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Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1995.A.1269.17 | RG Number: RG-50.470.0017

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    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich
    Transcript
    [INAUDIBLE]
    OK.
    I am a child.
    I don't know much about World War II,
    and I don't even know, really, much what
    happened in the Holocaust.
    Tell me briefly what the DP camps were.
    The DP camps, the displaced persons camps,
    were the camps to which the survivors of the Holocaust who
    were found alive in the German concentration
    camps on German soil and on Australian soil
    were placed after they had been liberated by the advancing
    allied armies.
    In other words, they were camps where these survivors lived
    and the main Jewish survivors until the time came
    for them to migrate to other countries
    where they had chosen to live for the remainder
    of their lives.
    Their sojourn in the camps began after they had been moved out
    of the concentration camps soon after their liberation,
    and they lived in the camps until they
    left for the countries where they had chosen to go.
    Now can you give me sort of an overview
    of what kind of a scale we're talking about,
    how many DP camps there were and different types?
    There were a good number of displaced persons camps,
    and they varied both in size and in nature.
    For example, there was a displaced persons camp
    in Stuttgart, which, in reality, had no appearance as a camp.
    It was a series of what we would call apartment houses which
    had been taken over by the American army
    and to which the Army had placed Jewish survivors
    from German concentration camps.
    On the other hand, there was a DP camp like Landsberg,
    where there were, when I visited it, over 6,000 survivors
    and which had been a large camp for military purposes
    which had been used also by the foreign workers who
    had come to Germany to help the German effort in industry
    during the war.
    So there were all kinds of displaced persons camps.
    In addition, there were groups of survivors
    who lived in a place that could not be termed a DP camp.
    For example, there were some Hungarian Jewish women
    who had been liberated from a concentration camp in Germany
    and who had gone to a small town in northern Germany
    nearby where they just lived together
    in whatever kind of housing they could find.
    They lived as a group.
    I don't know whether you could call them a DP camp,
    but in essence, it was.
    So as I said at the outset, there
    were different kinds of DP camps.
    As to the number of them, I'm not exactly sure, perhaps 20
    more or less.
    And what kinds of numbers of displaced persons were there?
    That's a difficult question to answer, and I'll tell you why.
    Perhaps at the time of the liberation
    of the German concentration camps
    there may have been a total of 50,000 Jewish survivors
    in the American zone of Germany.
    Remember that Germany, immediately after the defeat
    of the German Army, was divided among four conquering armies
    and were governed by the British, the Russians,
    the French, and the Americans.
    The largest zone in Germany was the American zone,
    and there were about 50,000 Jewish survivors
    in the American zone.
    But Jews kept coming into the American zone of Germany day
    by day, and soon the number was not 50,000 but 80,000.
    By soon I mean over a period of a month, six weeks, or more.
    I'm now speaking only about the American zone in Germany.
    So it was a huge--
    it was a huge problem or huge situation
    that had to be dealt with?
    It was a very difficult problem that had to be dealt with
    and a problem that had been unforeseen
    by the American military authorities who had long
    planned for the kind of governance
    they would establish in a defeated Germany.
    The American plans called, once Germany would be defeated,
    for the liberation of course of all those
    found in German concentration camps
    and for the return of all those survivors to the countries
    from which they had come, and that
    was to be done within 90 days.
    So the plans called for.
    And indeed, after the concentration camps
    had been liberated, the American military authorities
    worked efficiently, and within 90 days,
    the Belgians, the French, the Greeks, the Poles,
    whoever were found in the concentration
    camps who wanted to go back to their homelands were sent home.
    But the military planners had not foreseen the fact
    that there would be Jews in the concentration camps,
    they would be the largest number,
    and they would be people who would not or could not
    return to their homelands.
    They could not because their homes and their businesses
    in their native countries had been seized
    by their former neighbors.
    They knew that if they returned and tried
    to reclaim their homes and businesses that they
    would be set upon, attacked, and perhaps even killed.
    And indeed, that did happen with a few Jews who did go back
    and who tried to regain what they had once owned.
    So most of the Jews didn't want to go back
    because they could not.
    There were no homes for them to return to.
    In addition, they would not because the lands
    where they had lived--
    and at the moment I'm thinking particularly
    of Poland as well as the Baltic countries,
    that they knew that the former neighbors in many cases
    had reported on their whereabouts to the Germans,
    that they could not live among those people who
    were responsible for their having suffered
    during the years of the war in concentration camps
    and who had been responsible for the fact
    that their nearest and dearest ones
    had been killed either on their native soil
    or in the concentration camps later.
    They knew that the countries from which they
    had come where now lands where the soil had been polluted
    by the blood of their loved ones and the very air
    had been polluted by the smoke of the concentration camps
    that had come out of the crematoria where members
    of their families had been burned, at least their bodies
    had been burned.
    So as I said, at the outset, they could not return,
    and they would not return.
    They wanted to live elsewhere.
    So the American Army found these people
    who would not go anywhere, who could not go anywhere,
    and no plans had been arranged for such people
    beforehand because the problem had not been foreseen.
    Let's stop because I think we're just about running out of film.
    Go to camera roll number two, slate number two.
    Tell me, when you finally started
    seeing some of the displaced persons camps, which,
    as I remember, was maybe in August, September,
    tell me what the conditions were that you found.
    The conditions, of course, varied from camp to camp,
    but by and large, I think the following conditions were
    pretty much accurate for, if not all the camps,
    most of the camps.
    Firstly, the housing was inadequate.
    That is, they were crowded.
    The survivors were crowded in the housing.
