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UNIT five: MARCHES AND LIBERATION TABLE OF CONTENTS learning objectives 3 SURVIVOR BIOGRAPHIES 4 classroom activities • Liberators 18 • Liberation 18 iwitness activities (downloadable mini lessons) • Death Marches 9 • Memory as an Historic Source – Liberation and Returning Home 11 text for teachers • Introduction 6 • Liberation 7 • Majdanek 7 • Auschwitz 9 • Bergen-Belsen 9 • Buchenwald 11 • The Generals 14 • The Chaplains 15 • The Survivors 15

2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES UNIT 5 LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Through survivor testimonies, students will:

1. Understand the historical events that led to the death marches

2. Trace the routes of the death marches

3. Understand why some camps were liberated before others

4. Recognize how the Allies and the press responded to the liberation of the camps

5. Explore the range of the survivors’ complex reactions to freedom

3 SURVIVOR BIOGRAPHIES

In this unit, students will have the opportunity to watch testimony from:

• Thomas Buergenthal, son of Menachem and Gerda (née Silbergleit), was born on May 11, 1934, in Ľubochňa, Czechoslovakia. His parents co-owned a hotel with Erich Godal, a famous political cartoonist. After Slovak soldiers took over the hotel, the family fled to Zilna, a nearby city; the family later fled to Poland. The Buergenthal’s planned to seek refuge in England, however, their plans were upended by the start of World War II. The family moved to Kielce, Poland, where they were put into a ghetto. They were later sent to work at a labor camp. In 1944, Thomas and his parents were deported to Auschwitz. Thomas was interned at Auschwitz until January 1945, when he was sent on a death march. Thomas was liberated by Soviet troops at Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in Germany, in April 1945. Menachem was died at Flossenburg, a concentration camp in Germany. Gerda survived . After the Holocaust, Thomas immigrated to the United States. He attended Bethany College and New York University Law School. Buergenthal went on to become a professor of law, dean of American University’s School of Law, one of the nation’s authorities on human rights, and the lone American judge on the International Court of Human Rights. He married twice and had three children. This interview was conducted on October 13, 1997, in Bethesda, Maryland.

• Katsugo Miho was born on May 15, 1922 in Kahului, Hawaii to first-generation Japanese immigrants. He was a student at the University of Hawaii in Oahu when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Katsugo’s father, a prominent member of the Japanese community in Hawaii, was taken as a and relocated to an camp until the war ended. Despite his anger towards his father’s treatment, Katsugo volunteered to be enlisted in an all-Japanese army unit. He was sent to training in , where he remembers experiencing anti-Japanese discrimination, as well as witnessing segregation in the South. Katsugo’s experience with seeing discrimination was far from over. His unit was shipped out to Europe in 1945, and they made their way from Italy to Germany, chasing out the remnants of the nearly-defeated German army. In April they reached Dachau, where they liberated the concentration camps. By the time they arrived, most camp prisoners were barely surviving, and Katsugo was deeply affected by the horrors he saw. In December, his unit was finally shipped home, after which he resumed his studies at the University of Hawaii. His father returned soon after. Katsugo went on to study law at George Washington University and practiced law in Hawaii with his brother. In 1959 he was elected as a member

4 of the Hawaii House of Representatives, and went on to work in the state judicial system. He met his wife Laura at the Veterans Administration, and went on to have four children. His experience in the war left him with an understanding of the same-ness of all people, a message he taught to his children. His interview took place on January 27, 1998 in Honolulu, HI.

• Leon Bass, son of Henry and Nancy, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 23, 1925. Leon had four brothers and one sister. In September 1943, Leon volunteered for the U.S. Army. Leon served in the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion; as a black soldier in a segregated unit he was treated like a second-class citizen. In April 1945, Leon’s unit helped with relief efforts at Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany. After the war, Leon enrolled at West Chester State Teachers College, where he again faced discrimination. After graduating from West Chester State College, he enrolled at Temple University, where he received a Doctorate. Leon became a teacher and a principal. He married Mary Sullivan in 1948, and the couple had two children and three grandchildren. This interview took place on August 12, 1998, in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Leon passed away on March 28, 2015. He was 90 years old.

