The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (35 page)

Jerome Klein with his mother, Bessie, in Brooklyn, shortly after he completed basic training. After the war, at Jerry’s request, she would help bring Holocaust survivor Sidney Glucksman to live with them
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Klein’s arrival happened to coincide with another instance of the inmates discovering a guard hiding inside the camp. He describes the scene as upsetting. “I didn’t realize at the moment what it was that was happening, but these wasted inmates had ganged up on somebody and were stoning him and killed him. Then I learned it was a prison guard who had not gotten out and had put on civilian clothes and thought he could escape, but they recognized him.” Klein watched from no more than ten yards away, listened to the “enormous amount of noise,” and noticed that other Americans were doing the same thing he was doing—gaping. “I don’t think anyone tried to intrude on it. We had already had some explanation of what this was all about. I took a photograph and walked on.”

The camera he used was one he’d been given a few days earlier by a German army doctor he’d captured in a small town. The doctor had asked if Klein would permit him to say good-bye to his wife before taking him to a POW camp. Klein agreed, and to thank him, the doctor took him down in the cellar of his home, removed bricks from the wall—an act that made Klein briefly wonder if he’d made a huge mistake and was about to be shot—and withdrew an unusual military camera from its hiding place and gave it to him.

After leaving the scene of the killing near the Dachau gate, Klein went inside the prisoner compound and began walking around, saying hello to some of the inmates. Initially he spoke German, but when he met a Jewish inmate, the language swiftly morphed to Yiddish. At one point in the camp, he met a sixteen-year-old boy, a Polish Jew named Stashek Gleiksman, who had survived in the camps as a tailor. “He was extremely friendly. He was much more alert. He seemed to be less damaged than the other inmates.”

Klein remembers Gleiksman as being slender but not emaciated. “He hadn’t been in Dachau all that long. He’d gone through a succession of other camps, and I have a feeling since he was valued as a tailor, they probably kept him in somewhat better shape.”

The boy Klein connected with had been taken from his home in the small Polish town of Chrzanów, near Auschwitz, in 1939, when he was twelve and a half. He, along with the other Jewish boys in his school, had been loaded onto a truck and taken to a Nazi SA camp several hundred miles away, where the brown-shirted guards made them build the barracks. While they were constructing the foundations, a bag of cement fell on him and broke his arm, and he was sent to another camp to stay until it healed.

From there he was sent to the death camp known as Gross-Rosen, where he stayed for three years working on construction of barracks. It was while he was there that he learned the fate of his family. “They brought in some more people from my town, and I asked them how my parents were, how’s my brother doing, how’s my sister doing? They just put the finger in front of their mouth and said ‘Shh!’ like that, and since then I never heard from anybody.”

About a year and a half before the liberation, Gleiksman and other prisoners were taken out of Gross-Rosen and set on a death march to Dachau. “One day they took us out, we were young, we were able to walk. But every night when it got dark, they put us on the field where it was nothing there, no trees or anything, and we had to lay down like an animal on the grass until daylight came. Because they were watching us. But there was no way to go away, to run away. If you had to pee, you had to pee right there where you were. We didn’t have anything to eat. A lot of people died during the march.

“Once we got to Dachau, there we had to again line up. There were chairs and tables and SS, a woman and an SS man, sitting on one side. And I remember they called out ‘Next!’ to come over. I got to the table, and I remember [from previous camps] when they say, ‘Jews on one side, every other nationality to stay where you are,’ and I could smell the stink from the crematorium, you saw the smoke coming out. It stunk like terrible, you know, when flesh burns and the bones. So I said to myself, I’m going to take the name of my friend who we lived together in the same building, so I gave them a Polish name. And they brought me over to the other side where I was with the Polish people.”

After being put in a barrack with young people from different countries, he became quite ill. “I got sick, typhoid, because an epidemic broke out. And I don’t remember anything what happened, I just remember that I fell down while I was talking to somebody, and that was the end. How I survived, who put me up in my bunk, I don’t remember. I don’t know. I woke up after that, maybe my fever left me. I wasn’t able to walk at all. Just to try, you know, you didn’t care at that time. Just that you wanted to live. So somehow I was holding on to the walls and tried to walk, to look for some water to get washed. I must have been laying there in filth without washing myself, without taking a drink of water, even. I still don’t know how I survived.”

He recovered from the typhoid but still had to survive months of hard labor until liberation. “I just put on my striped
shmata
on myself and the shoes with the wooden soles, which you could hardly walk, and they put us in trucks. And what we had to do is clean up after the bombardments, you know, bigger towns like Munich or any other place. If they bombarded during the night, that was like being on vacation, in paradise, because there we were able to find some kind of food. If it was a rotten potato or even a dead cat or whatever. Just to eat. At that time, I was weighing about eighty-seven pounds.”

At 6:30 on the morning of April 29, in the dark, Gleiksman and the other inmates had lined up outside as they did every other day before being taken to work. “That day, we were lined up, waiting for the SS to come and get us, to count us up and get to work. They didn’t show. It was very quiet.”

