The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (4 page)

But lice were a relatively minor problem. The men had been brought to Berga as slave laborers to help drill thirteen tunnels into a nearby mountain. They’d heard that the tunnels, or a huge chamber deep in the mountain where the tunnels would meet, would be used for munitions factories; another rumor had it that they’d be used to make synthetic aircraft fuel desperately needed to replace the lost manufacturing capacity at facilities being bombed to rubble by Allied aircraft. The fact that the war was clearly lost and the construction at Berga would make no difference in the outcome of the conflict was irrelevant. The tunnels had to be bored, and the Americans were going to do the job even if it killed them. Or especially if it killed them. At least forty of them died while working in the Berga tunnels.

According to Brooks, six or eight men worked in each tunnel per shift. There were two or three pneumatic drills at the rock face, each one weighing around a hundred pounds. The drill bit was several feet long, and the man holding the drill had to keep it going straight into the rock. As the prisoners lost muscle mass, just holding the drill became a nearly impossible task. He says, “You’d drill into the wall, and then a German explosives expert comes in and sets the charges, and you go out, they blow the wall, and then you go back in and shovel the rock.” There was no waiting for the dust to settle; they were forced back in immediately, breathing the huge cloud of smoke and rock and dust.

Fellman was assigned to Stollen Elf, Tunnel Eleven, where he learned the process quickly. “What they would do is drill a series of holes with pneumatic drills into the face of the rock, and then they would insert in each one of these holes a series of gunpowder sausages. I heard from some other prisoners that they had dynamite, but where we were all they had was black powder. They’d pour gunpowder, a pre-measured amount, into a sausage size. You twist the heavy paper together, and you made this individual gunpowder sausage. Depending on whatever the engineer decided would determine how many of these gunpowder sausages went into each hole. And they would blow up, and once they blew, before the dust had begun to settle, we were forced back into the tunnel, and we would load that rock into open-side gondolas, and the gondolas were on narrow-gauge rail tracks, and we would push them to the river’s edge, the Elster River ran there, and you would dump them. And then before dawn, every day, they would spray paint the pilings of rock so that it didn’t look fresh from the air. We worked mostly at night, and the planes would come over for hours, so that the faces of the tunnels would be draped with a canvas of some sort to block the light.”

The POWs wore whatever clothing they’d had with them when they arrived at the camp. “Shredded up, whatever we lost, we lost; that was it. You got a hole in your shoe, you put something in it, a cardboard or whatnot. Whatever. You got no replacement as far as clothing is concerned; you’re still wearing whatever you had on. [The overseers] had masks, they had gloves, they had all kinds—we had nothing.”

That’s not quite accurate. What they often had from the civilian overseer in the tunnel, recalls Morton Brooks, was beatings. “He carried a pickax handle and a rubber hose and didn’t hesitate to use it. And we were all beaten on a fairly regular basis because we weren’t going to try and help them do it. We slacked off and goofed off as much as we could get away with.”

Fellman, who was not working in the same tunnel as Brooks, says that even if it meant a beating, the Americans resisted with acts of sabotage. “We’d be sitting on the side of a pile of dirt making these gunpowder sausages. They’d be watching us. What would happen, though, is somehow—nobody ever knew how it happened—but every eighth or tenth sausage got a handful of dirt. When the explosions went off, it never went off the way it was supposed to, and they would go mad. They would go absolutely bananas. And everybody on the shift, everybody, I don’t care who you were, got a beating. Either with a club, a rifle butt, or a rubber hose. And this happened on a regular basis.

“I can only speak for the tunnel I was in, I don’t know what went on in any of the others, but we discovered by accident that if you piled all the heavy rocks on the side closest to the river and the lightest rock on the side closest to the bank, that when the gondolas would tip so that the body of the gondola was turned to empty the load, the whole gondola would go down in the water. And that would happen from time to time, whatever could be done to slow the work. One of the prisoners who understood German heard the guards saying, ‘That crap began to happen when the Americans got there.’”

Before they went to work on their twelve-hour shift, the men received what their captors called coffee. They drank it or tried to clean themselves with it. After their shift they would get a bread ration, perhaps along with soup of some sort, made with dead cats or rats, some of them were told. It was estimated they were being fed about 400 calories a day—roughly the equivalent of a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. The likelihood of survival under those conditions over a long period of time was nil, and the men knew it. Some took heart in the ever-increasing number of Allied aircraft that flew over the camp on their way to bombing German cities.

“We saw the American Air Force flying overhead,” says Brooks, recalling the sight of more than a thousand heavy bombers heading for Dresden. “It was wonderful. The Germans weren’t happy, but we were thrilled.”

Anthony Acevedo, a close friend of both Brooks and Fellman, who as a medic was allowed to remain in the barracks in order to minister to seriously ill POWs, says that when the bombers went over, he could hear the hinges on the windows shake and feel the building vibrate. He’d look skyward and cross himself, praying that liberation would come soon. And he said the guards—mostly Austrians who were devout Catholics as he was—would also cross themselves. He hastens to add that being devout didn’t make them any less brutal than the Germans.