5 TEXT FOR TEACHERS INTRODUCTION

Death Marches is the term that was given by prison inmates to the forced evacuation on foot of concentration and slave labor camps in the winter of 1944-45, later retained by historians.

MAP: Major Death Marches and Evacuations, 1944-1945

MAP: Major Death Marches from Auschwitz

In the winter of 1944–45, the Germans knew they had lost the war. As the Allied armies closed in on the —the Soviets from the East, and the British and Americans from the West— desperate SS officials made a frantic attempt to evacuate the camps. They wanted no eyewitnesses to remain when the camps were overrun, and therefore a concerted effort was made to conceal the crimes that had been committed. The concentration camps were dismantled or abandoned. But Germany still needed slave labor and more time to complete the “.” The inmates of the camps were moved westward in the dead of winter, forced to march toward Germany’s heartland.

IWitness Watch Page – Liberators

In January 17, 1945, just ten days before the Soviet Army arrived at Auschwitz, approximately 66,000 prisoners were marched to Wodzisław, where they were put on freight trains to the Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen concentration camps. Almost one in four died en route to the camps in Germany and . On January 20, 7,000 6,000 of them women were marched from Stutthof’s satellite camps in the Danzig region. In the course of a ten-day march, 700 were murdered.

The surviving marchers who reached the shores of the Baltic Sea were driven into the sea and shot. There were only thirteen known survivors.

These were by no means the first death marches. In 1941, hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war had been herded along the highways of the and Belorussia, from one camp to another. Romanians joined the Germans as Jews from and Bukovina were marched to Transnistria. Thousands died en route. In 1942 Polish Jews were marched from small ghettos to larger ghettos in Poland, only to be transported from there

6 to the death camps.

In 1944, , the SS official in charge of the deportation of European Jewry, was eager to deport Hungarian Jews. He could not wait for the trains to arrive in Budapest. On November 8, a death march began; tens of thousands of men, women, and children were marched to the Austrian border. Many died en route from , cold, and exhaustion. Anyone who could not keep up was shot. The march lasted one month. Those tenacious enough to survive were sent to Dachau and Mauthausen.

IWitness Connection – Meet Thomas Buergenthal Thomas recalls being taken on a death march out of Auschwitz.

There were 59 different marches from concentration camps during the final winter of Nazi domination, some covering hundreds of miles. The prisoners were given little or no food and water, and hardly any time to rest or take care of basic bodily functions. Those who paused or fell behind were shot. Many reached the point of utter exhaustion, and collapsed.

In his work, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, noted Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen describes the death marches as “the ambulatory equivalent of the cattle car.” The antithesis of deportations, which for two and half years brought Jews to centralized killing centers, this method of dispersion sent them off along in various paths toward Germany which, on the brink of defeat, was taking back the Jews it had once so proudly expelled.

IWitness Watch Page – Liberation

LIBERATION

MAJDANEK

Soviet soldiers were the first to liberate a concentration camp. On July 23, 1944, Soviet troops arrived at Majdanek, a death camp outside the Polish city of Lublin. As the Soviet Army advanced to the outskirts of Lublin, the SS hastened to hide, bury, and burn the evidence of their crimes. They simply ran out of time.

7 The soldiers were shocked by what they saw. Press coverage was intense. Roman Karman, a well-known Soviet correspondent, filed this report on August 21, 1944:

In the course of my travels into liberated territory I have never seen a more abominable sight than Majdanek near Lublin, Hitler’s notorious Vernichtungslager [“”], where more than half a million European men, women, and children were massacred. . . . This is not a concentration camp; it is a gigantic plant.

Save for the 1,000 living corpses the found alive when it entered, no inmate escaped alive. Yet full trains daily brought thousands from all parts of Europe to be coldly, brutally massacred.

In the center of the camp stands a huge stone building with a factory chimney—the world’s biggest crematorium. . . . The gas chambers contained some 250 people at a time. They were closely packed . . . so that after they suffocated they remained standing. . . . It is difficult to believe it myself but human eyes cannot deceive me. . . .

