The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (50 page)

Melvin Waters

Melvin Waters
Dallas, Texas
BERGEN-BELSEN

Melvin Waters says he came home from the war, where he drove an ambulance for the American Field Services, and completely forgot about his experiences, including those at Bergen-Belsen. “I never had a nightmare, I never even thought about it. And then, about thirty years after the war, I went to a movie with my wife one Sunday afternoon, and it was
Sophie’s Choice
. Do you remember that? And when we went out and got in the car and I started the car up, and then I just completely broke down. And I guess what got me was the scene where she had to make a choice between her two children, do you remember that one? And I had thought that the surroundings remind me—and I told Jo—I said, ‘I think that that was Belsen, the way it looked.’ Probably all of them looked alike in some form or fashion. But of course, the daughter immediately went to the gas chamber, and there wasn’t one in Belsen.

“But my feeling was really and truly a feeling of not feeling like I was compassionate, as much as I should’ve been. In other words, I just treated it like a day at the office instead of what it really was.” Waters acknowledges that acting that way in the midst of the horror was his way of getting through it—but it’s easy to infer that, despite this, he’s still filled with guilt. He made a trip to visit the AFS archives in New York, and he says he completely broke down. “Seeing the whole thing again, seeing the atmosphere, seeing the pictures of everybody. I was to the point that I really felt like I couldn’t talk about it in public. I never did try to talk about it.” Interviewed for this book, he says his bad feelings have somewhat abated but he still has feelings of guilt. “I still feel like that I was not compassionate enough, that I didn’t do enough when I was there.”

Werner Ellmann
McHenry, Illinois
MAUTHAUSEN

The pain in Werner Ellmann’s voice is palpable as he acknowledges how his shared German ancestry with the Nazis and their supporters has messed with his head for years. He says that he spent an entire year drunk after returning home to Chicago from the war. Eventually he got into therapy, which helped. Ellmann chose to attend what was then Roosevelt College because he says it was the only college in the United States at the time that had no quotas for Jews or blacks. And it also had an active core of young people getting involved in the nascent civil rights movement, so he was surrounded by turmoil while dealing with his own internal demons. “I was ashamed of being a German and of my relatives. I didn’t like myself. I always remembered that I took life, and to this day, I still can’t live with that.”

Things didn’t really change for him until 1972, twenty-seven years after the war. “I really went to work at destroying my hate. I got involved because of Roosevelt [University]. I set up a volunteer program. I got so engrossed in volunteer work as a penance for what I’d done. I’m not for gun control; I’m for completely destroying all of the guns. We don’t need them. And I think I’m constantly trying to pay my penance. I was raised a strict Catholic, you know, Hail Marys and all that when you sinned, vow to never sin again, but you do. And I lost that religion. I lost all religion. I became an atheist. Today, I’m a deist. I’m in church 24/7. And I’m always acting in that context.”

Werner Ellmann

Ellmann remembers a religious epiphany just before his outfit was committed to battle in the Bulge. “We were told we could all go to a service of our denomination. I went to the Catholic Mass, and the priest did nothing but berate the other side and that they should pay for this crime and we should all be preserved and not be hurt, not to die. And I kept sitting there thinking, ‘What the hell’s going on here? My two [German] brothers over there, they’re probably hearing the same thing, except now I’m the bad guy. What’s going on?’ I think that was the first time that I really began to question, and that doesn’t happen overnight. That’s a process.”

At college, even while battling his drinking problem, he became heavily involved in fighting for the rights of others, at the same time dealing with the shame of being a German who had relatives on the other side during the war.

He also felt a burning need to go back to Germany and visit with family members who had been there during the war. “You know, in 1972 I said to [my wife,] Liz, ‘I’ve got so much hatred in me, I have to get it loose, and I think the way to do it is to go back to Germany.’ And we did. And I went to visit my brother, and I said, ‘I want to be in a room with just you and me.’ We stayed for six hours in that room, and I blasted him all over the map.”

It was his oldest brother, Herbert, the oldest of four, about six years older than Werner, whom he confronted. “I told him how I felt about the Germans and what they did. And every time he said to me, ‘Werner, I wasn’t a Nazi,’ I felt like blasting his face with my fist. When we walked out of that room, we had settled some stuff, and I began my healing.”

In 2008, Werner Ellmann was still working on healing from the things he’d seen and done during World War II. He still wakes up at night screaming, still dreams of someone in a uniform coming at him. And he says he doesn’t believe he’ll ever be cured of that.

Morris Sunshine
North Belmore, New York
NORDHAUSEN

Morris Sunshine has the heart of a jazz musician. Unfortunately, his arteries are clogged with hate, and he hasn’t been able to find a way to fix it. The smell of Nordhausen never goes away. He readily acknowledges the anger, saying, “My hate for the German language and the German people is terrible. It’s something that I’ve never forgiven them for.”

Even six decades later. He understands when he hears stories of veterans who didn’t seem to be affected by the war, by seeing the camps, but after they retire begin having nightmares and exhibiting the symptoms of what the docs call delayed-onset post-traumatic stress disorder. “Yeah, I can understand that,” he says. “I can understand it completely. If you’ve got this stuff stored up in yourself, it’s gotta go someplace. I mean—the shock of seeing this kind of outrage, civilian outrage. It’s unforgivable, absolutely unforgivable in my book.

