The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (23 page)

The division was just finishing operations related to what came to be called the Ruhr Pocket and was near Iserlohn when it came across a barbed-wire-enclosed prison camp. Maurice is not sure exactly where it was, and he doesn’t know its name, but the memory of it has stuck with him for more than six decades.

When they arrived at the camp, the German guards were fleeing across an open field. There was gunfire, and some of the guards were captured, while others got away. But the focus of the Americans quickly turned to the inmates of the camp.

“We came to this concentration camp, and the officers told us to guard the outside and not let the prisoners go, ‘cause they wanted a firsthand look at them. We tried to keep ‘em in, but some of them were getting out, whether we wanted to or not, and I was too civilized to kill a man that was starving. So the thing is, some of them got out and they went down to the village. And they brought back a hundred-pound—some potatoes in a cloth bag. And I helped them get the cloth bag into the camp, and some of them prisoners were so hungry that they were reaching through the wire and getting blades of grass to eat. And then another one, another prisoner came back, and he had a live sheep on his shoulders. So I helped him get the sheep into the camp, and that was, that was the end of the man I seen.”

His squad stayed at the camp for no more than three or four hours and then moved on, leaving it to follow-on units to care for the inmates. At noon the following day, the town of Iserlohn surrendered. At Hemer, on April 17, the division liberated more than 20,000 Russian POWs kept in horrible conditions at a huge camp.

And then the 99th was sent to Bavaria, where it fell under the command of Patton’s Third Army, entering combat on April 21 near Schwabach, with Salzburg, Austria, as its objective. The route would take the 99th through Munich and an area filled with subcamps of Dachau.

APRIL 21, 1945
HERSBRUCK, GERMANY
     
18 miles east of Nuremberg
     110 miles north of Munich

L
eo Serian tried to get into the war when he was seventeen, but his father wouldn’t sign the papers, so he didn’t put on the uniform until the end of 1943. By the time he finished basic training and got bounced around a bit, it was already late January 1945 and he found himself with the 65th Infantry Division at Camp Lucky Strike just outside Le Havre. The Battle of the Bulge was over, and Leo’s outfit was high on gung ho and wondering if they’d get their chance to fight the Nazis. It wasn’t until March, when they arrived at the Franco-German border, that they heard the distant sound of cannons.

Sixty-eight years after the event, Leo can still remember his first combat: “All of us were gung ho, but then as soon as we entered combat, actually, it was horrifying, because here men that we trained with and that we’d come to love as comrades, we saw them getting killed and wounded all around us, and nothing happened to me. Our company was headed towards a larger force, to engage in battle, and then we got word that on the way, there’s a small town with a handful of Germans, and to wipe ‘em out and then go on your way. Well, what a surprise we were in for; when we got there to that town, on the road in front of the town, we noticed that there were three American airplanes [flying] in a circular fashion. They had come down and machine-gunned the town, then go around and rocket the town, shoot rockets, and then go around and drop bombs. The three airplanes did that for about forty-five minutes or an hour, and then after they left, we got the order to spread out and to advance. No sooner than we got the order to advance, we were sprayed with machine-gun fire; we weren’t very gung ho at that moment.”

Less than two months later, now experienced combat veterans, his outfit experienced a very different kind of horror. They were walking down a road when, several hundred feet in front of them, two large gates opened wide. “Two German trucks pulled out, and a handful of Germans jumped in and fled. It was toward the end of the war, many thousands of Germans were either fleeing or surrendering. This handful decided to flee rather than confront us, because we were a couple of hundred men.

Private Leo Serian was with elements of the 65th Infantry Division when it discovered Hersbruck, a subcamp of Flossenbürg. More than six decades later, the image of a huge, unburned pyre of bodies is never far from his mind’s eye
.

“We were on foot, and they were in trucks. We couldn’t go after them. They disappeared before we could even raise our rifles. And then, slowly, we approached those open gates. We walked in, and the sight before our eyes caused us to freeze, like we almost were in a coma. To our left on the ground were dozens of bodies, like twigs that fell off from a tree. And most of them were dead. Some came crawling towards us.”

Nineteen-year-old Private Serian and his buddies had known virtually nothing about concentration camps. Without warning, they’d walked into one.

“There was a pyre of human bodies about maybe eight feet high. They all appeared to be dead, but there could have been some alive on the verge of death. They didn’t have any furnaces there to burn bodies, so I’m assuming they were going to just throw gasoline on them.