The Illustrated London News apologized for twelve photographs published in October 1944. It was not the paper’s custom, it noted

to publish photographs of atrocities, but in view of the fact that the enormity of the crimes perpetrated by the Germans is so wicked that our readers, to whom such behavior is unbelievable, may think the reports of such crimes exaggerated or due to propaganda, we consider it necessary to present them, by means of the accompanying photographs, with irrefutable proof of the organized murder of between 600,000 and 1,000,000 helpless persons at the Majdanek Camp near Lublin. And even these pictures are carefully selected from a number, some of which are too horrible to reproduce. . . .

The story as it stands is almost incredible in its bestiality, but German cruelty went further still at Majdanek. Prisoners too ill to walk into the camp . . . were dragged alive to the furnaces and thrust in alongside the dead.

Documentary films were shot and distributed for viewing in the West.

During the summer of 1944, Soviet forces also came upon Bełżec, Treblinka, and Sobibór, the killing centers that had been closed a year earlier when the annihilation of Polish Jews was virtually complete. The SS had dismantled the three camps and turned them into farms. At Bełżec, pine trees had also been planted to conceal the camp. Still, soldiers found bones protruding from the ground.

8 IWitness Activity – Death Marches

AUSCHWITZ

On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces entered Auschwitz. The camp’s last roll call had been taken on January 17: 67,012 prisoners were counted.

Most of them were sent out on death marches. Only those too ill to walk remained. During the next ten days, Auschwitz was frantically dismantled. Crematoria buildings were blown up. SS documents and I.G. Farben corporate records were destroyed. Dr. , the SS physician who conducted horrific “experiments” on Auschwitz inmates, most especially twins, left for Berlin, carrying his “scientific” research on twins with him. He thought that they would be the key to his prominence and academic career in the post-Auschwitz world. Twenty-nine storerooms were burned. In the six storerooms that remained, the Soviets discovered 348,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats, more than seven tons of human hair, and even 13,964 carpets.

BERGEN-BELSEN

The British liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. The camp had been ravaged by a typhus epidemic. Thousands of bodies lay unburied, rotting in the sun. Sixty thousand prisoners were still alive, many of them in critical condition. Thirteen thousand of the newly liberated inmates died in the first weeks of freedom, despite valiant efforts by British doctors to save them.

Even for inmates who arrived on death marches from Auschwitz-Birkenau, a site of massive killing, conditions in Bergen-Belsen were severe. In Anne Frank: The Last Seven Months, Rachel van Amerongen-Frankfoorder, who was with Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen, recalled:

The period in Bergen-Belsen was certainly the most wretched. You knew so little about how the war was going; you didn’t know how long it would last, and because of the illness you were convinced that death was lying in wait.

You saw death, you noticed it so much more than in Birkenau, where the people who were going downhill simply disappeared. . . You got weaker. Especially when I got typhus, I would think, this is it; this is the end.

In her oral history given to the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lilly Appelbaum Malnik concurred. At Auschwitz there were well-planned facilities for . But Bergen-Belsen was different. “Bergen-Belsen was nothing but dead people. . . . They piled them up as they died. They just piled them up like a mountain.”

9 The infrastructure of the concentration camps simply collapsed under the strain of a significant increase in prisoners and the difficulty of securing supplies as the front in Germany was collapsing. As the British entered, the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, greeted his conquerors in a fresh uniform. He expressed his desire for an orderly transition and his hopes of collaborating with the British. He dealt with them as equals, one officer to another, even offering advice as to how to deal with the “unpleasant” situation. Derrick Sington, a junior British officer, toured the camp with Kramer. At the , Sington recalled a conversation he had with Kramer on that tour: “You’ve made a fine hell here.” Kramer responded, “It has become one in the last few days.” But the ruse could not last for long.

British officer Peter Coombs wrote his wife of the appalling conditions at Bergen-Belsen:

One has to take a tour round and see their faces, their slow staggering gait and feeble movements. The state of their minds is plainly written on their faces, as starvation has reduced their bodies to skeletons. The fact is that all these were once clean-living and sane. . . . They are Jews and are dying at the rate of three hundred a day. They must die and nothing can save them—their end is inescapable, they are too far gone now to be brought back to life.

I saw their corpses lying near their hovels, for they crawl or totter out into the sunlight to die. I watched them make their last feeble journeys, and even as I watched they died.