    There weren't enough beds and mattresses to go around.
    In addition, many of the structures
    were poor wooden structures that would not be good enough
    for the oncoming winter, and some
    of the structures, some of the buildings--
    the water supply was insufficient,
    and there were often leaks.
    So generally, their housing was not what it should have been.
    Secondly, they weren't getting enough food.
    These were people who had been malnourished
    for years under the Germans.
    They were now suffering from malnutrition,
    and they weren't getting enough calories.
    When more calories were added, very often those calories
    came from the wrong sources.
    They were given a lot of potatoes and bread.
    Sometimes even that wasn't good.
    The bread was stale, and the potatoes were rotten.
    So food was a problem. .
    In addition, they lacked all kinds of things
    with which to occupy their time.
    They had no means of doing any kind of work.
    Those who had been musicians before the war
    and who are very anxious to get their hands
    and fingers on a musical instrument
    again didn't have those.
    Even those who wanted to spend some time exercising, sports,
    using what we call in America a soccer ball to play with
    didn't have those things.
    And of course, some people might say
    those were unimportant things, but for people
    who had been without everything for years, every little thing
    was important.
    Their are clothing lacked much to be desired.
    Their clothing was poor.
    It certainly was not enough for the oncoming winter.
    They needed warm clothing of all kinds, beginning with underwear
    and going all the way out to overcoats, and hats, and caps.
    Their shoes were in bad condition.
    They needed shoes of all kinds.
    They needed medical attention, although I
    must say at this point that Jewish doctors
    among the survivors, as soon as liberation took place,
    tried to take care of their fellow now-liberated inmates
    of the former concentration camps.
    But they didn't have medicines.
    They didn't have medical instruments
    or surgical instruments.
    The teeth of the survivors were in terrible condition.
    They had had no dental care all through the years of the war,
    and their teeth needed immediate inspection and treatment.
    There were dentists among the survivors who
    would have been glad to go to work on that,
    but they had nothing with which to work.
    In addition, they needed the materials
    from which to make false teeth, for example, bridges,
    and so on.
    I'm just telling you that which comes to my mind at the moment,
    but the most important things they needed
    were better housing, better food, better clothing,
    and other things.
    What about--
    Oh, excuse me.
    I've left out one of the most important things,
    and that is, when the war was over
    and they were transferred from concentration camps
    to DP camps, among the survivors, there were non-Jews.
    Many of those non-Jews were victims of the Germans,
    and they were sent home, as I told you
    a little earlier, within 90 days after liberation.
    There were other non-Jews who did not go home.
    Who were they?
    Had come from Eastern Europe.
    Most of them had come to Germany willingly
    as volunteers to help in the German war effort.
    Since many of the Germans who had
    worked in the factories, most of them,
    were now in the German armed forces,
    there was a need for additional industrial workers
    to take their places.
    And many men and women had come from the countries of Eastern
    Europe as volunteers.
    They got good pay.
    They received good food, had adequate housing,
    and they worked in the war effort.
    But as soon as the Germans lost the war,
    they pronounced themselves survivors,
    and they were placed into displaced persons camps.
    Now, the problem with that was, first of all, there
    was a built-in anti-Semitism on the part of almost all
    of these non-Jewish workers who had come to help the Germans.
    Secondly, they had been well-fed all through the years
    of the war, and if efforts were now
    to be made to give more food to the Jews
    suffering from malnutrition, they
    would only pour oil on the fires of anti-Semitism
    and would lead to disputes, and conflict, and who
    knows what else between the Jews and the non-Jews in the DP
    camps.
    So one of the first things that had
    to be done when I took my position as advisor to General
    Eisenhower on Jewish affairs was to see to it
    that his orders of late August--
    I believe August 22--
    should be carried out, namely the orders to establish
    DP camps in which the sole inhabitants
    would be Jewish survivors.
    So that was a very great need that
    had to be taken care of at the very beginning.
    What about the pass system and being locked-up?
    Oh, yes.
    There were certain camps, particularly in Bavaria
    under the supervision of the American Third Army commanded
    by General Patton, like Feldafing and Landsberg,
    where the camps were locked and where the Jewish inmates were
    permitted to leave camp only by means of a pass system that
    permitted a small percentage of them
    to go out of the camp on these passes.
    And of course, they returned to the camp
    before the end of the day.
    The Jewish survivors in the DP camps
    could look beyond the barbed wire
    that surrounded their camp.
    They could see German civilians walking on the roads.
    They knew that the Germans had been the enemy of the American
    Army, yet the Germans were free to come and go as they pleased,
    but they, who had been liberated by the American Army,
    did not have that privilege.
    They were confined behind barbed wire to a DP camp
    with only a small percentage permitted to go out
    for a few hours each day.
    Moreover, psychologically, they had been behind barbed wire
    in German concentration camps.
    Now liberated, they were still behind barbed wire.
    I think that may have been among the first, if not the very
    first complaint that I heard when
    I met with a committee of Jewish survivors
    in the Feldafing displaced persons camp.
    We're just about to the end of this roll, I'm pretty sure.
    Two, camera roll number three, interview
    continued with Judah Nadich.
    Three.
    What was the Harrison Report?
    Dean Earl Harrison of the law school
    of the University of Pennsylvania
    was appointed by President Truman
    to examine the conditions in the DP camps.
    During the month of June 1945, newspaper correspondents,
    foreign correspondents in Germany
    had sent back stories to the American press
    that there were Jewish survivors of the Nazi concentration
    camps living in displaced persons camps
    under the American Army who's living conditions were
    abominable, and that created quite a stir,
    evidently, in the United States.
