The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (18 page)

After returning home in mid-1946 and coping with the kinds of postwar adjustment problems experienced by many veterans, Payne moved to Chicago, where he became a graduate student at the University of Chicago and ultimately did some of the pioneering work in library automation and computerization. He married and had one son and doesn’t recall ever telling his family about the time he spent at Ohrdruf. “I’ve never really liked to talk about it; I like to tell more interesting, funny stories. Everybody’s heard my war stories about liberating a baby buggy full of fine German wine. I don’t know that anybody’s heard about the grim part of it.” Not even his great-nephew, the boy who would become President Barack Obama.

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A film has been made about Vernon Tott connecting with the survivors of Ahlem. It’s entitled
Angel of Ahlem
and was produced by the Documentary Institute of the University of Florida. It’s available on DVD.

CHAPTER 8

BUCHENWALD

THIS AIN’T NO PLACE I WANNA BE

APRIL 14, 1945
FRANKFURT, GERMANY

T
he men and women of the Army’s 120th Evacuation Hospital had spent more than a month chasing Patton—“playing catch-up” is the way one of their truck drivers, Sergeant Milton Silva, put it. “He would move into an area, and we would be moved up to where he was supposed to be, no sooner had we set up our equipment and tents, he’d moved on, we’d knock them down. We just chased him all over until we got to Frankfurt. By that time, everything was sort of quieted down. The Germans were on the way out, and it was sort of an R&R area at the time.”

Silva, who grew up in the family-run funeral business in Fall River, Massachusetts, and was drafted while attending the Boston School of Anatomy and Embalming, says the 120th had set up in the center of a racetrack in the middle of Frankfurt and everyone was having a good time, which included racing a liberated motorcycle on the track. The good time ended with word that they were being moved on a priority basis.

“We got word that FDR had died,” recalls Silva, now a retired Massachusetts judge whom local prosecutors referred to as “Not Guilty Milty,” “and all hell broke loose. We were told to pack up but not to load any vehicles. Up to this time, what we would do is operate in tandem. We would take the people [to the new location] who were supply and maintenance, the guys that put up the tents and so forth. And we would come back for personnel, and while we were doing that, they’d be setting up the equipment, so by the time we got there with the nurses and the doctors, the hospital would be operational.”

This move, however, was different. At about six in the morning on April 14, an all-black quartermaster unit showed up with trucks, loaded their vehicles, and with 273 personnel, the 120th Evac moved out. Silva recalls that they drove all day, then into the night under blackout conditions, occasionally hearing small-arms fire. “We didn’t know where we were going. We thought that Patton had started a big offensive and he’d met a lot of resistance from the Germans and there were gonna be a lot of casualties. And as we approached our destination, we started to get this odor.”

Riding in the truck with Silva was his buddy, truck driver Herbert James, Jr. “Herbie said to me, ‘Milt, there’s something that smells around here.’ I said, ‘Herbie, there’s somebody dead around here.’ Having grown up in the funeral business, the smell of death was not unfamiliar to me, and I thought that we had probably run by some bodies that had been left by the side of the road and had decomposed. But the smell got stronger as we got to wherever we were going. And, lo and behold, with the light of day, we arrived at our destination, which was Buchenwald concentration camp.”

Corporal Leonard E. Herzmark of Kansas City, Missouri, had just completed his second year of college when he decided to enlist in the Army at the end of 1942. He was eighteen years old, and since he’d been studying chemical engineering, the Army trained him as a combat medic, which was some cause for concern on his part. “You’d go out with a combat company, and you know, you’re wearing a red cross on your helmet, which is a good target.” He also wasn’t armed. “Medics are not supposed to be armed, and that meant you can’t shoot a medic, because they haven’t got a gun. I think that was probably a rule that was promulgated by the Geneva Convention, but nobody paid any attention to that.”

The future judge Milton Silva during World War II
.

Fortunately, before he went overseas with an infantry unit, he was pulled out and sent to Mississippi, where the 120th Evac was being formed, and he was assigned to be a laboratory technician. That’s where he met Milt Silva.

Herzmark says that though the unit wasn’t told their specific destination when they left Frankfurt, something was mentioned about a prisoner camp. He remembers getting to the area outside Weimar and bivouacking for the night. But he vividly recalls what happened the next morning. “As we drove up the road, I saw a lot of stuff hanging from trees, and, having come from Mississippi, we had what’s called Spanish moss that used to hang from the trees. My eyesight wasn’t the best—I wear glasses. But as we got closer, I saw those were soldiers, German soldiers, hanging from the trees.” Herzmark surmised that before the SS guards left Buchenwald, they’d blown up the power plants, thrown down their guns, and left. “Since the electrified fence was no longer electrified, the inmates climbed through the fence—this was either two or three actual fences, one inside the other, I should say. And so they took out after the Germans, captured a lot of them, and hung ‘em right there. A mass lynching, for which you cannot blame anyone. The Germans had asked for it.

