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$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter II: The Eyewitnesses - Part I}
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$Author{Various}
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$Subject{war
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world
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concentration
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$Date{1987}
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Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter II: The Eyewitnesses - Part I

Sigmund Strochlitz

     Many years have passed since the Allied entered the camps. The Russian
armies entered the camps in the East, being first to expose to the world the
horrors committed by the Nazis and their collaborators.  The English army
entered the camps in the North and confirmed to the western world the brutal
realities of death factories in the heart of Europe, next to big towns and
small villages, while the inhabitants went about their daily work,
unconcerned, undisturbed, and yet knowing very well that mass murder was
taking place in their backyard.  In the South, American armies entering the
camps and suspecting that time may erase the memory of Nazi behavior, brought
a high-ranking congressional delegation to record for posterity the atrocities
committed by Nazi Germany.

     Survivors will never forget the valiant effort made by the Allied armies
to save even those who were beyond help and to help restore a semblance of
normal life to those who were at that moment not even able to respond to human
decency or to react to human compassion.  The same struggle, the defeat of
Nazi Germany, enabled the Soviet army to liberate the camps in the East, as
the western armies liberated the camps in the North and the South.  We waited
a long time for you to come, while life was ebbing out of us, and today we are
meeting again in the secure surroundings of the State Department, but faced
with a new threat.

     I am sure that those who will be testifying today, recalling what they
have experienced and what they found entering the camps, are as appalled,
disgusted, and angry as survivors are with the proliferation of hate
literature denying the existence of gas chambers and the murder of six million
Jews, 90 percent of European Jewry and millions of others.  The denial will be
foremost in our minds today, but let's also remember that the danger that the
Holocaust can be forgotten or become a matter of indifference just a
senseless, mindless crime - an only be ignored at the cost of great suffering
and costly tragedies in the years to come.


     But perhaps those eyewitness accounts should not be looked at only from
those points of view.  Those who fought in the last war and those who have
been victims of hate, prejudice, and indifference owe it to present and future
generations to sound the warning that we live in times when military forces of
unimaginable destructiveness, religious fanaticism that caused so much misery
in the past, and blind hatred that transcends boundaries are building up
around the world that can in one summer day or winter day drive mankind to
madness again.  Let's hope, therefore, that today's eyewitness testimonies to
acts of evil will stand as a permanent witness to an event that must be
remembered and transmitted to younger generations, not only by us, the
victims, but also by you, the victors.  You and we are partners to a legacy
forced on us by fate:  to uphold the truth, to prevent the dead from being
murdered again, and to save the conscience, the decency, and the humanity of
mankind.

Leon Bass

     I am very pleased to have this opportunity share with you an experience
that I had at the young age of 19.  It was not an experience that I would have
wanted, but it was thrust upon me.  At 18 I enlisted in the United States
army, and I began to find out at that time that in my great country I was set
apart as something different because I happened to be black.  Therefore, I was
put into what we called then a segregated unit of the army, and I was told to
deliver.  I was told to go out and do battle, to change the world, to make it
a better place for all of us to live.  Most of my training took place in the
South.  At that time they were very overt in the way they treated those of
color.  I was constantly reminded, "Leon, you are something different."  I had
to rise above that.  I had to be aware that in spite of the impingements on me
that were denigrating and debilitating to me as a human personality, I had to
be something better in order to make this world what it should be.

     So I and my comrades went forth and one day we found ourselves in the
Battle of the Bulge.  We found ourselves moving up under great stress, pushing
the Germans back into Europe, until finally one day we landed at a place
called Weimar, Germany.  It was at that time that I began to take the blinders
off.  It was at that time I began to see that I could no longer have tunnel
vision about human suffering.  I could no longer be centered on what I wanted.
The "Vitamin I" which I carried for so long had to somehow be eradicated.  I
was just ready to find out why that had to change.

     No one had told me about the death camps.  I went through many
orientations, but no one shared with me what had been going on in Europe for
so many years.  On this day in April in 1945, with some of my comrades, I
walked through the gates of a place called Buchenwald.  I was totally
unprepared for what I saw.  Someone of 19 couldn't have been prepared, for he
hasn't lived long enough.  I was still trying to develop my value system.  I
was still trying to sort things out, and then all of a sudden, slap right in
the face was the horror perpetrated by man against man.

