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$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter X: The Survivors - Part I}
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$Author{Various}
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$Date{1987}
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Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter X: The Survivors - Part I

Moderator: Prof. Yaffa Eliach (USA): Survivor; Director, Center for Holocaust
Studies, Brooklyn, NY.

Esther Cohen (USA):  Member, Board of Trustees, Simon Wiesenthal Center for
Holocaust Studies; trustee, Yeshiva University; Holocaust survivor; member,
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Trygve Bratteli (Norway):  Concentration camp survivor and former Prime
Minister of Norway.

Isaac Goodfriend (USA):  Cantor of Ahavath Achim Congregation, Atlanta;
Holocaust survivor; member, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Guy Hinterlang (France):  Military historian; survivor of Buchenwald.

A.F. van Velsen (Netherlands):  Survivor of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen.

Benjamin Meed (USA):  Businessman; president, Warsaw Ghetto Resistance
Organization; member, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft (USA):  Survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen;
lecturer and author on the Holocaust; member, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Sigmund Strochlitz (USA): Businessman; Holocaust survivor; president, American
Friends of Haifa University, where he endowed a chair in Holocaust Studies;
member, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Kalman Sultanik (USA):  Vice President, World Jewish Congress; Holocaust
survivor; member, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Siggi B.  Wilzig (USA):  Businessman; Holocaust survivor; member, U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council.

Eli Zborowski (USA):  Businessman; Holocaust survivor; honorary president,
American Federation of Jewish Fighters, Camp Inmates, and Nazi Victims;
member, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Institutional identifications are those at the time of the Conference.

Yaffa Eliach

     I was liberated by the Russian Army at the age of seven, and I was one of
the first people in the United States to include the liberation of the
concentration camp as a discipline of Holocaust studies.  Therefore, I am
especially privileged that I was asked to chair this distinguished panel.

     This is an historic moment.  Liberators and survivors meet once more,
some 30 years later.  This time we are all equals.  We are all free men and
women, branded by the agony of memories and the compulsion to tell them and
record them so the events of the Holocaust will be known by the next
generation, so they may learn and, we hope, be spared the suffering and death
all of us in this room knew firsthand.

     Once more, we would like to bear witness and give an eyewitness account
of the days when the gates of hell were opened, to paraphrase Colonel Fellenz,
a liberator of Dachau.  We are going to recall the events when the gates of
hell were opened, not only of concentration camps but of hiding places, death
marches, forests, partisans, and every place in the occupied countries where
Jews and other oppressed and suffering people were suffering from German
tyranny.

     It was a long-awaited moment, and the price for liberation was a great
one.  What did it mean to us around this table to return to a civilization
branded forever with the mark of Cain and the ashes of Auschwitz?  This is
what we came to tell here this morning.

Esther Cohen

     To speak of liberation and what it means to me is to speak from the heart
and the soul, and probably for hours.  But in respect to the time element, I
have taken the privilege of just writing out a few notes and giving you one
feeling that I have.

     At the actual time of liberation, I do not think I truly believed it was
over.  Certainly, hard as I tried, I could never begin to understand the
madness, the blackness, and the brutality of the years past that were now
over.  What I did know was that for the first time in what seemed like an
eternity, people had smiles on their faces, even if those smiles lasted only a
moment, as their minds flashed back to those lost, to a world gone mad, to
acts and events that were beyond human comprehension.

     What I remember best is my father taking me in his arms and saying to me,
"My dear child.  Our family, once a strong beautiful tree, is no more.  They
have chopped it in pieces and cast those pieces in the inferno.  But a branch
has survived, and now that branch must grow and from it must come new life."
Those words and my mother's eyes when she looked at me have remained in my
heart and my soul as a reminder that somehow I lived when so many others did
not.

     But it was some time later that I began to feel free and secure. It was
in the United States, in New York, at our first apartment - a small room with
two cots and a small bathroom down the hall shared with many families.  It was
and is to this day the best place I have ever lived in, for in that small room
I could read, I could dream, I could do whatever my heart desired, and no one
could come to harm me.  I was free - free at last.  I could go to school, walk
the streets, I could go to the synagogue with my family on the Sabbath.  I
could even have friends with whom I could argue about different issues, and
they would still be my friends.  I could no longer be hurt because I was born
a Jew.

     As the years went on, the meaning of being free took on much deeper
feelings.  There was the inevitable question of "Why me?  Why did I survive?"
Eventually I gave up on that question, for I knew that I would never have the
answer.

