The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (24 page)

It was only when he saw the reaction of the GIs on the tanks that he got a sense of how bad off he really was. “I never realized how bad we looked until I saw other people’s faces when they saw us for the first time.” When he was rescued, Fellman had cellulitis, a precursor of gangrene, in one leg. The problem had originated with bites from lice that had become infected at Berga. When he got to a U.S. Army field hospital, they weighed him: he was down to 86 pounds. He knew that death hadn’t been that remote a possibility. “I don’t know whether any of us that were in the carts—or even on the road—would’ve lived another week.”

Mort Brooks wasn’t able to get word to his family that he’d survived captivity until he arrived at a field hospital near Manchester, England. Brooks had an epiphany during his recovery there. “They saw I couldn’t eat, and they started me on a liquid kind of diet, almost like milk shakes, that I could sip out of a straw. I would get food, and I would gag. And after a while, I was looking at myself in the mirror, and I said, ‘You gotta do something about this. You’ve got to control it,’ and gradually it improved. I learned what the power of thought was; maybe that’s why I became interested in psychology. I could determine that I had to do something about that situation, and I would look in the mirror and say, ‘Look, just calm down. And get over the gagging,’ and I would talk to myself, essentially, and say that I had to improve, that this was not a tolerable situation. And gradually it improved.”

Brooks spent about six weeks in the hospital and was then sent to London, where he and other former POWs were interrogated with an eye toward future prosecution of German war criminals. The commandant and assistant commandant of Berga were eventually tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The SS commander, Hans Kasten, was ultimately hanged by Communist authorities in 1952. His deputy, Erwin Metz, who had directly caused the death of many of the prisoners at Berga and had continued to cause deaths on the long march, was sentenced to death in 1946. The sentence was commuted, and he was released eight years later. To this day Brooks regrets that he was never called to testify against them formally at Nuremberg.

Shortly after his liberation, Norman Fellman was flown from a field hospital to Paris, where his leg required extensive treatment. But when he got to the hospital, a makeshift facility in a converted school, there were no rooms. “Casualties were coming in so damned fast, and the prison camps were beginning to empty out, the hospitals were just overflowing. They had me in a bed out in the hall, and people would come by, and kids would look at me and cry. So I felt like a freak.

“The care couldn’t have been better, and the empathy was fantastic. They couldn’t do enough for me. I lay in the bed, and I listened to a doctor, a lieutenant, and a chief medical officer, a colonel, and they were having an argument. The colonel is saying, ‘That leg’s gotta come off; we are loaded with people. We gotta move this man along.’ And the lieutenant says, ‘I think we can save the leg. We’ve got this new medication, it’s working marvels. I’d like to try it.’ And don’t you know, the colonel finally decided, he said, ‘I’ll give you two days. If we don’t see remarkable improvement, that leg comes off.’ And he’s talking about penicillin. And they gave me shots around the clock, every two hours. They had no idea how to dose it. There was twenty thousand units every two hours. You feel sorry for the poor sonofabitch who had to give me a shot, because all I had was bone. I had no fat. So he gave me a shot like you’d give it to a dog. He’d pick up the skin, which was loose, and you shot it under the skin. And then penicillin washes. I had these lice-bite holes in my ankle, and there were maybe six or eight of them going up my ankle and down into the foot. And you could take a medical probe and actually go from one hole to the other, like tunnels in my leg. And they would wash me—have the liquid penicillin go through, and in the end of two days’ time, you could actually see the healing begin. It was a miracle, there’s no question about it.”

At the time, Fellman was indifferent to the discussions about his leg. He just wanted to sleep. “I was a bystander; I was divorced from the person who they were talking about. They were talking about cutting off my leg. They may as well been talking about squashing a fly. It just didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to be left alone. I kept thinking to myself, Goddammit, go argue somewhere else.”