The uncontrollable epidemic was so lethal that the camp had to be burned down. Former inmates were moved to a Panzer tank corps school two miles down the road, which became the site of a displaced-person’s camp. The British were horrified by what they found. Mass graves were dug, bulldozers were brought to shovel in the dead. Local civilians were marched into the camp. They, too, were taken on a tour. Before they began their visit, the colonel in charge of medical efforts spoke to them. The colonel’s remarks were recorded by the BBC:

You must realize that according to those wretched victims who experienced other camps, this camp was in some respects one of the better ones. Chiefly because in this camp it was possible in most cases, though not in all, to die fairly quietly from hunger or typhus. In certain other camps, the inmates were done to death and hurled into massive graves, sometimes before they were dead…

What you will see here is the final and utter condemnation of the Nazi Party. It justifies every measure the will take to exterminate that party. What you will see here is such a disgrace to the German people that their names must be erased from the list of civilized nations...

It is your lot to begin the hard task of restoring the name of the German people. . . But this cannot be done until you have reared a new generation amongst whom it is impossible to find people prepared to commit such crimes; until you have reared a

10 new generation possessing the instinctive good will to prevent a repetition of such horrible cruelties.

The films taken by the were broadcast throughout the world and formed indelible images of the Holocaust and the name Bergen-Belsen.

In , 44 members of the Bergen-Belsen staff were tried. Eleven, including Commandant Kramer, were executed that December.

BUCHENWALD

American troops entered Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. The SS had left hours earlier, so inmates had taken over the camp when the Americans entered. Only a few days before the Americans arrived, 25,000 prisoners had been taken out of the camp. Many did not survive.

IWitness Activity Memory as an Historical Source - Liberation and Returning Home

Edward R. Murrow, the preeminent broadcast newscaster of his generation, reported on his visit to Buchenwald on April 12th.

He warned his audience:

Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio, for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald.

It is on a small hill about four miles outside Weimar, and it was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. And it was built to last.

When I reached the center of the barracks, a man came up and said, ‘You remember me; I’m Peter Zenkl, one-time mayor of Prague.’ I remembered him but did not recognize him. He asked about Benes and Jan Masaryk.

I asked how many men had died in that building during the last month. They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in the little black book, nothing more. Nothing of who these men were, what they had done or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died there was a cross. I counted them.

11 They totaled 242 – 242 out of 1,200 in one month.

As I walked down to the end of the barracks, there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand clapping of babies, they were so weak.

In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeve, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm – D6030 it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die.

We went to the hospital; it was full. The doctor told me that 200 had died the day before. I asked the ; he shrugged and said, ‘Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult.’ Dr. Heller pulled back the blankets from a man’s feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move.

As I left that camp, a Frenchman who used to work for Havas in Paris came up to me and said, ‘You will write something about this perhaps?’ And he added, ‘to write about this you must have been here at least two years. And after that, you don’t want to write anymore.’

He beseeched his audience to believe him: “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it; for most of it I have no words.

Murrow ended his broadcast by stating, “If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry.”

Americans liberated other camps in April: Nordhausen, Ohrdruf, Dora-Mittelbau, Landsberg, Wöbbelin, Gunskirchen, Ebensee, and Flossenbürg. Among the soldiers entering Nazi concentration camps were Japanese Americans whose families were incarcerated in internment camps in the United States, Katsugo Miho was among them.

IWitness Connection – Meet Katsugo Miho Katsugo remembers liberating a sub-camp of Dachau.

12 Leon Bass, an African-American who served in the military in a segregated unit recounted his experience when he entered Buchenwald days after liberation.

IWitness Connection – Meet Leon Bass Leon reflects on the liberation of Buchenwald.

Bill Barrett, an army journalist, described the liberation of Dachau in the 45th Division News:

It was late afternoon—about 4 p.m.—as the men made their way down the tracks. They knew that the camp ahead was guarded by SS troops and that they expected a hard fight. And like all men going into an attack, be they rookies or vets, these men were afraid.

They picked up the clawing stink before they reached the first boxcar. They stopped and stared and the dead stared back.