     But yet, some answers did come to other questions.  Yes, there were
people out there who cared, who were willing to give their lives so that we
could live and maybe, more importantly, so that mankind might have a just
reason to go on.  For as our brothers and sisters were dying, with them was
vanishing any and all reason for the human race to continue.

     It is today in this room that I feel the meaning of liberation. It is at
the polling booths in my city when I am free to follow my conscience that I
know the full meaning of my liberation.  It is when I watch the sun rise in
Jerusalem that I joyfully cry for being free.

     I thank God, and I thank the men and women who fought so valiantly to
free me and to restore justice and reason.  I will never forget.

Trygve Bratte

     May I say this about Norway:  there were thousands of political prisoners
during the war and the occupation.  Norway was occupied by the Germans in
1940, as certainly most people know, and for many reasons big groups, not the
least of whom were leading people in Norwegian society, went abroad or were
sent abroad.  One of the groups that left were the political prisoners who had
been taken by Germans and sent to German concentration camps.  The Germans
also organized camps in Norway.

     However, the prisoners were not the biggest group of people who had to
leave the country during the war.  There were groups of seamen on board the
Norwegian merchant fleet who participated in the war as much as the military
forces did.

     The leadership of all political parties, so to speak, also left. They
went to Great Britain in June 1940, when the German occupation became a fact
which could not be changed for a very longtime.  The people from the
administration and organizations of the Norwegian government settled down in
London where a Norwegian exile government was formed.

     What was important, both in war time and the time afterwards, was that
all the important social and economic groups in Norway had representation in
all these various groups.  When we went back after the war ended, these people
met in Denmark and Sweden and within a rather short time in Norway, and they
could discuss both their experiences and the future of the country from a
different perspective which the war had given the various groups.

     I came back, as you understand, as a political prisoner after more than
three years in a camp in Germany.  I was very lucky personally because I had
not been totally destroyed.  My normal weight was about 72 kilos, and I came
back to Norway with a weight of 45 kilos, but I was not medically destroyed.
I went back to Oslo May 15, 1945, and went straight to my office where I had
my work, and I continued my work there.

     Among these different groups of Norwegians which spent up to several
years abroad, there was one common attitude I noticed when I went back. They
were, above all, interested in the reconstruction and to a large extent in the
reformation of all generations of society.  When we met in Norway again in
1945, the whole Norwegian population was united in a way which had not been
experienced before the war.

     But we largely avoided the difficulties of the occupation because the
main groups had the same intention.  They wanted to cooperate in their big
task of reconstructing the country and building it up better than it was
before, which indeed we succeeded in doing in the first 10 to 15 years after
the war ended.

     My group was one of the last which was discovered in southwestern
Germany, although I was the first to leave Germany and go back to Sweden, even
before the occupation of Norway had ended.  Most of the Norwegian prisoners -
all kinds of prisoners - were taken care of by a special arrangement organized
by Sweden and by Norwegian authorities in London.  We were taken care of by
what in the Nordic countries was called the "White Buses," which were
organized by the Red Cross.  They got permission from the German authorities
in the last months of the war to work within Germany, and they got most of the
Norwegian political prisoners out of Germany just in the days before the end
of the war.

     May I just add that in the time afterward we certainly had a lot of very
difficult problems connected with these various groups of Norwegians who spent
a long time outside.  I think it is right to say that the worst-struck people
from the merchant fleet were, generally speaking, even weaker than many of the
prisoners who went back to Norway at that time.  During the occupation, a
common attitude was formed that the various groups should not be isolated when
they came back to Norway.  It was decided that they would not isolate
themselves into groups of former German prisoners, or of former seamen, etc.,
although certainly all of us had some tendencies in that direction.

     Mainly because the leadership of most important organizations in Norway
had been abroad, they also succeeded in uniting all these forces with regard
to the reconstruction of Norway after the occupation.

     In conclusion, let me report that when we heard the thundering of the
Allied armies not far from Alsace where we were in a camp, we were very happy
to see them.

     We met people from all western Europe, Soviet Russia, and all of these
countries.  We tried to prepare ourselves for a big meeting with the Allied
forces when they came to our camp.  We trained up on what we could of the
English language.  We were especially interested in informing each other in
English of the names of our favorite dishes

which we were going to ask of the first people who came from the Allies.

     But before that happened, and I think just a few days before the Allied
forces moved into that part of Germany, we were removed by the Swedish Red
Cross White Buses and came over the border to Denmark and Sweden before the
very last days.  There were a lot of exceptions.  We have long, long lists of
political prisoners and other prisoners who were taken to Germany about whom
we have never heard anything.