     I saw all the things that many of you have lived through who are
survivors.  I saw what most of you here who were eyewitnesses saw.  I'm not
here this morning to wallow in the horror story, because it's so painful for
me, and I know it's painful for many of you.  But, nevertheless, the story
must be told.  We must talk about the crematoria.  We must talk about the
dead.  We must talk about the denigration of human personalities, how they
tried to make people less than human.  The purposes are beyond me. It boggles
the mind for me to try to figure out why.  Why would someone take millions of
people and in a planned, organized, systematic way try to destroy them,
exterminate them?  I have yet to come to grips with that in my own mind.  But
I know that I must share this so that the history books really tell the story
as it is, so that nobody sugarcoats the history as they did with slavery.  Our
secondary sources would make you think that all slaves loved the plantation,
when this was not so.  Even though the revisionists are out there today
writing books and telling students that it never happened, we cannot ignore
our responsibilities to tell the story.  Yes, we must be graphic.  We must use
the media.  We must come together like this to focus attention across the
world.

     But in the final analysis, my friends, if we want to avoid another
Holocaust, if we want to make sure that this doesn't happen again, we have a
personal responsibility to do something about it.  I know it's nice to say
that you're going to give a large sum of money to the NAACP or you're going to
give a large sum of money to B'nai B'rith.  But that's the easy way out. Yes,
you can avoid a Holocaust because you must belong to organizations. You must
contribute.  But the tough part of the program is when you walk out of here
and you go back to where you live and where you work.  When you're on the job
and your boss tells an anti-Semitic joke, do you laugh because you want to
move ahead?  When you're sitting around the bridge table and somebody talks
about the dirty niggers or the spies moving in down the street, do you sit
there quietly and never say anything?  If so, you are contributing to another
Holocaust.

     It was James Baldwin who said, "God gave man the rainbow sign/No more
water, the fire next time."  You are throwing fuel on that fire when you keep
your mouth shut.  When you come to a large gathering like this, it is
important that we talk about the things that we experienced.  If, however, you
go back to your job, back to your bridge table, back to your neighborhood, and
you say nothing to people, you are sowing the seeds for another Holocaust.
Trying to love the unloveable is the challenge, my friends.  When we ignore
the disinherited, the dispossessed, and the poor among us, we are contributing
to another Holocaust.

     So I come here today saying, out of my experiences, I can ill afford to
pass by on the other side.  I cannot ignore the young people who come into my
school holding on by their fingertips, saying, "Give me a chance."  Many of
those who don't have enough money, who live jammed in poverty, will bite the
hand that feeds them because they're so angry.  Somehow they're still saying,
"Help me," even though they call me an SOB.  Even though they use all kinds of
profanity to express themselves, they're still crying for help.  And where am
I?  Where are you?  Are we caught up in getting and spending?  Are we so busy
trying to move ahead, whether it's in the military, whether it's in the halls
of Congress, or whether it's in our own community that we're trying to cater
to people?  Do we cater to them and ignore the morality that's striking us in
the face?  If we ignore those things, if we remain silent, if we pass by on
the other side, we are sowing the seeds for another Holocaust.

     I come here this morning, in the short time that's been allotted to me,
just to say there's no easy way out.  You must answer the question as I do
every day.  Is the price too high?  You can't look at the person next to you,
or behind you, you must answer that for yourself.  Is the price too high?  If
you practice your Judeo-Christian ethics and dare to be a Daniel and go into
the lions' den, you become vulnerable.  I challenge you, all of you, to try to
live up to those things that we see in the Ten Commandments, or in the Koran,
or whatever philosophy you believe in.  If you do, you're vulnerable, and
you're going, to take pain and blame for things you did not create.

     If we're going to survive, if we're going to make this world a better
place, when we leave here we'll take the message back with us.  We'll move out
into the forefront where the battle happens to be waging, and that's with the
disinherited and the dispossessed.  I would like to remember again the words
of James Baldwin who said, "Either we love one another/Or the sea will engulf
us/And the light will go out."

George Blackburn

     To label me a liberator of a concentration camp is just simply not true.
No one person, no single unit, no division, not even the Canadian army, was
capable of liberating a concentration camp.  It took the full forces of the
Allies crushing Germany from both directions to retake land and liberate
people from those death camps and from those other horrors.  I am very
subdued, and I approach this all with a great sense of inferiority.