“We dismounted from the truck just outside the camp and went to the gate. And as I walked through the gate, I remember seeing a gallows with three bodies hanging from it. Those were not German soldiers, those were inmates who had been hung. This struck me as ‘this ain’t no place I wanna be.’”

Milt Silva had a similar reaction. “We got beyond the entrance, and we saw these people walking around, almost naked and looking like living skeletons. It was sort of an eerie sight. People were whimpering. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This is not so, you know? Who the hell would treat people like this? And I remember wandering off into an area where a bunch of inmates were surrounding an individual, and they were pelting him and beating the hell out of him. He was one of the guards, and I remember standing there shouting, ‘Kill the sonofabitch!’” Silva now calls that one of his moments of shame.

At the time, he was so upset about it that he just walked off. “I didn’t want to stay there anymore. I just didn’t want anything to do with what was going on up there, and I went down and started to fix tires. Remember fixing eighteen flats and beating the hell out of the tires with a sledge hammer and feeling pretty good about it.”

From the Army’s Buchenwald press release:

11. Miscellaneous: A. Rations: 600 to 700 calories per day for the regular camp, 500 for the Little Camp, both of an unbalanced ration, as against 3,000 to 3,600 calories required for adult health. Black bread, potatoes twice a week, and beet root twice a week served as weak soup, soy bean (or other vegetable “sausage”), jam twice a week, margarine about once a week. Never any greens or fresh vegetables. Heavy deficiency in animal fats and vitamins. No meats. Red Cross packages almost entirely appropriated by SS camp commander, and distributed to suit himself to SS personnel, to citizens of Weimar, even to Nordic German camp prisoners. In two months Commander [René] L’Hopital
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received 1⁄10, 1⁄14 and 1⁄7 of one-person weekly French Red Cross parcel. Meals were prepared and “served” by prisoner personnel under SS supervision.

Warren Priest was an orthopedic surgical technician with the 120th. He’d grown up in Haverhill, New Hampshire, gotten a full scholarship to Boston University in 1940, and been drafted at the end of 1941, when he was nineteen. After basic training, he was selected to attend Fordham University as part of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), where he majored in German. The plan was for him to be part of a group that, at the end of the war, would be involved with occupation administration. But after nine months, the special program was dissolved and he was sent to the 104th Infantry Division and, from there, to the newly organized 120th Evac at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.

Before the unit left Frankfurt, he remembers the colonel calling everyone together and saying they had an assignment to go into a camp where they could practice their medical training. “My experience as a kid growing up was that camp was a place where you went swimming and went barefoot in a bathing suit. So I had difficulty trying to determine the nature of the camp. I knew there were people needing medical care, but I had no idea what we had to face.”

The odor was his first clue that Buchenwald was not summer camp. On the night of the fourteenth, the unit was bivouacked at Schloss Ettersburg, within two or three miles of the concentration camp. Some men stayed in tents, others slept inside a school. “The whole area was permeated by an odor that I had never experienced before, and I later realized it was the odor of burning bodies and decaying bodies that wafted down from the mountains into the valley below. It was something you couldn’t escape.

“It’s the first thing you encounter and the last thing you forget. I can tell you from experience that I know that I’m not a victim of post-traumatic stress, theoretically, except at those times when I am present and there’s some burning flesh of some kind, it comes back, and it really does a job. For example, I live in a home where I have a wood stove now, and several years ago, I was stoking the fire in the morning with my bathrobe on and didn’t realize in doing so a spark came up and lit the back side of my sleeve, went up my arm to the back of my bathrobe, and ignited my hair, and I smelled that burning flesh, burning human. And it kept me awake for months.” Priest went into Buchenwald the following morning with the men of the 120th.

Initially, the female nurses of the unit went into the camp with the men. Rosella Willis Lane, who’d been a farm girl in Iowa before becoming a nurse and joining the Army, still recalls the ride from Frankfurt to Weimar, with the trucks stopping frequently and the women ordered to crouch behind the wheels because the convoy was being strafed. Now ninety-four years old, she says that what she saw inside Buchenwald can never be forgotten. “The crematorium with the doors open, ribs and bones. DPs on stretchers and walking around, just skin and bones.” She met the fifteen-year-old Elie Wiesel and spent time with him, wondering how he’d ever gotten through
that
. (Long after the war, Wiesel would attend reunions of the 120th.)

Her unit was camped at a castle in Weimar, a couple of miles from the concentration camp. Two or three days after arriving, she says a couple of SS soldiers were killed very near their mess tent, and her commander decided that it was no place for women to be assigned. All the nurses were sent on temporary duty elsewhere, while the men of the 120th remained to work in the camp.