Born Survivors (39 page)

Urging the prisoners to stay calm, Sgt Kosiek radioed his headquarters to report what he had found, but witnesses said he ‘couldn’t explain what the heck it was’. He and his soldiers had already come across hundreds of prisoners on the side of the road who’d been shot or had died from exhaustion on the death marches as the Nazis fled, but they were mentally unprepared for the sight of their first concentration camp. Stunned, Sgt Kosiek formally accepted the surrender of the Austrian and German guards, who put up no resistance and handed over their weapons. Not only were they relieved to give themselves up to American rather than Soviet soldiers, but the liberators realised later that when the Germans saw
the distinctive red bolt of lightning on the ‘Thunder bolt’ insignia (similar to the jagged ‘SS’ symbol), they believed their unit was the equivalent.

The rest of the German guards had either fled or tried to disguise themselves in striped uniforms, but they were soon found out and many were killed in an explosion of prisoner anger. The surviving Russians, especially, wanted revenge, and killed their former German masters with their bare hands. Several were beaten, hanged and thrown onto the electric fences, where their corpses remained for days. Others were cut open and butchered. Some were stamped to death with the wooden clogs they’d issued to the prisoners.

At the Gusen sub-camp four kilometres away, Sgt Kosiek and his men had already witnessed similar scenes in which hatred of the guards led to mass lynchings of the
Kapos
and others, and more than five hundred of the 24,000 prisoners died. In Mauthausen, people also mobbed the few members of the American platoon wherever they went, and they stood powerless as prisoners went on the rampage, storming the SS
Kommandantur
and helping themselves to whatever they could carry. They watched two women hurl themselves at the electric fencing in a double suicide. They were told later that the women had been prostitutes for the Nazis and didn’t want to be taken alive. There was a riot in the kitchens after hundreds broke in and raided it ‘like a horde of savages’. Starving men grabbed fistfuls of flour from sacks and poured it down their throats. Skeletal prisoners were on the floor wrestling to the death for scraps. Desperate to maintain order, Sgt Kosiek fired his pistol three times in the air and spoke to the prisoners in Polish, ordering them to calm down.

In the middle of the mayhem he and his men were offered ‘a guided tour’ by the inmates, among them a professor who spoke perfect English. They were shown several different areas of the camp including the crematorium, where the ovens were going ‘full blast’ and were ‘smoking hot’. The incinerator was burning five bodies at a time instead of the usual one and the floor was stacked
with freshly slaughtered prisoners, many with their heads split open, leaking blood. They also found rats gnawing on corpses strewn around the camp. Most bodies were barely recognisable as human. There was talk of cannibalism and they were shown fresh piles of humans ‘stacked like cordwood’. In the adjacent gas chamber they discovered the fully clothed corpses of more prisoners.

Knowing that he and his men couldn’t safely remain in the camp that night, Sgt Kosiek arranged for a committee of prisoners to be put in charge to prevent further riots or retribution attacks on any remaining
Kapos
and prostitutes, and to supervise the distribution of whatever food was left. He threatened that if order wasn’t maintained the Americans would pull out and leave them to the Nazis.

With the stink of Mauthausen still in their nostrils, the US platoon eventually left the camp, taking with them most of the guards (many of whom begged for their protection), and promised that the US Army would arrive in force the following day. Many inmates were terrified that they’d been abandoned or that the Nazis would come back, so those who were strong enough found weapons and organised themselves into patrols, vowing to defend themselves until death.

Klara Löffová said, ‘The Americans suddenly left and we were scared again – either that there would be nobody to feed us (and you can imagine how scary that is) – or that the Germans might come back. We also didn’t understand why. The explanation was that because of the closeness of the demarcation line [between the Soviets and Americans] the authorities didn’t know under whose jurisdiction we should be.’

By day’s end on 5 May 1945, however, they were officially free. The twenty-seven-year-old son of Polish parents, Sgt Kosiek had personally liberated some 40,000 prisoners at KZ Mauthausen and KZ Gusen, as well as accepting the surrender of 1,800 German prisoners-of-war.

In 1975 Kosiek was to return to Mauthausen with his wife Gloria to lead a procession of liberators back through the main gates of the
camp to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation. He remained in touch with many of his fellow liberators, and with a few survivors including Hungarian teenager Tibor Rubin, who emigrated to America and went on to win the US Medal of Honor for his bravery as an infantryman and prisoner-of-war in Korea. There were also two Polish survivors who visited Sgt Kosiek and his family years later at their home in Chicago, Illinois, to personally thank him for what he had done. He died, aged sixty-six, in 1984.

His son Larry said, ‘My father found his experiences difficult to talk about his whole life, but he did give me his personal written account when I was thirteen years old and studying the war in school. He knew about the babies in the camp, which always amazed him, but he was mostly enormously proud of the accomplishments of his platoon.’

8

Liberation

Survivors recovering after liberation in Mauthausen

The first Priska knew about the arrival of Americans in Mauthausen was the sound of something she hadn’t heard in years – laughter, ‘a most beautiful thing’. Somewhere in the distance, she thought she could also hear music being played.

Rising unsteadily from her hollow of soiled straw she peered out of her window, squinting in the noonday sun, and spotted three unfamiliar military vehicles with white stars carrying young-looking soldiers, none of whom were wearing German uniforms. So that was what Americans looked like. After dreaming so long about their Allied liberators, the sight of such beings in the flesh seemed like an illusion. Everything about them was different, from their uniforms to their helmets, even to the way they walked, talked and smelled.