     After listening to the first marvelous speech that was made on this
subject, there is almost nothing left to say in terms of the purposes and the
objectives of this great Conference.  Please permit me to say, Mr. Chairman,
on behalf of the Canadian delegation, that there is not a man on it - and I
know from talking to them the last 24 hours - who does not feel a sense of
inferiority being in the presence of people who have survived those horror
camps.

     I did not see a death camp.  Westerbork was a collection center for the
Jewish people of the Netherlands supposedly identified as people of the Jewish
faith to be sent on to the gas chambers and the ovens. I was a forward
observation officer in the artillery, and our job was to do a dash of six to
10 miles in behind the enemy lines to cut a road that was servicing a battle
going on in the town of Assen and, in the dash, these kangaroos came crashing
by this camp.  It was obviously a concentration camp of some kind.  It had
towers, the normal accoutrements of a concentration camp.

     By the time my vehicle arrived, which had been falling farther and
farther behind because of the lack of strength of the old engine, the people
had run out of their huts it was quite an extensive set of huts and they'd
clotted at the front gates.  They had managed to get the barbed wire gates
open, and they were coming out on the road and they stopped us.  Of all the
memories I have, and there are an awful lot of them from Normandy through to
the top of Holland, nothing compares to the people yelling and screaming their
gratitude for the liberation of their town, their farm.  I can't call it
crying; I can't call it screaming.  It was more like the whimpering of an ill
animal or a frightened animal, mixed with expressions of joy.  My deepest
memory will always be of these dozens and dozens of skinny arms attempting to
touch us.  They wanted to feel us and to feel the vehicle.

     Even as we gave out the little bit of food that we could from our bren
gun carrier to them, they seemed to be more preoccupied with feeling to make
sure we were real.  We had to go on forward.  I mean, we had to catch up with
those half-a-dozen kangaroos with the infantry in them, but we couldn't get
these prisoners to move.  I pulled out my pistol, and you can just imagine
what went through the minds of these poor people.  They were thinking, "My
God, after all this, are you going to shoot us?" But this did quiet them down
to the extent that we were able to get across in our pigeon Dutch - my driver
could speak a little German - and English the fact that we were still
attacking and had to keep going to chase the Germans.  Then they opened up,
and they reluctantly let us go.  Really, that is all I saw.  I didn't see the
horrors of Belsen, except as we all have through pictures and eyewitness
accounts.

     But I suppose I must not occupy any more time, except to say that I, and
everyone on the Canadian delegation, are a hundred percent behind the
motivation and the purposes and the objectives of this conference.  We must
keep alive and vivid the memory and the horror that took place when people of
a nation, a very enlightened nation, forgot to watch very carefully the
movements of their morality and let a situation get out of hand, and even
supported it, until it was too late.  There's a real purpose, ladies and
gentlemen, in what you're doing, and I can say on behalf of the Canadian
delegation we're a hundred percent behind it.

Michal Chilczuk

     It is not too easy to speak without emotion in front of those who went
through a cataclysm in history, civilized history.  This cataclysm is based on
a barbarian theory which was first implemented in my country Poland. During
the war, six million Polish citizens almost half of whom were Jewish were
killed.  I have come from the country where Nazis established over 2,000
different kinds of camps:  military, slave, prison, extermination.  Each day
2,800-3,000 lives were taken.

     I have come from the country where the resistance movement started.
Half-a-million citizens, together with Jews, participated in this movement
which began in October I 939.

     I am a representative of the Polish People's Army.  In our battles, we
liberated a dozen different kinds of camps.  But in the limited time allowed
me, it is impossible to describe all these camps; therefore, let me
concentrate on one which the Polish Army directly liberated Oranienburg, which
some people call Sachsenhausen.  Before the 20th of April, we had reached a
suburb of Oranienburg.  Together with my soldiers, I entered the concentration
camp of Sachsenhausen on the 22nd of April.

     It is not easy for me, Mr. Chairman, to reconstruct what I saw. Yesterday
we listened as the Chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Council explained how he
felt when he first saw the liberators.  He remembers very well, but, Mr.
Chairman, I want to explain what I saw from the other side.

     I don't think any artist or any writer exists who can reconstruct this
picture.  It is not only difficult for me in English, but in my mother
language it is also impossible.  You, sir, saw soldiers with nice uniforms, in
good physical health.  But what I saw were people I call humans, but it was
difficult to tell they were humans.