    And President Truman, as I said, appointed the dean
    of the law school of the University of Pennsylvania,
    Dean Earl G. Harryman--
    Harrison.
    --Harrison-- excuse me-- to examine the camps
    and to report to him to see whether or not
    the reports of the war correspondents were accurate.
    Dean Harrison came to Europe, and he
    was accompanied by Dr. Joseph J Schwartz who
    was the European head of operations for the American
    Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
    And he visited the camps in Germany, in the American Zone,
    and he came back to Washington and submitted his report.
    The report caused a number of cables
    to go from Washington to General Eisenhower's headquarters
    in Frankfurt.
    First, General Marshall, who was chief of staff,
    got in touch with General Eisenhower
    and told him that he soon would be getting
    a summary of the report of Dean Earl Harrison, that it was not
    a good report, that it did not put the American
    Army in a good light.
    And then I believe it was on August the 10th--
    I'm certain of that date, August the 10th--
    General Eisenhower got a cable from the secretary of war--
    his name was Secretary Stimson--
    who gave General Eisenhower a summary of the Harrison Report
    and said that the report contains
    some very damaging description of conditions
    in the displaced persons camps administered by the American
    Army, and what did General Eisenhower expect
    to do to correct the situation, and also told him that,
    in due course, he would be receiving the entire Harrison
    Report.
    That report was the reason for the creation of a position that
    was rather unique in the history of the American military,
    the creation of an advisor to a commanding
    general on Jewish conditions in the area of command
    of the general.
    General Eisenhower sent back a cable the day
    after he had received the Stimpson cable
    to say that he was creating position of advisor
    to General Eisenhower, to himself, on Jewish affairs
    to be filled by an American Army Jewish chaplain.
    And that was the reason for my being
    ordered to fly from Paris, where I
    had been stationed for about a year, to Frankfurt
    to undertake my new responsibilities.
    No I'm going to jump around a little bit.
    In general, the Jewish displaced persons who didn't want
    to return to their homelands--
    where else could they go?
    What other problems did they face in terms of--
    where did they want to go?
    Did they have choices or options?
    Well, one of the questions in my questionnaire
    that I had prepared for myself before visiting any of the DP
    camps was precisely that.
    Where did these people want to go,
    assuming that there would be no barrier to their going
    to the lands they had chosen?
    Between 70 and 75% of them said they
    wanted to go to the country then known as Palestine.
    Others chose other countries, the United States, Canada,
    Australia, countries in South America,
    usually because they had relatives
    living in those countries to whom they could go.
    And what were the barriers, then, for getting people out?
    Why couldn't they just go?
    They could not go because they had no means with which to go.
    They had no funds.
    They didn't have decent clothing on their backs.
    They were, many of them, weak because of malnutrition,
    and in addition, there was the obstacle of immigration laws
    that limited the number of people
    that could arrive in any of these aforementioned countries.
    Great Britain had been appealed to just a short while
    before the time about which I speak by President Truman
    to grant special visas to 100,000 of these people.
    Great Britain didn't act upon General Truman's request.
    American immigration laws were strict and permitted
    four very small numbers to come from the lands of Eastern
    Europe, and most of the people in the concentration camps
    were Jews who had come from Eastern European lands.
    So there were all kinds of reasons for their not
    being able to go forthwith to the countries of their choice.
    Can you address differences in displaced persons,
    such as Feldafing and Landsberg, with, say,
    Bergen-Belsen, American-run camps versus British-run camps?
    I can't tell you about Bergen-Belsen.
    I can't answer that question because Bergen-Belsen was
    in the British zone of Germany.
    I wasn't allowed into the British zone of Germany
    unless I requested special permission.
    I had more than enough to do with my responsibilities
    in the American zone of Germany.
    All that I can tell you, an answer to that question,
    is that I had gotten requests from London
    from a number of leaders of the Jewish community in that city
    to send to them copies of the military orders creating
    my post and its duties to them in London
    so that they might request General Montgomery to create
    a similar position, that is, advisor to the commanding
    general on Jewish affairs, for the British zone of Germany.
    General Montgomery refused point blank.
    We've got to stop and re-load.
    Camera roll number four
    is up.
    Slate four is up.
    Can you talk a little bit about how difficult
    it would have been for an American commander
    to understand the special problems that Jewish displaced
    persons faced or American commanders in general?
    I don't mean just General Eisenhower, who
    I think had a unique vision, but I
    mean how difficult it was to understand
    what those problems of repatriation were.
    Each DP camp had a military officer in charge
    together with a UNRRA team and one or more people
    sent by the JDC, the Joint Distribution Committee.
    These officers frequently and their superiors,
    that is, captains and majors above them,
    had little knowledge about what had transpired
    during the years of the war and particularly
    no knowledge whatsoever as to what had happened to the Jews
    during the war.
    For the most part, very few of them
    knew anything at all about the treatment accorded Jews
    by the Nazis.
    I'm sorry to say that some of them
    had a little bit of antisemitism, which
    was to have been expected because members of the American
    Army were a broad cross-section of the American people.
    I think that in 1941, the year that war was declared
    in the United States, in December of that year,
    there was far more antisemitism in the United States then
    there is in 1995.
    There had been antisemitic preachers and speakers
    on the radio--
    there was no television then, but on the radio--
    week in and week out like Father Coughlin, Gerald LK Smith,
    and others.
    And I'm sure that their words, spoken week in and week out,
    had an effect.
