Read Online The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Michael Hirsh
Tags: History, Psychology, 20th Century, Holocaust, Modern, Psychopathology, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
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young boy, so I wasn’t that familiar with it, but I know that there was.” In June, Limor left Buchenwald, which had been converted to a displaced persons (DP) camp after liberation, after his brother, who had been liberated in Poland, found him. They went to Hamburg and from there to Israel, where he was one of the first soldiers in the nascent Israeli army. He settled in the United States in 1969 with his wife, Leah, also a Buchenwald survivor, and their three children.
At about three in the afternoon on April 11, the day the fourteen-year-old Menachem Lipshitz was watching American tanks approach the main camp, Staff Sergeant Robert Burrows and his driver, Ben, were in their jeep, scouting ahead of the 2nd Battalion, 317th Infantry Regiment, of the 80th Infantry Division. It was a lightly overcast day, and they were driving through the slight rolling hills. To their right was a grassy meadow, but on a rise to the left they could see a camp, fenced with barbed wire, with a building right next to the gate. “This gate was here,” he says, gesturing with his hands, “and these fellows were standing to the left. Two POWs in their striped uniforms. Just standing there, watching me. They didn’t move. Just had their hands on the wire like they were resting, just like this. Both of ‘em. And I thought it was strange, but I didn’t want to be bothered, to be honest with you. I had things on my mind. I was supposed to be out scouting ahead of the battalion, and if I run into anything to let ‘em know [by radio]. But I went up to the front of this office building—it had a walk-in door—here. I didn’t go in the gate. The gate was closed. It was on the left side of the administration building. It said, ‘Arbeit macht frei.’” (The phrase, loosely translated as “Work will make you free” or “Work will liberate you,” was displayed on or above the entryway of many of the Nazi concentration camps.)
Burrows continues, “I went up to the door, and it opened. Nobody inside, nothing. And I went to the office, to the back end, looked out the back end. There were single-story barracks buildings. I didn’t see anybody. I didn’t go out; I didn’t investigate. I couldn’t have done anything anyway by myself. So I walked back out and told Ben, ‘I don’t see anything there. Let’s go.’ And so I did.
“I thought it was strange, you know, but that’s the way it was.” Not long afterward he put two and two together and figured that the people in striped uniforms who he knew were creating havoc and looting in nearby Weimar had been imprisoned in this small, anonymous camp.
There were a lot of things that PFC Clarence Brockman found to be strange about the Army and the war. He was twenty-two and driving a truck in Pennsylvania when he was drafted. Brockman was assigned to the 80th Infantry Division, the Blue Ridge, right out of basic training. He was a private first class and stayed one until he went back to civilian life in October 1945. He went to war aboard the Queen Mary , crossing the Atlantic in less than six days. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg, freezing his butt off but making it through with nothing worse than a hunk of Krupp steel shrapnel in one finger—a souvenir he can still feel.
Talking with Brockman today, you find a man with a cockeyed sense of humor and a ready smile. He was like that during the war, but with a hard edge. During the Bulge, he remembers, there were bad things “about us and them too. You didn’t want to take a prisoner back in that snow ‘cause you’ve got to walk them down to the PW camp and walk back. You took ‘em over the hill and shot ‘em. And there was quite a few of them was shot. On both sides. More so on their side than our side. Because the order came down, we’re to take prisoners now. No more shootin’ ‘em. Take prisoners. So there you are.”
His comments are more than just a suggestion that the rules of the Geneva Conventions were
At about three in the afternoon on April 11, the day the fourteen-year-old Menachem Lipshitz was watching American tanks approach the main camp, Staff Sergeant Robert Burrows and his driver, Ben, were in their jeep, scouting ahead of the 2nd Battalion, 317th Infantry Regiment, of the 80th Infantry Division. It was a lightly overcast day, and they were driving through the slight rolling hills. To their right was a grassy meadow, but on a rise to the left they could see a camp, fenced with barbed wire, with a building right next to the gate. “This gate was here,” he says, gesturing with his hands, “and these fellows were standing to the left. Two POWs in their striped uniforms. Just standing there, watching me. They didn’t move. Just had their hands on the wire like they were resting, just like this. Both of ‘em. And I thought it was strange, but I didn’t want to be bothered, to be honest with you. I had things on my mind. I was supposed to be out scouting ahead of the battalion, and if I run into anything to let ‘em know [by radio]. But I went up to the front of this office building—it had a walk-in door—here. I didn’t go in the gate. The gate was closed. It was on the left side of the administration building. It said, ‘Arbeit macht frei.’” (The phrase, loosely translated as “Work will make you free” or “Work will liberate you,” was displayed on or above the entryway of many of the Nazi concentration camps.)
Burrows continues, “I went up to the door, and it opened. Nobody inside, nothing. And I went to the office, to the back end, looked out the back end. There were single-story barracks buildings. I didn’t see anybody. I didn’t go out; I didn’t investigate. I couldn’t have done anything anyway by myself. So I walked back out and told Ben, ‘I don’t see anything there. Let’s go.’ And so I did.
“I thought it was strange, you know, but that’s the way it was.” Not long afterward he put two and two together and figured that the people in striped uniforms who he knew were creating havoc and looting in nearby Weimar had been imprisoned in this small, anonymous camp.
There were a lot of things that PFC Clarence Brockman found to be strange about the Army and the war. He was twenty-two and driving a truck in Pennsylvania when he was drafted. Brockman was assigned to the 80th Infantry Division, the Blue Ridge, right out of basic training. He was a private first class and stayed one until he went back to civilian life in October 1945. He went to war aboard the Queen Mary , crossing the Atlantic in less than six days. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg, freezing his butt off but making it through with nothing worse than a hunk of Krupp steel shrapnel in one finger—a souvenir he can still feel.
Talking with Brockman today, you find a man with a cockeyed sense of humor and a ready smile. He was like that during the war, but with a hard edge. During the Bulge, he remembers, there were bad things “about us and them too. You didn’t want to take a prisoner back in that snow ‘cause you’ve got to walk them down to the PW camp and walk back. You took ‘em over the hill and shot ‘em. And there was quite a few of them was shot. On both sides. More so on their side than our side. Because the order came down, we’re to take prisoners now. No more shootin’ ‘em. Take prisoners. So there you are.”
His comments are more than just a suggestion that the rules of the Geneva Conventions were
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