Morris Sunshine

I’m very bad—everybody’s taken me to task for this, including my wife, my kids. But if I heard German spoken by young people, anybody, my first reaction is this hate. I can feel it in the back of my head, you know, my hair standing up. Now, these people might be Jews, they might be Austrian Jews, and I have that. But my first emotion is the hate I have for the language and everything else.”

He’s been in therapy groups; no help. “They always come up to the same thing: you gotta forgive, and these children are really not responsible for what their parents didn’t do or did do. They’re showing me that’s really the right way, but that’s got nothing to do with my emotions. I still smell that, you see. In my head I understand that I’m crazy when it comes to this. But it’s there, you know, and I can’t forgive anybody for this kind of bestiality.”

When you talk with Morris, it becomes apparent that his anger is directed more at the civilians who lived near the camps and denied knowledge of them than at the Nazi officials themselves. “It was always the same response—that they didn’t know. ‘
Ich bin nicht ein Nazi.’
I am not a Nazi. And ‘I had to be part of the Hitler
Jugend,’
all that kind of stuff.
‘Ich bin kein Nazi.’
Might not be correct German, but, you know, it’s close enough for jazz.”

Jazz is probably what kept his hate from eating him alive. Sunshine went to music school when he got back home to New York, studying arranging with Eddie Sauter, who used to write for Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Ray McKinley, and Red Norvo. Eventually he began to teach music, and he began selling and repairing instruments. He married a girl he’d known in high school—they recently celebrated their sixty-second anniversary—and they had three kids.

And he told them about Nordhausen. He told everyone about Nordhausen. “Everybody I know knows that I opened up a concentration camp. That was like a banner that I used to walk around with. I always used to tell them, ‘Never mind what you see in pictures. The smell of death is the strongest odor in the world.’ And a massive smell, massive bodies, that odor sticks with you forever.”

So he can’t get rid of the smell—or the hate. But jazz has saved him. “Music is my love,” Morris says, “and that’s been passed down to the next generation. They play music, and we play together. I can sit down with the granddaughter, my daughter, my son, and we play. We swing. No greater force in the world.”

Manfred Steinfeld
Chicago, Illinois
WÖBBELIN

There’s no one size fits all with veterans on the matter of Germany or German people. Consider Manny Steinfeld. He was born in Germany; his mother and one brother were murdered by the Nazis just three weeks before he participated in the liberation of one of the camps. Yet he’s gone back to Germany and become a benefactor of the current residents of the little town he left as a young teenager.

Actually, Steinfeld has been back to Germany many times. The first was in the late 1950s, when he went to the furniture show in Cologne. “I drove through the town I was born in; I didn’t even stop. I didn’t want anything to do with them.” That’s how he felt even while acknowledging that there had been very little anti-Semitism in the town where he had lived until the age of fourteen.

In the year 2000, he was contacted by a young man from the town, about seventy miles north of Frankfurt, who told him he’d been working on dedicating a memorial to the three Jewish families from the town who had been killed by the Nazis—families whose roots went back two hundred years. The man wanted Steinfeld to speak at the dedication. He went and brought eleven people with him. After the dinner, which the town paid for, he said, “Now that you have done this, what can I do for the town?”

The town fathers said they needed a youth center, and after lengthy correspondence, Manny Steinfeld agreed to pay for it, provided it was named for his younger brother, who had been killed in Palestine. In 2007, the town held a memorial service and dedicated the new building, with a plaque that told the story of his brother’s short life in Germany.

On that same trip in 2000, Steinfeld paid a visit to the town of Ludwigslust, where he’d watched the funeral service for two hundred of the Wöbbelin victims at the end of the war. “I looked for the cemetery where we buried the two hundred bodies. No sign of the cemetery. Everything was gone.” He contacted an official of the Wöbbelin museum, who told him that all the wooden crosses they’d erected had been removed during the winter of 1948 and burned when no coal or other fuel was available. The town had been in what was then East Germany, and the government had seen to it that only a stone monument remained, dedicating the site to two hundred victims of National Socialism.

In addition to his personal experiences in postwar Germany, Steinfeld says he’s pleased that many towns with a population greater than 50,000 once again have Jews living in them, and he sees that as the Germans trying to make amends in some reasonable fashion. He also seems to take comfort in the fact that the new Berlin Holocaust Memorial and Jewish Museum is the most visited museum in the country today. “Are [these] all Germans and all young Germans who want to, maybe, clean their conscience?” he asks and then answers, “I don’t know.”

Despite his own history and his family’s tragic past, Manny Steinfeld seems willing to keep an open mind about today’s Germans. Nevertheless, he betrays a sense of caution by telling this story: “When Hitler passed the law that the middle name of any Jew is Israel or Sarah, they went back to all the birth records and added the middle names to all of them. Can you believe that? Dead or alive. And then, in 1947, when it was rescinded, they went back to make the changes again. But that’s the German mentality.”