    So to come back to the subject, there
    was antisemitism on the part of some
    if not all of American military officers, and even more,
    there was little knowledge on their part.
    In some cases, they were doing a job that they didn't like
    doing, that they didn't want to do because it wasn't, strictly
    speaking, a military position something that they
    had expected when they entered the army so very often,
    the military men placed in charge of camps
    provided problems.
    Mind you, some of them were good-hearted people,
    and they tried to do what they thought was best.
    But they were young men.
    They were dealing with people who not only had suffered
    greatly under the Germans during World War II but who,
    before the war--
    many of these survivors had been prominent people
    in their home cities.
    They were older, mature people, and yet they
    were lorded over by perhaps a young lieutenant
    in his early 20s who thought that he
    knew what was best for them.
    In addition to this, I must say that the orders that
    emanated from General Eisenhower's headquarters
    in Frankfurt were not always translated
    into action in the field, and that was
    the source of many problems.
    Do you think that the Americans accomplished something, though,
    in the running of the DP camps?
    Were there some people who ran those
    who bent rules, and did help, and did accomplish something?
    There were many Americans, many military Americans,
    who are of great help, and that should be underscored.
    There were many Americans who overlooked military regulations
    in order to help the survivors.
    In addition, the divisions that first liberated
    the camps did everything that they possibly
    could to help the stricken men, and women,
    and even some children whom they found in the concentration
    camps that they had liberated.
    I know that American Army medical men and women
    worked around the clock to help save
    the lives of the survivors in the concentration camps.
    Many of them they could not save.
    They were too far gone, and they died in the hands
    of their American rescuers.
    But doctors, surgeons, nurses worked 24 hours a day
    after their unit had captured a concentration camp in order
    to help save the Jews whom they could possibly save.
    And so all praise to them and to the many other American
    military people who helped save the lives
    of many Jewish survivors.
    May I give you just one interesting example?
    In Austria, in Salzburg, I called
    upon the G5, the officer in charge of civilian government
    in occupied countries, the G5, for Austria,
    who was General Hume, and he was of extraordinary help
    in helping the Jewish survivors in the liberated concentration
    camps of Austria.
    But there were many like him.
    So they actually bent the rules in order to help?
    They were operating from within a bureaucracy, in a sense,
    and they weren't dealing with pushing paper around?
    No, they were not.
    And if I go back a little bit, when I was still
    stationed in Paris, the Jewish underground
    that had just begun to operate in conquered Europe and in
    liberated Europe--
    one of their leaders came to see me
    to say that there were about some 600 Jews who
    were to be moved across the still-fluid borders
    from Germany into to France and down to Marseilles
    where they were to be put aboard a so-called "illegal" ship that
    was to try to run the British blockade to land
    these people, these survivors in Palestine.
    He came to see me because he lacked food
    for the people who were to be aboard ship for who knows,
    a week, 10 days, two weeks.
    It had come to my attention that there were American Army
    warehouses in Paris full of survivor food kits that
    had been dispatched to Paris for forwarding
    through Switzerland to American prisoners of war in Germany.
    The war in Europe was now over.
    These prisoner-of-war packages were no longer needed.
    American military prisoners of war
    were sent home at once as soon as they were liberated.
    These food packages were being stolen regularly,
    and they were appearing on the French black market.
    I went to the American quartermaster general in Paris,
    asked him if I could remove these prisoner-of-war packages
    from these several warehouses because a number
    of Jewish survivors are being moved from one
    place to another.
    He didn't ask me for specific answers.
    He quickly signed the order.
    He understood what I was asking him for.
    Take five.
    OK.
    Why don't you just re-summarize that last point?
    I had gotten a request from the Jewish Agency representative
    in Paris to try to get some food for a shipment of people who
    were being brought across the still-fluid borders
    from Germany into France down to Marseilles, where there were
    to board so-called "illegal" ships to try
    to run the blockade put up by the British
    and to get the survivors into Palestine.
    I had learned that there were American prisoner-of-war
    packages in several American military warehouses in Paris,
    which were no longer needed because our prisoners of war
    had already been sent back home.
    I went to the quartermaster general headquarters in Paris.
    I told him that a group of Jews--
    they were survivors, I explained--
    had to be moved from one place to another, that they required
    food for the journey, that there were
    these warehouses of American military war
    packages in our warehouses in Paris, packages that would no
    longer be needed, that were already being stolen,
    that were already appearing on the French black market.
    I asked him would he not grant permission for all
    of those military prisoner-of-war packages
    to be removed from the warehouses for this purpose,
    of feeding hundreds of Jews on this journey.
    He did not ask me any questions about where they were coming
    from or where they were going.
    He understood that he had better not ask the questions.
    He didn't want information that might bother him.
    So he bent the rules and quickly signed the order,
    and for the next several days, the trucks
    hired by the Jewish Agency representative in Paris
    were busy transporting the prisoner-of-war packages out
    of the American military warehouses
    to be used for the purpose I indicated at the outset.
    And were there lots of instances of bending the rules?
    There were a number of instances.
    I know that other Jewish chaplains of the American
    Army who had been asked to help in the same project I just
    mentioned got medical supplies and even ammunition,
    and these were all obtained from American military officers who
    gave them voluntarily, knowing the purpose for which
    these supplies were to be used.
    OK.
    Now let's talk about the problem for the survivors of finding
    families?
    What were some of the ways they went about looking--
    One of the first desires on the part of liberated survivors
    was to try to find members of their families.
    In some cases, they had left families
    behind in their native cities and towns.
    They went back, some of them, to look
    for a members of their families.
    In most cases, they returned without having found any.