“Some came walking towards us, haltingly, and some came crawling on their hands and knees. You could almost see their bones protruding out of their bodies and wondered how they still remained alive. Some of them were completely nude. When they approached us, we didn’t know what to say to them. Some of them spoke, but we didn’t understand. Some embraced us and clung to us, standing and on their knees.”

The camp they’d discovered was Hersbruck, one of seventy-four subcamps of Flossenbürg, later described by the Third U.S. Army Judge Advocate Section, War Crimes Branch, as “one of the worst … a factory dealing in death.” On Easter Sunday, just three weeks before the Americans arrived, the Nazis had marched the prisoners still able to walk out of Hersbruck to Dachau, a hundred miles away. The survivors that Serian’s unit found were the ones too debilitated to walk.

The image of the unburned pyre of bodies is never far from Leo Serian’s mind’s eye. In 1994, just prior to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, with the country experiencing renewed interest in what World War II veterans had to say, Serian wrote to the U.S. Army Center of Military History. He wanted to know the name of the camp he’d helped liberate. After learning that it was Hersbruck, he got in touch with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and asked for help in finding survivors. Eventually he received a list of twenty-seven people and wrote to them; he’s heard back from about a dozen who live in the United States, Israel, Prague, the Czech Republic, and South America. Each described daily life in Hersbruck; some told of the death marches to Dachau and beyond.

And Serian, who is motivated not only by his own family’s tragedy during the Armenian genocide but by disgust with the Holocaust deniers who continually pop up to spread their lies, continues to speak often as a personal witness of the Holocaust.

CHAPTER 11

I START CRYING AND I CAN’T TALK ANYMORE

APRIL 22, 1945
    
Near Rötz, Germany
    
75 miles east of Nuremberg

I
t was late on the night of April 22, and most of the remaining 169 American POWs from Berga were bedded down in a barn near the village of Rötz when word went from survivor to survivor: “We can’t continue on this way.” Morton Brooks says they reached a consensus: “When morning comes, we don’t move.”

Hours later, as the sun was rising, the guards began yelling,
“Heraus, heraus!”
(Get out!)

Brooks says no one moved. “We stayed still. And then we heard some shots, and the guards took off. We waited about ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and one of the fellows looked out the back end of the barn and saw the 11th Armored coming down the road. Tanks, trucks, whatever. And when they said ‘Americans!’ the door back there opened up, and we went down this hill and they couldn’t believe who we were, and they pulled us up onto the tanks and trucks and the group went on to their destination.”

Tony Acevedo, the former medic, recalls one of their German guards handing his rifle to an American and saying, “I am your prisoner now.” He says the POWs immediately recognized the American tanks, but there was a tense moment when the American liberators couldn’t comprehend what—who, actually—they were seeing. Acevedo says that moment didn’t last long, and a tanker grabbed him by one arm and swung him up onto the tank as though he weighed nothing. Now in his eighties, when talking about the experience, Tony still has to pause a moment to grieve for the men he had tried to save in Berga and Stalag IX-B and couldn’t. It’s the curse of the medics in all our wars: they never forgive themselves for the men they weren’t able to save.

Brooks, who’d been a POW and slave laborer for more than three months, says the liberators tried to give them food and water. “I remember I had a K ration—a cheese thing that was in this K ration, and I tried to eat it and I couldn’t get it into my mouth, really. I was so hungry, and yet I couldn’t eat. Which was lucky. Some guys ate and then became violently ill.”

The 11th Armored Division brought them to the city of Cham, where they took over a building and quickly converted it into an emergency hospital. The POWs were deloused with DDT, put on stretchers, and given medical care. Brooks says that some Red Cross people came through with toothpaste and toothbrushes—he sighs, then laughs as he recalls the moment—“I mean, it was just so inappropriate to what our needs were.”

Norman Fellman was with a different group of Berga prisoners on the death march. His memory of liberation two days earlier, on April 20, begins with lying at the side of the road, waiting to be lifted into the vegetable cart and pushed or pulled down the road. But he suddenly realized that the German guards had disappeared. “Next thing I know a tank comes over the hill, and there’s a bunch of dirty, scruffy guys. They were members of the 90th Division, and they were the best-looking guys I ever saw.” His liberators were most likely members of Company D of the 712th Armored Battalion, attached to the 90th Infantry Division.