A few days later, when it was clear that his leg was going to be saved, Fellman became interested in food. He remembers it as though it were yesterday. “They wanted me to have anything I wanted to eat. I told them I wanted eggs, and they said, ‘How do you want them fixed?’ I said, ‘I want them every way you can fix one,’ and I think they served me a dozen eggs. Two fried, two over easy, you know, two boiled, whatnot. And I ate them, every damned one of them. And about thirty minutes later I threw every one up. But it was good going down, I gotta tell you.”

After about a month in the hospital, Fellman was put aboard a DC-3 and flown from Paris to Lisbon, then to the Azores, ultimately landing at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. Morton Brooks came home on the
Queen Mary
, sailing from Scotland to New York harbor. He still thinks one of the most exciting things he’s ever seen was the Statue of Liberty as the ship came in. Fireboats were spraying water, horns were blaring, and a band on one of the boats greeted the former prisoners of war, the former inmates of a Nazi slave-labor camp, with one of the most popular songs of that year, “Don’t Fence Me In.”
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APRIL 22, 1945
SACHSENHAUSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP
ORANIENBURG, GERMANY
    21 miles north of Berlin

B
ernhard “Ben” Storch is an American, a veteran, a witness to the Holocaust, and a past state commander of the New York Jewish War Veterans. He saw things that no other American saw during World War II. That’s because during the war, Storch was a Polish citizen, fighting first as part of the Polish army as a mortarman and then as an artillery sergeant, attached to the White Russian Front. As part of the Soviet forces moving west, Storch’s unit was among the first at several of the Nazis’ worst death camps, but Sachsenhausen was the only one liberated by his unit where there were still live prisoners to be saved.

Storch was born in 1922 in the small town of Chorzów, Poland, not far from Katowice in Upper Silesia. His father had served in the Russian army from 1912 to 1919. When the Germans invaded Poland at the start of the Second World War, his family fled east, to Russia. And the Russians promptly sent them to Siberia.

In the spring of 1943, because he had to find some way to help support the family, he joined the army and was assigned to carry the tube in a three-man 82mm mortar squad. Their first engagement against the German army was on October 12. His unit was equipped with Studebaker and Buick trucks provided by the American Lend-Lease Plan.

Throughout the war, Storch offered morning Jewish prayers, laying tefillin, the small, square black leather boxes, one on the forehead, the other on the upper left arm and held in place by leather straps, that contain a handwritten copy of the Sh’ma, the sacred prayer that begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is One.” Despite his belief that anti-Semitism flows in the blood of the Polish people, he says it was not a problem in the Polish army.

By January 1945, there were two Polish divisions fighting alongside the Russians. In June, they’d pushed the Germans in their sector all the way back to the Polish border. A month later, they discovered their first death camp, Sobibor. Storch says, “We would have never found it, but there was this one guy telling us, ‘Down there, in the forest, there is a camp. Follow the railroad track about five miles.’ There was a railroad stop named Sobibor. The guy had simply said they were killing Jews there and Russian soldiers.” Storch says when they got to the camp, there was nothing but an empty field, where they discovered mass graves and thousands of saplings that the Germans had planted to hide the evidence. The camp had operated for eighteen months, until an uprising in October 1943, when the inmates had been liquidated and the camp razed. In that short time, an estimated 250,000 people, the majority of them Jews, were murdered with carbon monoxide generated by a diesel engine in six gas chambers with a total capacity of 1,200 at a time. It was at Sobibor that the Jews of the Vilna, Minsk, and Lida ghettoes were killed. The camp had no crematoria; victims were buried in pits; some were ultimately burned.

Storch says his men were not quite sure what they were seeing at Sobibor. “We had no idea then about concentration camps.”