    In one particular case, that of Dr. Solomon Greenberg, who
    was head of the St. Ottilien DP camp,
    which was really a hospital.
    He had left his little son with a Christian neighbor in Vilna,
    in Lithuania, and he went back.
    He found the child and brought the child back with him
    to St. Ottilien.
    Then these survivors wanted to get in touch with members
    of their families who lived in the United States,
    and I tried to be of help to them.
    In France, the survivors came to see me at Army headquarters,
    French Jewish survivors, and I sent their letters
    to the addresses of families in America that they still had.
    When I received the letters back,
    I gave them to the French Jews.
    Remember, there was still no regular email for civilians.
    In Germany, one of the first things
    that was done by the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews
    of Bavaria--
    these were Jewish leaders who had been liberated
    from the concentration camps and who were living, at first,
    in DP camps.
    They had been leaders of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.
    They knew what leadership entailed.
    They quickly created a committee in Munich,
    and one of the first things that committee did
    was to try to get a roster of the names of all
    of the survivors in the American zone of Germany.
    And they tried to forward mail from these people
    to their relatives in America through
    American Jewish chaplains.
    Many of them brought letters to me in Frankfurt
    to forward to their relatives in the United States,
    and soon my daily mail included many letters
    from people in the United States writing to their surviving
    family members in the DP camps, which
    I forwarded to the UNRRA team or the GDC people working
    in the camps to be distributed to the proper people.
    And indeed that was one of the first things
    that liberated survivors wanted to accomplish,
    to get in touch with families.
    What about in Europe?
    What kinds of things did they do there?
    Did they put lists everywhere?
    Did you see any of that?
    Did you see any reunions that were--
    I didn't see lists.
    There weren't lists posted in the DP camps.
    But within each DP camp, there was a committee elected
    by the survivors, and this committee
    would gather the names of all of the people in the camp.
    They would forward the list to the Central Committee
    of Liberated Jews in Munich, and that committee
    would then try to get in touch with relatives
    in other countries.
    And also within Germany, and also within--
    Oh, yes, within Germany itself, of course.
    That was one of the first things they
    did was to look at the list and see if they could find wives,
    husbands, brothers, sisters who had survived
    the war in other concentration camps in Germany or Austria.
    Tell me about the visit of Ben-Gurion
    and what it meant not just to you but also
    the people in the camps.
    Ben-Gurion had sent a request from Paris,
    where he was visiting, to General Eisenhower
    and to General Montgomery asking for permission
    to enter the American zone and the British zone, respectively.
    And I was called by someone in General Eisenhower's office,
    and I was asked if I knew who this man was
    who wanted to visit.
    I told the person, yes, I knew who
    he was, that he was the head of the Jews of Palestine, roughly,
    a rough description.
    I was asked whether I thought it was
    advisable to permit him to enter the American zone of Germany.
    I answered, it would be most advisable
    because his very arrival would lift
    the morale of the survivors in the DP camps.
    So permission was sent to him.
    Can we just--
    Go to camera roll six.
    Slate six is up.
    OK.
    Now we're continuing with--
    It so happened that I was to proceed to Paris for a day
    to receive the Croix de Guerre from General De Gaulle,
    and when I arrived in Paris, I called
    the office of the Jewish Agency and learned that Ben-Gurion
    was in Paris the Claridge Hotel and he would very much
    like to see me.
    After the Croix de Guerre ceremonies,
    I went to the hotel, met Ben-Gurion,
    and he asked me generally about the conditions
    of the survivors.
    And then I told him I would meet him that very night
    on the railroad platform for the American military train that
    ran between Paris and Frankfurt.
    I got there early at the railroad station,
    and I saw the American captain in charge of the train.
    He gave me a ticket for the train,
    my quarters on the train.
    My accommodation was to be half of a bedroom.
    I was to share it with another American Army major.
    When Ben-Gurion came, I was standing on the platform
    waiting for him.
    I asked him to wait, and I went to the captain of the train
    and asked him where was this gentleman to be seated.
    He asked me for his name.
    I gave it to him.
    He said, well, he was to sit in the coach.
    I told the captain that this gentleman was
    a distinguished visitor who is coming to General Eisenhower's
    headquarters, and it was not proper
    for him to sit up all night in a coach.
    The captain asked me what I thought he should do.
    I said, I think you should tell the major sharing that bedroom
    with me that, unfortunately, distinguished guests of General
    Eisenhower had arrived to take the train for Frankfurt
    and that the major would have to leave the bedroom
    and take a seat in the coach.
    That's what happened.
    And so Ben-Gurion go on and I occupied the bedroom
    on the train, and we talked until about 2:00.
    As the train was riding, well, Ben-Gurion
    plied me with questions about the displaced persons.
    We arrived in the morning at Frankfurt.
    I took him to headquarters I introduced him
    to general Walter Bedell Smith, chief of staff.
    General Eisenhower was away on one of his many field trips,
    and then I took him to his first concentration--
    to his first displaced persons camp, his first DP camp.
    The camp was called Zeilsheim near Höchst,
    not too long a ride from Frankfurt.
    I'd requisitioned a reconnaissance car.
    We arrived at Zeilsheim, drove into the camp.
    I told the driver to wait.
    I stepped out of the car, and a number of the people living
    in the DP camp came up to me.
    They knew who I was.
    I'd been there often before.
    We chatted a while, and suddenly one of them
    went over to the car, and looked inside,
    and saw this man sitting in the back seat.
    He couldn't believe his eyes.
    He looked, and then he screamed, Ben-Gurion.
