The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (34 page)

Butt has another memory as well. “I got the smell. There was a stockyard area between Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas, and it was a stink that you noticed as you drove by. It just plain stunk, and I made the statement that I couldn’t see how people could live in that area. While we were there, they brought people in from the city of Dachau itself and took them through. And they didn’t know anything like that was going on.” The look of disgust on his face says it all.

Corporal Eli Heimberg was a twenty-eight-year-old assistant to the 42nd Division’s Jewish chaplain when Dachau was liberated. He’d gotten the job because he could sort of play the organ, and the brand-new chaplain, Captain Eli A. Bohnen, was desperate for a reasonably observant Jew who could drive a jeep, pour wine into a Kiddush cup, and handle an M-1—sequentially, not simultaneously. They were in Salzburg when word came to them about Dachau, and they immediately drove to the camp to try to minister to surviving Jewish prisoners. The South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, veteran, now in his early nineties, says, “I remember very vividly, it remains as a nightmare sometimes. Crossing the moat on a bridge, enough for one car at a time. And on the other side of the bridge, several big piles of clothing. Lots of clothing. Quite a few piles about three feet high and ten feet square.” He also saw shoes piled fifteen feet high.

They were very quiet driving through the gate, just observing. They found someone to direct them to what he calls “the Jewish section.” That may have been just one or two barracks, because at liberation, there were just 2,539 Jews, including 225 women, out of a population of just over 31,000.

Heimberg says, “Chaplain Bohnen announced in Yiddish,
‘Ich bin ein amerikaner Rabbiner.’
At that moment, it was as if all the pent-up emotions of the years in misery were unleashed in that room. There was a burst of wailing and crying. We stood there for a moment, unsuccessfully trying to control our emotions as the victims, who were able to, surged forward to kiss our feet and hug our hands. I felt humble and uncomfortable, for it was I who should have been hugging and kissing them.”

The first group they found didn’t number more than twenty-five, many of whom said they had relatives in the United States and wanted the chaplain to contact them. “People said, ‘Look, just ask for—he lives in New York, my uncle. His name is Sam Cohen. You’ll find him.’ So we took the names anyway, and where we could get a telephone number, we’d take a phone number.”

The Jews they met with were Polish and had come from other camps. He remembers them talking about Bergen-Belsen in Germany and Birkenau, part of Auschwitz, in Poland. And after just talking with the survivors, Rabbi Bohnen held a brief memorial service, chanting the traditional memorial prayer, El Moleh Rachamim, as the newly freed inmates sobbed.

The next day, Chaplain Bohnen wrote a letter to his wife, Eleanor, describing the experience. “Nothing you can put in words would adequately describe what I saw there. The human mind refuses to believe what the eyes see. All the stories of Nazi horrors are underestimated rather than exaggerated….

“The Jews were the worst off. Many of them looked worse than the dead. They cried as they saw us. I spoke to a large group of Jews. I don’t remember what I said, I was under such mental strain, but Heim berg tells me that they cried as I spoke. Some of the people were crying all the time we were there. They were emaciated, diseased, beaten, miserable caricatures of human beings. I don’t know how they didn’t all go mad. There were thousands and thousands of prisoners in the camp … and as I said, the Jews were the worst. Even the other prisoners who suffered miseries themselves couldn’t get over the horrible treatment meted out to the Jews. I shall never forget what I saw, and in my nightmares the scenes recur…. No possible punishment would ever repay the ones who were responsible.”

Chicagoan Morris Eisenstein had already earned two Silver Stars for gallantry with the 42nd Division by the time his outfit got to Dachau. But the concentration camp terrified him in ways that combat did not. Now ninety-one years old and dealing with the aftereffects of a severe stroke, the Delray Beach, Florida, resident remembers walking into the prisoner compound and being swallowed up by 10,000 or more people. “I figured I’ve got to identify myself, so I fired a clip up in the air to quiet everybody down, and I remembered a prayer I learned in Hebrew school. I said to them,
‘Barukh attah Adonai eloheinu melekh ha-olam, shehecheyanu v’kiyemanu v’higianu laz’man hazeh.’
It’s the Shehecheyanu prayer, said on special occasions, that translates as ‘Blessed art thou, Lord our God, Master of the universe, who has kept us alive and sustained us and has brought us to this special time.’
”

The prayer had the desired effect. Eisenstein—they called him Ike—says the prisoners began whispering in Yiddish,
“Ehr ist ein Yid”
(He’s a Jew), a reaction of surprise that was common at liberation. After talking with him in Yiddish for a while, some of the prisoners took Eisenstein on a tour of the camp. As he was about to leave, he stumbled over a man who was sitting on the ground. “He looked like he was dying, he looked like he was dead, and I didn’t know what to do, so I figured maybe I can help him out. I wanted to make sure that he stays there, because I knew our rear echelon had medics and everybody else would be coming up soon. I said to him,
‘Ich bin amerikaner yiddisher
Soldat,’ and he looked at me.