     I can never forget their eyes.  There was a difference.  Maybe they cried
with joy because there was freedom for them.  I will never forget one victim
who I thought wanted to shake my hand because a little bit of him moved.  And
I took his hand . . . just now I can see this man with his hand in my hand.

     After a few minutes, my soldiers also wanted to help as your colleagues
did with food.  It was human instinct that they would want to share their food
with the victims.  They didn't realize that it could be a tragedy for these
people to eat.  But soon our physician explained to the soldiers that it could
mean death to these people if a doctor didn't supervise the sharing of food.
But they wanted to help - that was the first human reaction.

     After that we helped these people with our medical care.  We took them
from their beds some of you know what these beds were like.  Who can describe
these beds?

     I went with one group who showed me the concentration camp, their
township for murdering.  I saw the crematorium.  In this concentration camp we
found only 5,000 people.  There were 50,000 before our liberation.  I heard
from one victim that this crematorium, this industry for murder, was working
two days before the liberation.

     We then went West when on the second of May, I met up with American
soldiers.  But not all of us who participated in the liberation of
Sachsenhausen and Oranienburg reached this point.  A dozen soldiers, including
Jews with Polish uniforms, died in the battle of Sachsenhausen. We fought
together arm in arm in the liberation of our sisters and brothers from this
concentration camp which was largely Jewish, Polish, Russian, Czech, Yugoslav,
Italian, Belgian, Dutch, Greek, Spanish, and Latvian.

     Therefore, if we want the world to survive, we should stop this hatred in
people.

Guy Fassina

     When I received the honor to speak before you I though I would tell you
just what a young man saw in 1945.  I was an officer in charge of repatriation
in the British Zone, attached to the British Army on the Rhine, the I Corps
district.  I was looking at the world with the eyes of youth, with the
impression that I was coming to the assistance of people. Later, when I saw
people wandering around in the streets where the Jews used to live in Paris,
looking around, waiting for the people who had disappeared, disappeared
forever, I realized that for some the deportation of the soul would never end.

     But yesterday what the Chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Council, Professor
Wiesel, said upset me a great deal.  You [Wiesel] called upon the liberators
to bear witness, and you said, "Say what you saw; you will be believed because
your witness will not be doubted." They only saw a moment of your suffering, a
privileged moment and a revealing one, but a very limited one.  Should those
who saw die before their eyes the members of their own families, those who
followed with their glances their children who were held by the hand and led
into the gas chambers, have to justify their witness and find a way to have
this witness corroborated?

     Here and there [there are] published texts which are astonishing.  One is
called The Lie of Auschwitz.  People doubt the existence of the gas chambers,
and if these people are challenged, their right to speak is defended.  You can
just say I don't share your opinion, but I will defend to the death your right
to say it.

     Youth listens attentively and is sometimes tempted by paradox and may at
any time be misled.  This is where, outside of the essential compilation of
the witnesses, we must continue to work to introduce a new method of proof
compatible with the language of today.  Indeed, would the means of Nazi
propaganda - the base calumny and slander, "The Protocols of [the Elders of]
Zion" the caricatures - weigh heavier in the minds of some than the conviction
that millions of Jews, Gypsies, and resistance and underground forces did go
through the gas chambers?

     We see in the years that have passed that sociological principles may
have changed the truth, and things seem to disappear or fade.  The
concentration camps become historic facts and become just a part of people's
memories.  They become a secondary fact in the history of the whole Second
World War.  In the history books they are hardly mentioned, and sometimes
there are sociological and literary aspects which are given more weight.  The
history books talk about myths, and this may make people reject the truth.
That is why the literature on the resistance, as well as on racism or
anti-Semitism, is so important to concentrate on.

     Words change meaning because racism is used in different ways and is used
to propagate lies.  So what shall we do to leave to future generations the
experience of these incredible facts?  I think there are two different things
we could do.  The first thing is a kind of working program which has really
been generally undertaken.  The second is one which I would express as a wish
to bear witness by looking at the original documents.  In some cases there are
as many as three million documents which have survived.  These should be
distributed in facsimile.  Everybody should be able to see then.  A German
professor wants all of these documents to be disseminated because once they
are known they can be fought.  What can you say about these concepts, like the
master race, the inferior race, people who deserve annihilation?