While many of the prisoners were ecstatic at the Americans’ arrival, crying, ‘Peace! Welcome!’ or ‘We are free!’ in a Babel of languages, others just slumped where they lay, apathetic and indifferent. Others sat overcome, tears streaming down their faces, praying that the smiling men in uniform weren’t a cruel hallucination. Some of the younger women, who’d dreamed of meeting GIs all their lives, suddenly became self-conscious. Repelled by their own smell, they pinched their cheeks or tried in vain to smooth hair crawling with creatures and stiff with dirt.

One of the American soldiers was a young medic, Technician Fifth Grade LeRoy Petersohn. Just twenty-two years old, a newspaper employee from Aurora, Illinois, Petersohn was travelling with General Patton’s Headquarters Combat Command B (CCB). He had a large red cross painted on his helmet and another on an armband. Pete, as he was known, had already ‘patched up’ numerous men in the field and had been awarded the prestigious Purple Heart for valour after being shelled and injured during the Battle of the Bulge. Once his division reached Mauthausen he spent almost two weeks tending to the sick and dying, and was initially sent down to the barracks below the main quarters to see who most urgently needed his help.

‘I had seen a lot before I ever got to that camp,’ he said later, ‘but I was more affected by seeing the people that were starved and were just skin and bone.’ When he reached a hut where men slept five to a bunk, he found a ‘skeleton’ with a weak pulse who died before his eyes. ‘It was just a horrible mess; very strength-consuming.’ The
unarmed young medic had been warned not to get too close to the prisoners or to let them embrace him because of all the vermin and infectious diseases, but said they ‘just swarmed’ around him. As he continued to work his way through the huts examining the sick and dying, he was helpless to intervene when SS guards trying to pass themselves off as prisoners were discovered and beaten to death by those taking their revenge.

LeRoy Petersohn, the medic who saved Hana

Priska, leaning unsteadily on the window-frame of her barracks, heard the voices of the soldiers and recognised the language. The young teacher of languages who had given English lessons in her garden as a girl summoned up as many words as her fevered brain could recall and cried out for help. ‘I called out to them in English to come to the barrack,’ she said. ‘One of these soldiers was thankfully a medic. He
looked at my bundle, opened it and saw this so little baby with pus-filled furuncles [boils] caused by malnutrition.’

Pete was amazed to come across a mother and newborn baby in the infested, insanitary barracks. Both were severely malnourished and dehydrated, and the baby was suffering from a ‘massive infection’ and covered in lice ‘bigger than her’. Having seen enough, he hurried to find his senior officer, Major Harold G. Stacy, to tell him what he’d found. The major was the division surgeon who’d been with Pete when they were shelled on their way to replace two medics killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

‘I said, “Doc, would you come with me? I’ve got something I want to show you.” So he and I went over to the barracks and sure enough this little girl, little baby girl, was just [a few] weeks old. She had been born in one of the other camps.’ Pete asked what the baby was called and someone told him, ‘Hana, her name is Hana.’ He added, ‘When they arrived at Mauthausen, they were scheduled to be killed. It just happened to be that, the day they arrived there, they had run out of gas.’

Gravely malnourished and riddled with infection as Hana was, both men knew that her chances of survival were extremely slim. They were also completely overwhelmed by the thousands of prisoners needing urgent medical attention and knew that they were facing mass epidemics of typhus and other diseases. Even so, the major and his young medic took pity on the child and decided to operate immediately.

Seeking Priska’s permission to take her child away, Pete assured the anxious mother that they would do all they could to save her. It was the second time in less than a week that Priska had been asked to hand over her baby to a stranger and she was extremely reluctant to let Hana out of her sight again. Her English failing her, she begged to go with her baby until Major Stacy, who spoke German, managed to calm her down. ‘The mother was trying her best to go,’ said Pete. ‘My officer … explained that we would bring her back, that we were going to make her well, and that settled her
down.’ Priska was too weak to argue further. Watching them disappear, she wondered if she would ever again see her beautiful little Hanička with the blue eyes and the pretty, upturned nose.

The two doctors jumped into a jeep, Major Stacy cradling Hana while Pete drove them straight to the 131st Evac (Evacuation) Hospital at nearby Gusen. It was the only place that had the necessary surgical equipment to deal with her infection. Major Stacy then sent Pete further on down the Danube to where the 81st Medical Battalion was stationed. He was instructed to collect some vital penicillin, the miraculous new ‘wonder drug’ that had only just been made available, and had to be kept in specialised coolers.

By the time he returned, Major Stacy was already operating on Hana in the field surgery, opening up and lancing her numerous abscesses. In a slow and complicated procedure, he tackled each pustule individually, surgically cutting away infected areas of skin where necessary. Pete followed him around her tiny body, cleaning the pus and dousing each wound with swabs of penicillin. Hana, whose face was distorted from crying, then had to have several of her sores stitched up in a process that would leave her scarred for life.

As Priska waited for news of her baby, the hours passed with no relief. When a US Army nurse eventually brought back the heavily bandaged bundle the following day, the woman had tears rolling down her cheeks. Priska, who’d been moved to a makeshift infirmary with just three to a room and each in their own bed, took one look at the nurse’s face and cried out in anguish, ‘Is she dead?’