soldiers were angels indeed.
Kurt Bronner recounted the moment of liberation for his liberators in 2013.
Kurt Bronner
What I remember is that suddenly the doors of the cattle car were opened, and we were out there, hearing the machine guns, and the gunfire, very close by. We didn’t have any food, we didn’t have any water—but we were alive! We saw the German guards running; and we saw them taking their clothes off and changing into civilian clothes… and we were waiting. And suddenly we saw some convertibles, and some tanks on the road above, and looking up from the small valley, and seeing the white stars on the jeeps—we thought they were Russians, you know— ‘stars.’ Then one soldier came and started to speak in English. Very few of us spoke English, and he said in Yiddish, ‘I am a Jew, too.’ Excuse me [puts hand over heart, gets emotional]—memories coming back [pauses]… we were given our lives back. We were taken to the Hillersleben village, and I remember one of the American soldiers came by, and pointed us to a room. And twenty, twenty-five of us went into the room—and the first English expression I learned was, ‘One only!’ [Laughter] And it was a room for one person!
I go to schools and talk to the students, and one of them asked me, ‘When did you know that you were free?’ And I tell them, when I went to the bathroom, and closed the door, by myself, alone, in privacy, that is when I knew I was free; [I had my dignity]. And after the DDT, the new clothes, the white sheets on a bed—we felt free.[*]
At age 15, George Somjen was from Budapest, Hungary, and imprisoned into Bergen–Belsen, like Kurt Bronner, with his father. And like Kurt Bronner, Dr. Somjen’s father did not survive.
George Somjen
I remember the liberation; I remember that the tanks were surrounded and mobbed by our people, who did not want to leave them alone. It was a rather intense and joyous moment. They took us to Hillersl
eben. In Hillersleben today there is a cemetery where 143 people are buried, who died after the liberation; one of them is my father.
Hungarian-born Robert Spitz also found himself all alone at age 15; his father, who had been with him at Bergen–Belsen, was suddenly shipped to Mauthausen slave labor camp in Austria, where he died. Bob would become an interpreter for the occupation US forces and go on to join the division that liberated him, as an American soldier. In a gathering with his liberators and fellow survivors in 2009, he related the following.
Robert Spitz
I was sitting inside of that cattle car, where I would estimate that there were few inmates in the cattle car that had fewer than a million lice each [crawling on them]; naturally starved to death, skin and bones, very, very bad condition. We heard, I heard, that somebody was fiddling with the lock of our sliding door, from outside. Obviously that sliding door lock was open, and first thing I know is that the sliding door is sliding toward an open position. I saw a young man who wore an olive drab uniform, and he had a wide armband with a red cross in it. Behind him there were two or three younger men without the armbands, they were talking a language that I understood. I assume that I was the only one in my car that understood and spoke English; I had had English in school with other languages. I was the only one with these guys that was able to strike up a conversation! They were, I think, more delighted than I was. I didn’t realize just how many advantages I just gained because I [had] successfully established a line of communication with these guys from another part of the world—they were delighted that they could start finding out information that was never available to them.
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