    And the others came running to look,
    and they too began screaming at this familiar face.
    To them, it was unbelievable that this man who
    was the head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine,
    the head of the government of the Jews,
    the substitute for a government was there in Zeilsheim,
    in their DP camp.
    And other Jews came running, and I was afraid
    that a riot might ensue.
    So I quickly called them together, and I said to them,
    I want you to show Mr. Ben-Gurion the discipline
    of which you are capable.
    He is going to speak to all the people in the camp
    at the assembly hall.
    Now, you people run around the camp.
    Tell the people to get together in the assembly hall,
    and they will hear Mr. David Ben-Gurion speak.
    They did that.
    I drove with Mr. Ben-Gurion to the assembly hall,
    and we waited there for the people to come.
    Very soon, they pack the entire hall,
    and those who didn't get in stood outside the open windows
    and doors, straining to listen to what would happen.
    And when the place was as jammed as it could possibly get,
    I escorted Mr. Ben-Gurion out on the stage,
    and as soon as he appeared, the people rose to their feet.
    And they began to sing "Hatikva,"
    "The Hope," the national anthem of the Jews living
    in what was then Palestine.
    And as they sang, they broke down into tears,
    and Mr. Ben-Gurion did, and I did.
    And eventually, when they could get back to it,
    they finished singing, and for the first time,
    for the first time, these people who
    had gone through years of hell knew that they were free.
    Most of them had cherished the hope all through the years
    of their suffering that maybe someday they
    could get to Palestine, and here Palestine
    had come to them in the form of the leader of the Jews
    of Palestine, David Ben-Gurion.
    And throughout his talk, there were sobbing.
    There were tears, and at the conclusion, there were cheers.
    It was a scene that I shall never forget,
    and I'm sure that no one who was there will ever forget it.
    And when I met Mr. Ben-Gurion in the following years in Israel,
    he and I would often speak about that historic event
    and the assembly hall of the Zeilsheim DP camp.
    I then took Mr. Ben-Gurion back to American Army headquarters,
    and he very much wanted to visit the DP camps.
    That was his reason for coming.
    And general Walter Bedell Smith speaking for General Eisenhower
    asked Mr. Ben-Gurion if he would visit the DP camps
    and bring back a report to General Eisenhower
    together with recommendations.
    That night, Mr. Ben-Gurion and I met
    with the committee of the Jewish leaders of the Zeilsheim camp
    that we had visited earlier in the day.
    Mr. Ben-Gurion fired questions at them,
    trying to test their mettle to see what they were made of,
    what did they really want.
    And I remember he asked them a question that I knew
    was not a real question, but he wanted
    to see how they would react.
    He asked them, if the Jewish Agency were
    to give orders for all the Jews of the DP camps
    in Germany to walk out of their camps
    and to keep walking until they crossed
    the borders to Italy and to France
    and to go to the southern coast of Italy and France
    and board ships for Palestine, would you go,
    would you follow those orders despite the danger involved?
    You might be shot at.
    You might be beaten.
    Would you go?
    And they gave the answer that he had hoped for.
    They said, yes, we would go.
    We would follow your orders.
    And so he got the answer he had hoped for.
    Unfortunately, I could not accompany Mr.
    Ben-Gurion on his trip to all the other DP camps
    because at that very same time a civilian advisor to General
    Eisenhower, whose coming he had suggested as a possibility
    in his first cable back to Secretary of War Stimson--
    that gentleman was to arrive that same night,
    and I was, of course, to meet him
    and to bring him to General Eisenhower.
    That gentleman was Judge Simon H. Rifkind.
    Do you want to talk first about the complexity of--
    The problem that inserted itself into the very earliest
    consideration of how to take care of the Jewish survivors
    was one of, who are the Jews?
    Now, that's a question that has perplexed writers and authors
    for a long time.
    Are they a religion, a people, a race, a nation?
    Well, that question came to the fore
    soon after the Jews had been liberated
    from the concentration camps and methods
    were adopted that were aimed at relieving their plight.
    Now, the plans, as I mentioned earlier,
    drawn up by American military experts
    and civilian government were that people
    of different nations were to be sent back to their native lands
    within 90 days after the liberation of the concentration
    camps.
    The Jews, however, as I said earlier,
    didn't want to go back.
    They couldn't go back.
    They wouldn't go back.
    Now, when President Eisenhower--
    excuse me.
    When General Eisenhower was asked
    to appoint a liaison officer who would coordinate
    the work of helping the Jewish survivors,
    he was asked to do this by the American rabbi Stephen S
    Wise, who was in London the first days of August
    for a Zionist conference, the first
    to take place since before World War II.
    And Zionist leaders came from various free countries
    for the conference.
    Some of us, American military chaplains,
    got permission to go to London to attend the conference.
    We spoke with Rabbi Stephen S Wise,
    one of the most prominent American Rabbis of the 1920s,
    the 1930s, the 1940s, as well as with other American and other
    Jewish leaders about what we had seen of the Jewish survivors.
    Rabbi Stephen S Wise sent a cable
    through the American embassy in London
    to army headquarters in Frankfurt,
    asking General Eisenhower to appoint a liaison officer
    to coordinate the various efforts at helping
    the Jewish survivors.
    That came to army headquarters in Frankfurt
    on the seventh day of August 1945.
    General Eisenhower replied on August 9,
    two days later, saying he could not appoint a Jewish liaison
    officer.
    There were liaison officers at Eisenhower's headquarters,
    but they represented, each one, a different nation.
    There was a French liaison officer.