Isaac Goodfriend

     We have heard in the last two days that time will never heal our wounds
and our pains and our suffering.  I feel that this conference and meeting
again the liberators did help to soothe my wounds and to alleviate some of my
pain, for I did not have a chance on January 18, 1945, to personally go out
and shake the hands of the soldiers who liberated my home town, Piotrkow.

     I was liberated a few times, saved a few times, by the grace of Polish
people.  I was separated from my family on October 10, 1942, when I said the
last good-bye to my mother, my brothers and sisters, and my grandparents.  The
last act that my grandfather did was to walk over to the bookcase, pull out a
tiny little book, and say to me, "Let this tiny little book guard you."  I
remember the book.  I have a book by the same author, the same book, in my
library now, because the original was taken away from me.

     I was saved in 1943 by a Polish engineer who was hired by the German
factory of my slave labor camp where I worked.  I was prepared - the guards
prepared me - to be sent to the Gestapo for a minor accident that I caused in
the factory.  If it had not been for the intervention of this Polish engineer,
I would not be sitting here and telling you this story.  He simply threatened
the authority of this particular camp that if I were sent away, he would not
finish the job.  And I was saved.

     One day a non-Jewish neighbor who lived with my grandparents in the same
house slipped a note under the fence of this labor camp from my contact on the
outside that said the house was open at any time when I felt that there was
danger ahead.  It said I could come and spend time with them.

     So one early morning in 1944-I believe it was the beginning of 1944-I
escaped from the labor camp and made my way to this farmer's house on the
outskirts of the city where this farmer saved nine Jewish lives. There were
nine of us.  It was, of course, a liberation of a dream, a liberation that
was, not reality because we knew from experience that we lived from hour to
hour, from minute to minute, not knowing what the next day would bring.  This,
too, was like living in a dream world.

     However, since I was brought up in a very orthodox Jewish home, we
managed to do our prayers every morning, even putting on the Tefillin
[phylacteries] without having a prayer book.  We prayed by heart.  How can I
forget the last High Holy Day while in hiding?  There were four men trying to
help one another to do our services by heart.  Those who are familiar with the
liturgy of the High Holy Day services would understand how difficult it is to
say those prayers by heart, but we did.

     Until January 17, 1945, we lived in fear because we knew we could not go
out and walk among people.  Everything we did was in hiding.  We whispered -
we didn't talk, even though there were no neighbors around.  We whispered even
after the war.  After I was liberated, I could not get back to normal; I kept
on whispering for two months after the war.  We couldn't sneeze or cough.
There was a little girl with us, my cousin, who was at that time four years
old.  We were afraid that she might cry and a neighbor from far away or a
field worker might hear her.

     The night of January the 17th we said to one another, "Let's sit down and
talk seriously.  What will happen if the Germans come and they discover us?
Who will ever know that here, in this place, in a far remote place in central
Poland there were nine Jews hidden and saved by the grace of this family?"

     So we sat down and we said to one another, "Let's write a legacy, and
we'll bury it in the ground in some sort of a bottle or a glass jar.  Maybe
somehow in the future some people will come and find it."  We knew that there
were no remnants of our families.  I was the only one who survived my family,
as it was with the others.

     So we started to write, and everybody had something to say.  It took
about 15 minutes until we could not write anymore because of our emotions. I
recently found out from one of my friends who was with me that he does have
this testimony in his possession.  This man lives in Pittsburgh.

     About a half-hour later the same evening, we saw suddenly the sky
lighting up.  We could not make out what it was.  As the hours and the time
moved on, we heard something like thundering.  We connected thunder with
lightning and thought we might have rain.  But we knew there could be no rain
in January in Poland, and certainly no lightning.

     Then the sounds of the cannons came closer.  We realized that perhaps
someone was approaching to liberate us, or maybe it was the other way around.
Maybe the Germans were going to destroy the city before they left. Maybe they
were burning some houses with people in them because this is what we were used
to since 1939.

     Sure enough, the Russians were approaching.  The next morning while I was
standing in the field and preparing some ground for growing vegetables and
grain, we saw the Russian planes come down and drop some bombs.  I remember I
started to dance for joy, whereby my landlord, the farmer, knelt down in
prayer.  With two different feelings, I thought, "Let it fall, let it come.

     We heard that the first two Russian tanks were in the city.  We wanted to
greet them.  We came out.  We were the first two Jewish young men visible in a
city of 28,000 in which only about 1,000 had survived.