Death was all around them at Berga. “The Germans were sticklers for book work,” Fellman says. “Everything had to be recorded. So whenever a prisoner died, they had to wait for the medical officer to come by and make a death certificate out. He would only come periodically, once a week, maybe, and so the guys that died in the interim, they would line [their bodies] up on the outside. Remember, now, this is subfreezing weather, so they were stiff in every sense of the word, and they would line them up right alongside of where we lined up to get our chow. And you have to understand, you’re standing there waiting for your food alongside of your buddies who are lying dead on the road, and it didn’t bother you. [That gives you] some idea of what kind of a situation you had sunk into—and it didn’t take long.”

Morton Brooks acknowledges that he didn’t even have the strength to cry at the time. “It was so miserable, unreal. It’s not like sitting here and thinking about it. You’re in that situation, and your behavior’s determined by the situation in which you’re in.”

And the situation? All the niceties of civilized living are absent. Taking a shower, having toilet paper, being able to wash your hands after going to the bathroom or before you eat. Not even having a bathroom, just a perch over a slit trench for months on end, coping with chronic diarrhea and having only straw from your bedding to wipe yourself with. And then wearing the same clothes for months at a time.

Brooks ultimately became a clinical psychologist, and he speaks in the language of that profession. “That’s why I say, the situation determines your behavior, and say it’s a crazy situation, your behavior is crazy. And so, to understand someone’s behavior, you have to understand the totality of the situation. And the human capability of coping with that situation. So you cope. And whatever comes out, comes out.

“You had this piece of bread, and then you try to stretch it. Sometimes if we had the potbelly stove going, you’d take the bread and try and toast it on the outside of the stove. One of our fellow soldiers had stolen someone else’s bread, and we went over to essentially attack him for doing that. I remember going to hit him, and it was like a powder puff. The force with which I hit him, and I remember how striking it was for me, the lack of strength I had at that moment. You just don’t even realize how the strength disappears. It was a shock to me that I had lost so much strength. But that’s how quickly we became weakened.”

Brooks never did really pray. “I don’t know why,” he explains. “Maybe I’d never thought in those kinds of terms, that there was some God up there that would be protecting me or could do anything for me.”

Survival under those conditions required both physical and emotional strength. Fellman says, “I always believed, but I was never excessive about it, and I don’t remember doing any heavy-duty praying, although I’m sure I must’ve. So I can’t tell you where the strength came from. I’m only glad it was there.”

And clearly, it had to be. He says, “I have to reiterate, any time you got the frame of mind that you felt like you weren’t going to make it, those guys didn’t make it. Every one of them.” Fellman says that of the guys who survived, “it never occurred to us that we weren’t gonna make it home.”

He doesn’t know what gave him or the others that outlook, it was just existential, like the barracks humor that buoyed them. “We made jokes about everything, except toward the end, you were so turned in, there was no jokes, no nothing. We used to engage on what we would order when we went to a restaurant, and we would insist that the steak be done a certain way, with a certain number of onions on top. And we’d make damn sure you were listening. ‘Are you hearing me? Are you hearing what I’m saying?’

“You never talk about girls. Women became very unimportant. I don’t remember anybody talking about women, but we talked about food—how it was gonna be prepared.”

The Germans worked most of the Americans in twelve-hour shifts. During their off-hours, they slept—or tried to. Norm Fellman recalls, “We tried, if the lice would let you. If the cold would let you. We slept two to a bunk, tried to keep warm. But it depended. I think we slept no matter what, because we were just so thoroughly exhausted. Between the hunger and the lice and the cold, it was not a guaranteed thing. You did sleep. I’m sure we did; otherwise, we wouldn’t have made it.”

As the days and weeks wore on, Fellman found it more difficult to be an optimist. “Let me tell you, when we first got into camp, the idea was just to hang on. After you’ve been on reduced rations for a while, you would concentrate on food an awful lot. Your concern would be to make it through the next month, the next week, the next day, and when things got toward the end, you were trying to make it through the next hour. And then it was the next ten minutes. You just wanted to survive that much longer. By the time we were liberated, I don’t believe any of us would have lasted another week. I don’t believe I would have lasted another twenty-four hours. I was as close to being gone as you can be and not be.”

Fellman doesn’t remember having nightmares while in Berga. “I don’t know what could happen in a nightmare that could even equal what would happen to us during the day. Your existence was a nightmare. Nobody could believe that something like this could happen, not to Americans, anyway.”

CHAPTER 3

INCOMPREHENSIBLE

APRIL 3, 1945
NEAR GOTHA, GERMANY
    
130 miles northeast of Frankfurt

L
ieutenant Colonel Albin F. Irzyk didn’t find God on the road to Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge; he was already a believer. But he was certain God found him on December 23, 1944. There was no other way for him to explain why a high-powered armor-piercing round fired by a German tank at point-blank range hit his huge Sherman tank, knocked everyone inside for a loop, but didn’t explode. The impact actually split open the turret. As dawn came up, the crew inside could see a long sliver of light. Only after daylight, when Irzyk, the commanding officer of the 8th Tank Battalion, Combat Command B, of the 4th Armored Division, had a chance to crawl outside his tank, did he discover that the round had, with great precision, pinpointed a stubby piece of steel about five inches by four inches by six inches deep and ricocheted off into the Ardennes forest. Irzyk had been a tanker for most of his military career, and he’d never before even noticed that appurtenance on the tracked monster, much less understood why it was there. But it didn’t take him long to figure out that had the round not bounced off that solid chunk of steel, it would have driven through the turret and hit him square in the back, leaving little more than crispy pieces of flesh and bone.