Morris Eisenstein outside his Florida home, proudly wearing his Jewish War Veterans cap displaying his two Silver Stars and Combat Infantryman Badge
.

“At that time, I got down on my knees next to him, and in my pocket I had about twenty thousand marks. We killed some SS in a firefight the week before, and we got some loot. I took it out and I put it in his hand. And he grabbed my hand, and he said to me in Yiddish, ‘I cannot take this. It’s not proper. I must give you something in return.’ Here’s a man who was absolutely emaciated, just about dead. You think philosophically about what he just said. So I kept looking at the Star of David pinned to his uniform, and he saw me looking. He unhooked the pin and gave me the star.” Eisenstein left Dachau in tears. That star is now on display at the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, D.C.

Dallas Peyton came to Dachau with the 70th Armored Infantry of the 20th Armored Division and is more than a bit cynical about the ongoing battle of who got there first, the 42nd, the 45th, or the 20th. He’s clear that the three divisions had elements that hit the concentration camp at roughly the same time, certainly on the same day. He’s also clear that the argument will end when there’s only one man left standing who can claim the honor because there’ll be nobody else to argue about it.

Peyton has blocked out most of what happened at Dachau on April 29, except for two things that he’s seen in his mind’s eye for the last sixty-five years. “One of them was that train. At first I thought it was people in there, and then I realized, no, that’s not people. They’re just thrown in there like little logs. I don’t know what I thought. Shock beyond belief. And the other’s when we got inside the camp and saw two of what I call ‘walking skeletons’ shuffling along, one in front of me and the other coming towards us. And those two guys stopped, stared at each other for a few minutes, then screamed and ran together, hugging, kissing, hollering, and crying. Up until that moment, neither knew the other was still alive, and I can see that right now.”

As darkness settled over Dachau, Jim Dorris and the men of Company A of the 222nd Regiment were told that they would be spending the night inside the SS garrison barracks, in the building where the on-duty SS guards had eaten and slept. Dorris says the building was about seventy-five yards inside the main gate, and their cook had come in to prepare a big meal for the American troops. “The building had a nice kitchen in it,” Dorris recalls, “and a big part of it had bunks. Everybody was just kind of numb from what we’d seen. You couldn’t describe. I mean, everybody had seen something so bad that they just didn’t want to talk. We just sat there eating and not saying a whole lot.

“After we ate—we’d had a hard day of it—we went in and picked out different bunks. They all looked like maybe the guards had been awakened, hearing that we were coming, and they’d just thrown the covers back and jumped up and took off to resist us or whatever they did. And I remember getting in that bunk and thinking, ‘What kind of guy was laying here in this bunk last night?’ I thought about that for quite a while.”

APRIL 30, 1945
DACHAU, GERMANY

B
y the next morning, other outfits had come in, bringing food and medical care for the prisoners. Dorris’s company got something to eat around dawn and then loaded onto tanks and headed for Munich, about fifteen miles away. They expected a battle but were surprised. “The people were lined up on both sides, cheering us, and we were completely taken aback by that. That was the first time we’d had that happen, but they were giving us bottles of champagne and throwing flowers on us. And we were wondering how much they knew about what was going on out there at Dachau.”

Jim Dorris never had a chance to find out. He’d made it through the war with nothing more than some minor shrapnel wounds, but while he was sitting in a house with three of his buddies, one of them pulled out a .38 revolver, gave the cylinder a twirl, and pulled the trigger. The bullet went into the top of Dorris’s leg and out the back, leaving powder burns. The guy with the gun asked if he’d shot him, and Dorris claims that all he said was “Hell, yes!” He was taken to the hospital, where they took his clothes. The cigarette butt in the can that he’d been given by the Dachau prisoner was in a pocket. He never saw it again.

Dee Eberhart was also one of the 42nd Division guys riding tanks on their way from Dachau to Munich. It was a memorable morning, not only because of what they had left behind at Dachau, but because the ugliness continued. “We were in the outskirts of Munich, and I was on this lead tank, nobody ahead of us, and maybe three or four other guys on the tank, and here was a German soldier who was running straight down the street, maybe a block ahead of us. And behind him, pounding along, was not one of the emaciated prisoners but one of the blue-and-white prisoners, a husky guy, and he caught that German and tackled him and then kicked him to death before we got there. And here was the tank with machine guns pointed forward and all of us with rifles, we didn’t raise a damn hand, not a hand. We saw this premeditated murder, killed him dead. And that guy was just a bundle of dead rags when our tank rumbled by, and the other guy was standing around, looking at the man he’d just killed. So there was a lot of residual violence, on both sides, during that day.”

New Yorker Jerome Klein was part of the 48th Tank Battalion of the 14th Armored Division when, on April 30, his outfit was told they were being taken to see a most unusual sight. The sight was the concentration camp at Dachau, and, just as he had with Ohrdruf and Buchenwald, Eisenhower had ordered that as many American soldiers as possible should be given time to see the horrors firsthand.