There were about a dozen bodies in the dirty boxcar, men and women alike. They had gone without food so long that their dead wrists were broomsticks tipped with claws. These were the victims of a deliberate starvation diet, and they weren’t pretty.

The men looked, then shuffled on to the new car in silence. There were more dead eyes here staring out at the German houses not 200 yards from the tracks.

Someone broke the stillness with a curse and then with a roar the men started for the camp on the double.

“I never saw anything like it,” Lieutenant Moyer said later. The men were plain fighting mad. They went down that road without any regard for cover or concealment. No one was afraid, not after those boxcars. We were just mad.

Barrett concluded his front-page report, “Dachau Gives Answer to Why We Fought,” with the words: “The stink of death has seeped into the ground with the blood of the murdered and Dachau must remain forever a blot on German history.”

Fred Friendly, a young Jewish GI, who later went on at CBS to a pioneering role in American broadcasting in the early days of television went into Mauthausen as a correspondent, wrote to his mother and said:

I saw the living skeletons, some of whom regardless of our medical corps work, will die and be in piles like that in the next few days. Malnutrition doesn’t stop the day that food is administered. Don’t get the idea that these people here were all

13 derelicts, all just masses of people... some of them were doctors, authors, some of them American citizens. A scattered few were G.I.s. A Navy lieutenant still lives to tell the story. I saw where they lived; I saw where the sick died, three and four in a bed, no toilets, no nothing.

He understood that his mother might have difficulty believing what he described:

This was Mauthausen. I want you to remember the word... I want you to know, I want you to never forget or let our disbelieving friends forget, that your flesh and blood saw this. This was no movie. No printed page. Your son saw this with his own eyes and in doing this aged 10 years.

The American-born son of Jewish immigrants from Europe, Friendly was clearly aware of the fate that he avoided because his parents had immigrated. He closed his letter by saying, “For, if there had been no America, we, all of us, might well have carried granite at Mauthausen.”

In his oral testimony given to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, William Levine, another young Jewish GI remembered his first encounter:

You can’t describe in any language that scene. …They were not only dirty, filthy, but how the men -- the condition they were in -- they were actually skin and bone. … it’s just an impossible thing to look at. The hollow -- their eyes were into their heads. They weren’t just eyes that were on the surface. The skin was tight against their skull and a sallow complexion -- everything told you that they had to be miserable for a long time.

Many of the men just threw up. Some cried. Some vented their spleen by firing into the guards that were still present.

American soldiers wanted to feed the emaciated prisoners thinking it was an act of kindness.

The Generals

On April 12, 1945, Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George Patton toured Ordruf, a satellite camp of Buchenwald. Eisenhower remarked, “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he was fighting for,” Now, at least he will know what he is fighting against.” Later, Eisenhower wrote to Chief of Staff General George Marshall:

The things I saw beggar description...The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering.... I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegation to propaganda.

14 General Bradley wrote about the day: “The smell of death overwhelmed us.” George Patton was overcome. He refused to enter a room where the bodies of naked men who had starved to death were piled, saying “he would get sick if he did so.” But he was also so outraged that he ordered that the town of Weimar be marched through Buchenwald, a concentration camp just four miles from its center.

The Chaplains

It was not only soldiers and journalists who witnessed the human devastation. Jewish chaplains were among the troops entering the camps. US Army Chaplain Eli A. Bohnen, the first rabbi to enter Dachau after liberation, was unprepared for what he found. In a letter to his wife in Providence, RI, he struggled to express the scene:

Nothing you can put into 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. We saw freight cars with bodies in them. The people had been transported from one camp to another, and it had taken about a month for the train to make the trip. In all of that time they had not been fed. They were lying in grotesque positions, just as they had died…We entered the camp and saw the living. 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 Heimberg (my assistant) 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… I shall never forget what I saw, and in my nightmares the scenes recur. When I got back I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t muster enough energy to write you.

No possible punishment would ever repay the ones who were responsible ....