The kapos—the inmate guards who got special favors from the Nazis in exchange for being overseers and goons—never showed up. When daylight came, the prisoners saw white rags tied around the machine guns in the guard towers, but they still had no idea what was going on. He says somewhat matter-of-factly, “You know, I didn’t see a newspaper for six years. We don’t have radio. We didn’t know what day it was. At nine o’clock in the morning, it was really bright, and those guards are still staying in the towers. Shaved their heads off. They didn’t have any helmets on, and they had uniforms on from what we wore, striped uniforms.”

Shortly, the prisoners heard shooting—Gleiksman believes tanks were firing, but he may have actually been hearing explosions and seeing rising smoke to the northwest when the Germans blew the bridge over the Amper River in the face of the advancing L Company of the 45th. When the gate was opened and soldiers in jeeps and trucks poured into the camp, “Whoever was able to walk, you know, was not sick anymore, they started to run towards the gates. We saw a color green, and German tanks were dark gray, so we knew that something happened. We saw a different marker on the truck, a white star, and the jeeps’ white stars, and they started to surround the whole camp, staying on guard.

“And they started to go in deeper into the camp, and the people were laying there, half dead all over the ground, with flies all over the bodies, maybe rot even. People were still with typhoid, and they were not able to stand up, they were too weak. They were breathing, but that’s all. And some soldiers I saw, when they bend down, they started to cry like children. That’s how bad it was. It stunk terrible. And they still found bodies in the crematorium, in the ovens, and there were bodies laying in the front to be burned with those big pliers to be picked up and thrown in the fire. Those things I do remember.”

And what did he do? “I just sat down. I was too weak to go back to the barracks.”

There’s some confusion as to whether the man now known as Sidney Glucksman of New Haven, Connecticut, met his future lifelong friend, Jerome Klein of Manhattan, on liberation day or on the day after, as Klein recalls. What the former inmate does clearly remember is his own disbelief that the American soldier was a Jew. Sidney says, “I myself, I couldn’t believe it. But I didn’t know that he’s a Jew, because all the Jews in the whole world are dead. I didn’t know that Jews were still alive when I was liberated. I thought the Germans killed all the Jews, because in so many years, what I saw [them] bringing in, hundreds of thousands of men, women, even children.

“It’s sometimes so hard to talk about it, but in Gross-Rosen when I was there, I remember when they brought in trainloads of women with children on their hands. They were lined up. I was already an old-timer there, and they made the women get undressed and the little children, set them down on the ground. And the women were all naked, and they told them they have to go in to get showered up, and they already had new clothes on their hands, like going to take a shower. They never came back. And the children were on the ground. We had to go over there, you know, all the younger prisoners, and undress them, shoes take off, take off the clothes, whatever they had on, and take off eyeglasses, and bring all the stuff into the barracks.

“The children, I cry whenever I start talking about it. They threw them in bags and hit them against barracks until you didn’t hear a child cry anymore. When I start talking about it, it makes me sick. So many years after.”

MAY 2, 1945
DACHAU, GERMANY

S
econd Lieutenant Charlotte Chaney, all five feet, 1½ inches of her, had been told by the first nursing school she applied to in New York that she was too short to be a nurse. Too short to move patients, to change the bed, to do everything nurses had to do. So she went back to New Jersey, to Beth Israel, which gladly accepted her in its three-year course. She went through all the rotations but fell in love with surgery. She graduated at the age of twenty-one, and in 1943, having seen most of the doctors and nurses at the hospital leaving to join the Army, she did the same. She shipped overseas as part of the 127th Evacuation Hospital in January 1945 but managed to get married first, to a soldier.

After landing at Le Havre, they were shipped to northern France, near Reims, where they lived in what had been a children’s boarding school. In April—she remembers because it was after Passover—life changed for the 127th. “We suddenly got orders that they’re coming to pick us up, and we’re heading south. They put straw on the bottom of the truck, and we slept foot to foot. We finally got orders to go into Germany, cross over, and that’s what we did. We had orders to go to Munich, and then we still didn’t know anything about the Holocaust. Nobody said anything.

“We got into Munich, and they told us we had to go ten miles past Munich, and they said there’s some kind of a camp there. Some camp. We went into the courtyard, they had something above the entrance.” She’s talking about an enormous Nazi eagle with outstretched wings, a swastika in its talons, mounted over the main entrance.

Their arrival came three days after the liberation of Dachau, and she doesn’t remember seeing a huge number of GIs when the 127th arrived. The combat units that had freed the camp had moved on. “When we went in, we were told the Army had been right before us. And they said, ‘You’ll probably find some dead bodies around.’”

As the trucks drove into the center of the compound, she got her first glimpse of the horror. “We looked to the right of us, and we saw all these people, you know, behind barbed wire. So that’s the first time we saw them. I thought to myself, where in the world am I? What happened here? How could this happen?”

They took over the four-story SS barrack that was inside the administrative area of the camp. “We were told to be careful, because if you touch anything, it may explode.”

Not long after their arrival, the nurses were assigned to go into the prisoner enclosure behind the barbed wire. They were warned that reprisals were still being taken against German guards or kapos found in the camp; they were being killed. “And we were told just to—don’t even bother with it—let them do what they want.”