     But there is one thing I would like to share with you, and they are the
final words that my friend the Polish farmer said to us when we were about to
leave his house.  He called us together and asked us to sit down because he
wanted to talk to us.  These are the words he said to us, looking down on the
little girl: "You are free.  You can go, but where?  There is nobody waiting
for you out there.  This little child - I don't know how how a little child
would survive.  The men?  You work, maybe.  But now you're free. But where
will you go?"

Guy Hinterlang

     For the past two days, I have been hearing so many eloquent statements
made here at this conference of the liberators that it seems very difficult
for me really to hold your attention, because everything has already been
said, and so well said, about the liberation of the camps.

     So, I shall simply give you a very quick glimpse of the personal
experience that I lived through at that time.  I think it will be necessary,
first of all, to say that if the French Minister of Defense assigned two
officers to represent him here at this conference in the French delegation led
by the Minister of Veterans Affairs himself, Mr. Jean Laurain, I think you can
conclude that this was due to the role played by the French army in the
liberation of Europe and of the camps.  This French army had many of its
members both on the side of the liberators and those who were liberated - and
I am one of those who was liberated.

     During the campaigns that they carried out in southern Germany and in
Austria, the French troops did not have, as did the other three Allied armies,
an opportunity to liberate any of the large concentration camps; only
Kommandos were involved.  But we did play a sufficiently large part in the
victory over the Third Reich so that we can testify to their efficiency in
participating in the liberation of all of those who were held in the chains of
the enemy.

     Obviously, the army contributed also to the repatriation of the deportees
which, as you know, was absolutely essential in order to restore and, indeed,
even save the lives of these deportees.

     We wanted to make sure that the greatest number of our members were
informed of the living conditions in the concentration camps; therefore,
General Leclerc, who was commanding the famous Second French Armored Division
that was operating in Bavaria with the U.S. Army, gave orders that the maximum
number of officers and men from his division, despite the concern to carry on
the offensive, be given the opportunity to see for themselves the horror of
the camp at Dachau immediately after it was liberated by the U.S. forces.

     But the French army also expected a great deal from the liberation of the
camps.  There were elements of the French internal resistance, the military
resistance in particular, that paid a very heavy price for the struggle which
they waged against the enemy.  Along with the 100,000 racial deportees who did
not come back from deportation, the overall number of dead French resistance
fighters was 60,000.  Among these, we had 400 officers and 350 career NCOs, in
other words, about one-tenth of our officers and NCOs who were still present
on occupied territory and able to participate in the resistance.

     As for those who were able to escape death in the camps, they provided an
absolutely remarkable number of officers who had held very high
responsibilities since the end of the war.  I am thinking particularly of the
officers who, prior to the current army chief, of staff, held that post, the
highest rank in the army.

     Now let us come to the experience that I had in the camps.  This deeply
affected my life, even though I was only 19 years old.  Incidentally, this
almost marked the opening of my military career at that time.  In only a brief
time, I went from a very lowly officer and - at the time of the Normandy
landing, the school of officers of gendarmerie in Gueret, which is a
prefecture in the central part of France took up arms and with the assistance
of the local maquis, we took over the town.  But on the sixth of June, 1944,
it was still too early for this to be a lasting undertaking, and the enemy
then arrived with the 55 Reich Division.  This totally cleaned out the whole
area with the cruelty that made this notorious, particularly because of the
massacre of Oradour-sur-Glans, which you all remember. During this combat, in
the area of Gueret, I was taken prisoner with some 30 other military men.  We
were transferred to the great internment camp of Compiegne, some 50 kilometers
north of Paris.

     This camp was the place where the SS drew their men to send to
concentration camps in Germany.  In August of 1944, before the Allies
advanced, this camp was emptied out for the last time because the SS did not
care to carry out the agreement that had been concluded between the Consul
General of Sweden in Paris, Mr. Nordling, and the German military high command
in Paris, which was to have prevented any further deportations.  However, the
head of the 55 troops decided that he had received an order and that he had to
execute it.

     After this dreadful trip in cattle cars, I was sent to Buchenwald and
later to two successive Kommandos located at Niedersachswerfen and the Leau
salt mines, where we worked 450 meters under the surface building underground
plants.

     I shall stop here just for a moment to bring out one point that seems to
me to be particularly important.  In this Compiegne camp, many people - these
are people who had occupied important roles in the resistance when they were
arrested, and they had some idea, presumably, of what was going on in Germany
in the camps simply were not aware of what was at the other end of this long
trip.