The Survivors

For the survivors, the moment of liberation was a mixture of hope and fear. At a 1981 conference for liberators, Hadassah Bimko, who had lost her husband and son at Auschwitz and organized medical efforts at Bergen-Belsen, remembered:

For the great part of the liberated Jews of Bergen-Belsen, there was no ecstasy, no joy at our liberation. We had lost our families, our homes. We had no place to go, nobody to hug, nobody who was waiting for us, anywhere. We had been liberated from death and from the fear of death, but we were not free from the fear of life.

15 Still, there was joy. In her memoir, Playing for Time, Fania Fenelon wrote of the last day at Bergen-Belsen:

A new life was breathed into the camps. Jeeps, command cars, and half tracks drove among the barracks. Khaki uniforms abounded. . . . Our liberators were well fed and bursting with health, and they moved among our skeletal silhouettes like surges of life. We felt an absurd desire to finger them, to let our hands trail to their eddies as in the Fountain of Youth. . . . These men seemed not to know that one could live in slow motion, that energy was something you saved.

That evening of April 15, Fenelon slept in the abandoned SS quarters. “A table, and chairs, a clean floor and water—all you needed to do was turn on the tap. Everything we had been made to suffer,” she wrote, “seemed to have sullied us. Lying in the SS sheets, we cried with happiness.”

“For us,” she concluded, “there will be an after.” Still, that very same evening, some died of overeating.

The soldiers had been generous with sweets, chocolate, and candy. Their generosity had been lethal.

Liberation was incomprehensible. In Survival at Auschwitz, Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi recalled:

The breach in the barbed wire gave us a concrete image of it. To anyone who stopped to think, it signified no more Germans, no more selections, no work, no blows, no roll calls, and, perhaps, later, the return.

But we had to make an effort to convince ourselves of it, and no one had time to enjoy the thought.

All around lay destruction and death.

Viktor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist who pioneered existential analysis, wrote of liberation in Man’s Search for Meaning:

Timidly, we looked around and glanced at each other questioningly. Then we ventured a few steps out of the camp. This time no orders were shouted at us, nor was there any need to duck quickly to avoid a blow or a kick.

“Freedom”—we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it.

Frankl remembered the inability to feel. “We did not yet belong to this world.” He described it as depersonalization. “Everything was unreal, unlikely, as in a dream.” Only later—and for some it was much later or never—was liberation actually liberating. “The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that after all he has suffered there is nothing he need fear any more—except his God.”

16 Frankl recalls a conversation from the evening of his liberation:

In the evening when we all met again in our hut, one said secretly to the other, “Tell me were you pleased today.”

And the other replied feeling ashamed as he did not know that we all felt similarly. “Truthfully no!” We had literally lost our ability to feel pleased and we had to relearn it slowly.

Some survivors felt empty, even guilty that they had survived while so many others had not. Others felt nothing. Israel Lau was just eight years old when he was liberated from Buchenwald. Lau, who would become Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, told of his meeting with an American Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Herschel Schacter, on April 11, 1945

In my eyes he was just another person, wearing a different kind of uniform. He jumped out of the jeep, took me in his arms, weeping. I was so frightened, he started to laugh, to smile.

“How old are you, my child?” he asked.

“What difference does it make, I’m older than you,” I answered.

“Why do you think you are older than me?” he asked.

“Because you cry and laugh as a child. And I stopped laughing and I can’t even cry. So I must be older than you.”

For the first time, survivors could permit themselves a moment of feeling that overcame their numbness, which was essential to their survival.

Norbert Wollheim, giving testimony to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, recalled:

“The world was celebrating. The French were dancing, we couldn’t dance we had no right to dance. So that was the moment of tremendous elation but also tremendous sadness. We were grateful to the Allies for liberating us but we were alone -- individually alone.

Only with liberation could one remember those who had been lost. I realized I was alone. I was certain my parents were gone, my family was gone.

17 CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES LIBERATORS

After students watch testimony from a liberator, have them answer the following questions:

1. Listen to the testimony of the liberators who describe what they saw and how they felt when they liberated the concentration camps. What was their reaction? Are there commonalities?

2. What traits do you think they needed to help survivors at this stage? (for example, bravery, empathy). How do you see this in their description of liberation.

LIBERATION

Have students watch testimony about liberation. Ask them to answer the following question:

3. What stands out to you about the way the survivors describe liberation? Describe their physical state. Describe Emotional State.

18