…They had one of the final pushes, over through Germany, and we were diverted to go to the northern part of Germany on a place on the Elbe River in a town called Ludwigslust. There we met the Russians. There, and I’ll never forget this, we liberated a concentration camp…We came into this camp, it wasn’t a camp that burned bodies, it wasn’t a camp of that type. It was a starvation type camp. They weren’t all Jews, they were mostly non-Jews, men from different parts of the world who were captured by the Germans and were being treated so. But the main thing is we came across these barracks. And you could see eight to ten bodies on top of each other, and to this day I can smell what we saw, and I can see…their eyes blinking, and we know there’s nothing we can do to them, for them, because their bodies were just wasted away. You see it in the papers, you see it in the movies, but it’s unbelievable. And I talk to you now I can still smell and feel what I saw. It was horrible. The next day we had the town people dig up the town in trenches. We had the population, we told them they must go or else to see what…to see these concentration camps.
Little by little, our generation is going. And the worst thing that I hate is the
remembrance of the Holocaust, of the horror.
People like myself, who saw and felt will be gone. Because I have heard
so much…some people saying that this didn’t happen. It’s an imaginary type of thing, and I think that this is
absolutely wrong. I know it’s wrong, I
was there. My mother worked, I told you
she worked as a volunteer at New Haven for the soldiers there. When I sent pictures to them, one of them
had the guts to say, whatever you want to call it, this is propaganda. [points to himself] I took the pictures, and
they call this propaganda. I mean, how
some people reacted to stuff…even to this day there are people that don’t
believe this happened. And when you see
these bodies, and I can still see the blinking eyes, and still smell this, I
say, I know what was real.
Now, we were a Depression group. And…funnily, you may laugh at this, we never
felt that we were poor. We would go out
with the Fresh Air Fund to collect money for the poor people, not realizing we
were the poor people.
And just after the war, you were saying, when I
came back from service, I was astounded to hear some of the people, as a
volunteer in the army, “Oh, I wish the war had kept on going on. I’m making so much money now.” They come back, you want an apartment, it’ll
cost you so and so under the counter. I
was amazed.
So I went to work in this war factory, rubber
factory, and after three months or four months, whatever the case, I went and
volunteered for the draft so I wouldn’t have to wait the other months to be
drafted. And I was anxious to go. And many of the young fellas that I was with
were anxious to go it. You felt funny
when we saw civilians and we were not doing anything. We were, we were helping the war effort, but I didn’t feel the
same as being in the army.
So they had us go through a room, I swear I went
in this door out that door, and I was in, which I was happy to be, because I
did not want to be out.
We were being switched around until we came to
the port of embarkation which was in New Jersey…New York, New York. And then we went over on the…it was either
on the Queen Mary or the Queen Elizabeth, I can’t remember. And the touch of that time…I hated it,
because we were on the hold of the boat.
And you had four compartments on one side, four compartments on the other
side, and one had to sleep on the floor.
This is on the bottom. And that
ship made us all so seasick. And the
first day that we got up you were supposed to have breakfast and they had
kidneys for breakfast. I took one look
at that and almost threw up and went downstairs. And for that whole trip I did not go up to eat. I had guys who did go up there bring me down
lemons. I’ll just suck on the lemon
until I got to England. And when I got
to England, of course, England was wobbly, we got so seasick over there.
…We’d go into town and we’d meet Air Corps,
nineteen, twenty year old kids that were captains and majors. And here were the guys who went through hell
in Sicily and in Italy and Africa, fighters.
They come up and they see these young fellows, captains and so forth in
a nice clean uniform, living in the best quarters and so forth. So what would happen, they would naturally
pick on them. They’d beat 'em up. So we were put on restriction, we couldn’t
go into town on certain days but we were still proud of the fact that we were
paratroopers and glider troopers, fighters as compared to…it was just a
rivalry.
Anxious to fight, anxious to get it over with,
anxious to get home, anxious to get home, anxious to get home.
I can still see the blinking eyes on some of
them. Arms….legs, this thin. [holds up
pinky finger] And they couldn’t even
talk. But people that came up to us were
so thankful that we were there, it brought tears to my eyes to see how people
could be treated by another human being.
They were so sick and they were so happy to see
us. Tears in their eyes. When I think of it [laughs] I get choked up
because they’re dead as far as everything is concerned and suddenly, there’s
life. Life. Their families were dead, their children were dead and their
mothers and fathers were dead, whatever the case may be, and they knew this,
they had lost all hope at this point.
Then suddenly, they were relieved, relieved.
Germans were an educated race. Germans were smart, they were industrious,
they were everything. And suddenly, to
have a people like that suddenly become monsters.
The people here in the United States didn’t know
it. They knew that, as far as Jews were
concerned, that they were forced out of business and forced out of schools and
stores broken up. But they did not
imagine the horrors of burning people, killing children, just at random doing
things like this.
But in the Second World War, we knew we were
fighting for something. And we were
proud to fight for it.