    There was a British liaison officer, a Polish liaison
    officer, a Czech liaison officer,
    but the Jews are not a nation.
    So he rejected Rabbi Wise's request.
    The very next day, on August the 10th,
    he got the cable from the Secretary
    of War Stimpson asking him what he
    was going to do about the report from Dean Earl Harrison.
    And it's critical-- report the critical remarks
    about the American Army's care of the Jewish survivors.
    So General Eisenhower replied that he
    was going to appoint an advisor on Jewish affairs,
    not a liaison officer, an advisor.
    And on August 22, he issued an order
    that, despite the fact that Jews had come to concentration camps
    with the nationality of their native lands,
    Polish nationality, Lithuanian nationality,
    whatever, that they were not to be regarded as stateless people
    and therefore were to be put in concentration camps
    by themselves with no other people with them, no non-Jews.
    So Eisenhower was able to bridge this gap,
    to answer this problem by appointing an advisor
    and to regard the Jews as stateless persons.
    Now, General Montgomery, when he was
    asked by the leaders of the London Jewish community
    to appoint an advisor on Jewish affairs
    replied that he couldn't because then he
    would have to appoint a Catholic advisor,
    and a Protestant advisor, and therefore he didn't
    appoint a Jewish advisor.
    And so the problem of "who were the Jews"
    reared its head throughout the discussions
    of what to do with the Jewish survivors.
    OK, we have a couple of minutes left,
    maybe enough time to talk about how
    General Eisenhower personally viewed Jews,
    maybe in comparison to General Patton.
    General Eisenhower, when he was made
    to understand what the problem was as a result of the Harrison
    Report and as a result of his own
    visiting the camps afterwards--
    and you'll forgive me if I say, as a result of the reports
    that I submitted to him of my visits to the DP camps,
    at once acted speedily to remedy the problem.
    I can say frankly and honestly that there was not
    a recommendation that I made to him to improve
    the lot of the Jewish survivors in the DP camps
    that he did not address affirmatively
    at once by issuing an order to rectify the situation.
    I call your attention particularly to the fact
    that hundreds, thousands of Jews were
    coming into the American zone of Germany
    from Poland in particular and from other Eastern lands.
    These were Jews in many cases, in most cases
    who, when Russia entered the war,
    had been uprooted from their homes and their cities
    and towns and trucked back of the Russian lines
    all the way to Asiatic Russia in order to keep them out
    of the battle zones.
    Now they were brought back by the Russians
    to their former homes only to find that their homes had
    been taken by their neighbors as well as their businesses.
    They didn't want to live anyhow and those countries
    where their families had been destroyed,
    so they began moving, at first on their own,
    across the still-fluid borders from Poland
    into Czechoslovakia, from Czechoslovakia into Austria,
    from Austria into the American zone of Germany.
    The question was what to do with them.
    Technically speaking, they were not defined as DPs.
    DPs, according to Army regulations,
    Army orders, rather, were Jewish survivors found
    in concentration camps on German soil or an Austrian soil
    and who were then placed in DP camps in Germany and Austria.
    So these Jews arriving from Poland and Baltic countries
    were technically not DPs.
    What to do with them?
    They were coming across the borders,
    and soon questions started coming
    into Eisenhower's offices.
    We discussed the matter.
    I recommended that they be admitted to our DP camps, which
    eventually would be emptied, and they
    would go to other countries.
    And Eisenhower issued an order saying
    that they were to be admitted.
    And I don't know exactly how many
    were saved in this fashion, but I
    think it must have been about 80,000 Jews.
    On the other hand, Montgomery turned back such Jews
    as they tried to enter the British zone of Germany
    and issued orders that they were to be turned back by force.
    So you see the contrast between Eisenhower and Montgomery.
    A slate, a slate, clap stick, but it has timecode on it.
    It's amazing what they--
    Patton and Eisenhower--
    General Patton commanded the Third Army,
    which had the supervision of most of the DP camps.
    The Third Army was in charge of all of Bavaria,
    and one of the first complaints given to me
    by the Jews in the DP camps in Bavaria,
    particularly in Feldafing but also elsewhere,
    was that they were not allowed to leave
    the camp as they would like.
    But only a small percentage would
    be permitted to leave each day with a pass system.
    And they objected to that because, despite the fact
    that they now were liberated, they still didn't enjoy freedom
    to come and go.
    They could look outside of the DP camp
    and see the Germans, the former enemies of the Americans,
    walking freely, but they, the victims of the Germans
    whom the Americans had liberated,
    were not free to come and go as they pleased.
    And of course, they objected vehemently
    to the barbed wire around the DP camp.
    It reminded them of the barbed wire
    around the German concentration camps.
    And one of their first requests to me
    was to try to do something to have the barbed wire removed
    and the pass system abolished.
    That was incorporated in my report to General Eisenhower
    through General Smith, and orders
    were issued to have the pass system abolished
    and the barbed wire removed.
    For next, I went from Frankfurt to Bavaria
    to visit the DP camps, Feldafing in particular,
    as well as Landsberg and the other camps.
    The barbed wire was still there, and the pass system
    was still in existence.
    I came back to Frankfurt, and I reported in due course
    to General Walter Bedell Smith, General Eisenhower's chief
    of staff.
    I visited him, I reported to him most
    of the time because General Eisenhower was often
    on field visits to the troops, and general Smith
    would then report to Eisenhower when he returned.
    I was told afterwards by General Smith
    that orders were issued to General Patton
    to come and report the very next morning at 8:00
    to General Eisenhower at his headquarters in Frankfurt.