     Language has served to place man in chains, and language can sound the
alert.  Let us listen to that language.  And in conclusion, let me come to my
wish.  May every generation find men of the lyricism, the incantation, the
magic which can serve to inspire by language, by music, by poetry, by plays,
by painting, who can bring concern to their contemporaries in order to make
people ask themselves and to doubt so that they can become better.  May we
learn the lesson of an unheard human drama and safeguard our liberty while not
renouncing any of the moral standards which are the basis of the dignity of
man.

Alexei Kirillovich Gorlinsky

     Mankind will always remember the bright in the month of May of 1945 when
the whole world heard the news about the victorious end of the war in Europe.
The war ended where it had begun, and the long-awaited victory was ours.  A
great and happy holiday of all mankind had arrived.  As events of the Second
World War are fading away, the more significant and important appears the
grandeur of our common victory.

     One is terrified at the thought of what could have happened to the
nations of our world and to all mankind if fascism had won.  All the best that
had been created throughout the centuries would have turned to ashes; many
peoples would have been enslaved; freedom, honor, dignity, and independence of
mankind would have been trampled and destroyed.  I, as a participant in the
Second World War and one who took part in the liberation of the inmates of
fascist concentration camps, was a witness to the horrors and sufferings
which fascism and war brought to the people.

     On May the second of 1945, we liberated the fascist concentration camp of
Terezin in Czechoslovakia and the 8,521 remaining survivors of this camp.  The
inmates were used there to construct an underground military plant.  Hard
labor, slave labor, hunger, disease, and humiliation caused great losses.
From October 1941 to May 1945, 153,000 men, women, and children had passed
through that camp from many countries of Europe.  Fifty-eight thousand, three
hundred and forty inmates, including 15,000 children, were killed in Terezin,
and the majority was taken away and killed in other concentration camps.  In
all fascist concentration camps, especially great hardship was established for
inmates from the Soviet Union, from different nationalities and different
nations.

     The Soviet War Veterans Committee, as a member of the International
Federation of the Resistance Fighters and of eight international committees of
former inmates of fascist concentration camps, takes an active part in the
struggle against the revival of neo-fascism because fascism means terror,
human hating ideology, and war.  In the struggle against fascism and war, the
Soviet War Veterans Committee strives to expand and deepen friendly ties with
veterans' organizations in the anti-Hitler coalition countries and with all
those who contributed, together with the Soviet armed forces, to the achieving
of our common victory. I recollect this bright page in history, April 21,
1945, when our vanguard detachment met with a reconnaissance unit of the First
American Army near Torgau at the Elbe River.  The meeting at the Elbe
symbolizes the military Soviet-American cooperation in the war.  We spoke the
same language then, and that was the language of friendship.  Soon after, the
commander of the First American Army, General Hodges, presented me with the
highest military American decoration, that is the Legion of Merit, which had
been awarded to me by the President of the United States.  To me this
decoration was the recognition of the immense contribution of the Soviet
people and its armed forces to the cause of our common victory, of which
Dwight Eisenhower said that the great deeds of the Red Army during the war in
Europe have aroused the admiration of the whole world.

     To me it was a sign of friendship in the war between the Soviet and
American people and of the future peaceful cooperation between our states and
between our people.

     Soviet war veterans are still faithful to the "Elbe spirit" and to all
the hopes which the victorious May of 1945 has given rise to.  Many people in
the USA, too, understand the historic importance of Soviet-American peaceful
cooperation.  "The more I think about our Elbe meeting," said General James
Gavin, the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, "the better I
understand its historic significance and its message.  The older I grow the
better I understand how important it is for our two countries to maintain good
relations.  I think it necessary to spare no effort to strengthen friendship
and cooperation between our countries." This was said when General Gavin met a
Soviet War Veterans Committee delegation in 1977 in Boston.

     We fought to make it possible for our children, grandchildren, and all
generations to come to live, love, study, work, and create without having to
know what war is.

     Recollecting the time which is part of history now, but which is so well
remembered by us, I want to tell all our former comrades-in-arms in the past
war, we who survived must do our best to prevent a new world catastrophe,
especially a nuclear one.  The Peace Program for the 80's adopted by the 26th
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Appeal of the Supreme
Soviet of the USSR to Parliaments and Peoples of the World, the new peaceful
initiatives submitted by the Soviet Union to the 36th Session of the United
Nations General Assembly serve to achieve this noble goal.