Their next objective was Lublin, about sixty miles to the southeast, which they took on July 23, 1944, in what he says was a horrible massacre. About two miles outside the city they discovered the death camp called Majdanek. Storch was now a sergeant in an artillery unit, traveling in a truck towing a 122mm howitzer. When they arrived at the camp, they simply drove in. “This camp was complete. The doors were not even locked, we didn’t have to break in anything. We went in and saw the gas chambers. We had no idea what it is. We thought it was a factory. The gas chambers didn’t look like anything special. There were about six of them; they had benches on the side but no marks, not even any blood on the floor. There was a skylight in the ceiling for the SS guys to check and see if the people were already dead. The sign said
BATH DISINFECTION—FOR SANITARY REASONS.
They had steel doors, showerheads. No lights; no electricity. We walked into them.”

Storch and his men then walked about a quarter mile down the road, where they discovered six crematoria, and the horror began to sink in. “We saw some parts of human bodies, bones. We started to think about it, said, ‘It couldn’t be.’ But in Poland, the Catholics don’t cremate people. We said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Finally someone from the outside showed up, and he told us that this is a death camp. Nobody had told us to be prepared for it. At that point I was twenty years old.” Storch has had this conversation with hundreds of American veterans of World War II who were blindsided by their own discovery of Nazi death camps in the spring of 1945. “The [U.S.] government knew about [the death camps liberated by the Russian army]. That was 1944. Those two camps were liberated, Sobibor and Majdanek, in 1944.” Treblinka was also liberated in 1944; Auschwitz was taken by the Russians in January 1945.

By the time Storch got to Majdanek, his outfit had seen death on a wholesale scale, but they still had the capacity to be horrified. “It was terrible. You had the ovens, you had the bones, and you go over to the side and you have this huge mountain of ash, [but] you don’t think that it is ash. One thing that struck me is that when I was walking through the grounds—our shoes were black shoes—all of a sudden the shoes became white. It was white, light grayish white. And for some reason we couldn’t figure out what it is; we were told later. The wind was blowing, it was fertilizing the fields there. The grass was so gorgeous, fertilized with bone meal. The commandant had a beautiful garden there.

“Going back to the other side, we saw the magazines, the storage rooms. First came the suitcases; they had the names on it. Then they had utensils, little pots, whatever, that the people had been told to bring. Little children, my God, those little dolls. We were pretty hard soldiers to that point; we knew what’s going on. Every one of them—we were only nine Jewish guys in our battery, the battery consisted of eighty-eight people—it was absolutely horrible. Then they had the clothing, men’s and ladies’, then they had the shoes, sorted out neatly, men’s, women’s, and children’s. They had eyeglasses.” At this point Ben Storch pauses briefly, then whispers, “Thousands of pairs. The room with the shoes is huge, a warehouse. In my head and the other guy’s head, my God, I hope my brother’s shoes is not there, my mother’s dress is not there, my grandmother’s dress, and my grandfather and my uncles and my aunts.”

Storch spent about forty-five minutes in Majdanek. He says there was “no time to think. You went here and here, you made a U-turn, and go out.”

Was there time to cry? “Oh, yeah. We did. I said Kaddish. The gentile guys kneeled on the floor and prayed. On that big pile of ash, that’s where we said our prayers. Yeah, the tears came to my eyes. I saw so many grave sites in Russia, [yet] that’s the first time in my life during the war I cried.”

At Majdanek there were no survivors. The only people they discovered were six SS who were hiding in one of the barracks. They learned from the prisoners that as the Russian army was approaching, the Nazis had sent all the concentration camp prisoners to Auschwitz, where some of them survived. Storch says, “The mentality was that ‘we have to move these people somewhere else to kill them.’ All those people in Auschwitz were to have been killed, but they couldn’t do it. So they moved them to Sachsenhausen, to Buchenwald, to Bergen-Belsen, to Austria, to Czechoslovakian camps.”

Storch recalls that he and the soldiers he was with were perplexed on their march west by the strange priorities of the German high command. “German soldiers fell in our hands because they didn’t have any transportation. The transportation was strictly designed for the Jews; the Jews is the priority. Now, it’s mind-boggling. Usually you’d try to save your people first. But no, for the Nazis, that was the main subject: the Jews have to be destroyed.”