     There were internees who had been held for many months who were packing
their baggage and opening their bags just as though they were changing
residences.  They said, "We may not see this baggage," but the 55 let them
pack because there is always a bit of comedy, even a bit of humor, in these
blackest situations.

     In the car where I was packed in with some 80 other comrades, one of them
knew what we could expect because he had already been in Germany.  He had
already been interned and had been able to escape and he told us exactly what
to expect.  Nobody wanted to believe him, of course.  Some even wanted to try
to correct him and argue with his account.  This incident shows how difficult
it was to determine the truth about what these concentration camps were really
like - those who created these camps took such great care to cover them up in
great secrecy.

     In any case, you know very well that one rarely believes witnesses and
eyewitnesses.  In fact, we have a proverb in French that says, 'There is no
one that is deafer than someone who doesn't want to hear, and there is no one
blinder than one who does not wish to see."

     A second glimpse or highlight that I would like to bring out about our
life as "Haftlinge [prisoners] was the spectacle that one saw every three or
four days at the Kommando of Lauenburg.  This was the sight of a cart filled
high with naked bodies, with numbers painted on their chests.  The whole
contents of this cart served to fuel an open charnel house near the little
town where we were located.  It's obviously very difficult to imagine that
those people in that village didn't know what was going on.  Once again, as I
say, there are people who refuse to see and believe their own eyes.

     Of my deportation, I would wish to say no more because it is really not
even comparable to the experience of my other colleagues and companions here;
but I nonetheless would like to talk about the end of my experience.

     When Buchenwald was liberated, our Kommando was set out on the road. This
was the solution that was arrived at by the Lagerfuhrer [camp commander] to
avoid the total liquidation that he had been ordered to carry out and which he
did not wish to carry out.  After three days of an absolutely exhausting
march, we were to be liberated totally by chance on the road from Dessau to
Leipzig.  Our encounter with our American saviors almost didn't take place,
but chance often works in our favor, and Providence was on our side for one
time that day.

     I can still remember when we came out of the woods that we were crossing
through, we ran into these few American tanks that had just cleaned out the
edge of the forest.  They saw our column approaching along the road, and they
started to aim at us, it looked like.  But then, all of a sudden, they came
toward us and things sorted themselves out very quickly.

     There were only about 5,000-6,000 of us left on the road by that time,
because obviously the invalids and the ill had been left in the camps.  Of the
1,500 in the Kommando when I arrived, some 600 were left in the charnel house
when we left.

     You asked us, Madame Chairman, what were our feelings after the
liberation.  Well, there were two feelings, I think.  First of all, I thought
that nothing like this could ever happen to me again.  Everything in my life
in the future would be perfect, and I would never live through such dreadful
experiences again like those that I had lived through during the 11 months.

     And the second feeling?  It was that of some pessimism, that is, that
there is no man, no people, that can claim to be the Herrenvolk [master race].
But there is no race that is free of malice and evil because I feel that this
is in the heart of man, if you allow your instincts to have free reign.  I
think that these feelings are the expression of what may truly happen.  I have
a lot of comrades, colleagues, and officers who some years later in a distant
theater of operations underwent an entirely comparable experience in the
physical destruction of the type that we experienced.  I am talking also about
brainwashing, something that the Nazis had avoided imposing on us.  But you
can also push things a bit further, and beyond, indeed.  Beyond physical
destruction you can also add the destruction of the human spirit, and that is
extremely grave.

     You can see that one cannot think, as our fathers and grandfathers said
after World War I, that we had come to the last of the wars, the "war to end
all wars," to be specific in the term they used.  You have to be watchful from
every angle.  You have to keep on the alert because the danger of totalitarian
destruction can come at you from any direction.

     What is the remedy for this?  Our Minister [Laurain] talked in his
statement of the trust that one had to repose in the teachings of history. In
France, this is something that we are thinking very seriously about, because
obviously you can't be sure of the future without knowing exactly what your
past has been.

     I would like to add this is a personal view here - that there is capital
importance to be given to moral rehabilitation.  All these fine and beautiful
speeches will serve for naught if you cannot perhaps not change man - but at
least make man a better person, and make man more conscious of what his fate
must be.

     You have your love of your neighbor.  That is the second great
commandment; it is as important as the first commandment, as you know.  That
is the commandment that we ought to teach our young people and our children,
because it is not in just seeking the easy way out - perversions and vices,
and so forth - that we can find the solution to our life's problems.
Otherwise, we are going to fall forever into the pit.