    That meant an overnight trip, virtually,
    driving from Munich to Frankfurt.
    And the next morning, at 8:00--
    and I didn't know of this at the time--
    I walked into the anteroom that led into General
    Eisenhower's office, and there I saw General Patton sitting with
    his shiny helmet on, his ivory-handled pistols,
    one on each side, and his highly-polished belt
    and strap's.
    And I quickly beat a retreat.
    He glared at me, and I knew what was healthy for me.
    I got out of there.
    Afterwards, General Smith told me
    that General Eisenhower asked General Patton--
    George, why aren't you doing something for those Jews?
    And Patton, thinking that he was talking to his old West Point
    buddy said in a half-laughter, why the hell should I?
    And Eisenhower replied with anger, well,
    God damn it, if for no other reason then
    because I have ordered you to help those Jews.
    Not long afterwards, General Patton
    was removed from command of the Third Army,
    and he was ordered to command the 15th Army which
    consisted only of a headquarters without troops.
    The headquarters was at Bad Nauheim in Germany.
    I know that books about Patton and the movie about Patton
    showed that he was ordered out of the Third Army
    because, supposedly, he slapped a soldier
    in a military hospital in Sicily for malingering.
    But to my mind, there's always been a question.
    Why was Patton punished a couple of years later for something
    he had done in Sicily?
    My own thought is that he was punished
    because he had transgressed, he had violated a direct order
    from a superior officer, which is something
    that an American army soldier knows he must not do.
    This is a little question.
    We have just a couple of minutes left.
    Did you conduct any religious services in DP camps
    that are particularly memorable to you?
    I mean in 1945, no-- no.
    And what about marriages or anything like that?
    No.
    See, I no longer was acting as a chaplain
    once I was assigned to the post of advisor to Eisenhauer,
    and there were American army chaplains assigned
    to divisions, and units, and headquarters
    in different parts of Germany.
    The marriages I officiated at in Europe
    were in England and in France.
    In the time that you were there, just in that window,
    in 1945, did you begin to see order
    coming out of the chaos that had been there?
    Yes, I did.
    I did. .
    By the time I left Germany, which
    was toward the end of November, the third week of November
    1945, the conditions were much better in the DP camps.
    The orders of General Eisenhower had taken a long time,
    but eventually, they filter down to all the lower levels.
    And they were being carried out.
    The Jewish DPs were in separate camps now.
    They were getting more food, better housing, clothing,
    shoes.
    They even got soccer balls, and musical instruments,
    and even Yiddish newspapers from the United States,
    and books in Yiddish, and in German, and in French
    that they could read and understand.
    In addition, they had organized themselves,
    the Jewish survivors.
    They were, many of them, very capable people.
    They had been leaders of communities in their hometowns
    before the war had started.
    There was this excellent organization, the Central
    Committee of Liberated Jews, in Munich, and in every camp
    there was a committee of Jewish DP leaders.
    And by the time I went home, the situation
    was far improved over what had seen just two and a half months
    earlier.
    So the efforts of the army had good results.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    I think we should cut.
    I --while we record the sound of the room,
    and you have to be especially quiet
    because the mic is above you.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Rabbi Judah Nadich discusses being a chaplain in the US Army during WWII; being stationed in Paris, France, where among other activities, he helped 600 Jewish survivors go from Germany to illegal ships in Marseilles to get to Palestine; being asked to be the liaison officer to General Eisenhower to coordinate efforts to help the Jewish survivors in August 1945; being stationed in Frankfurt; the Jewish survivors in the American zone and the displaced persons camps (DP camps); differences between the DP camps; the unforeseen problems in the DP camps; inspecting the DP camps in August-September 1945; food and medicine in the DP camps; the running of the camps by UNRRA ,the Joint, and the military; immigration of the refugees; and visiting camps with David Ben Gurion.
    Interviewee
    Rabbi Judah Nadich
    Interviewer
    Sandra Bradley
    Date
    interview:  1995 February 15

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 videocassette (D2) : sound, color ; 3/4 in..

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    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
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    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Sandra Bradley, a film production consultant for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, conducted the interview with Judah Nadich on February 15, 1995 in preparation for the exhibition "Liberation 1945," which opened in June 1995. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a copy of the interview on August 25, 1995.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:41:36
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    Also in Liberation 1945 oral history collection

    Contains oral history interviews with 25 Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators recorded in preparation for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's exhibition, "Liberation 1945," which opened in June 1995. The collection includes interviews with: Boleslaw Brodecki, Sonia Brodecki, Jim Cacioppo, Helen Fagin, Suzanne Foldes, Nesse Godin, Henny Gurko, Irving Heymont, John Holmes, Joseph Kahoe, Henry Kanner, Abraham Klausner, John Komski, Pat Lynch, William McWorkman, James Moncrief, Judah Nadich, George Salton, Richard Seibel, Milton Shurr, Alfred Sundquist, Fella Warshau, Nick White, and Alan Zimm

    Date: 1995

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral History

    Boleslaw "Bud" Brodecki describes being an inmate in Theresienstadt at the time of liberation; being wakened in the middle of the night to people screaming; how people did not know the war had ended; hollering to the prisoners that they were free; how the prisoners were numb and did not react; how the people still did not have food and many continued to die from dysentery and other illnesses; being taken care of by the Red Cross; being liberated by the Russians; being treated for louses; getting soup and clothing; registering to go to Russia because he did not want to return to Poland; going to a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany; becoming a police officer in the camp; meeting his future wife in the camp; courting his wife while they were in the displaced persons camp; getting married in the camp and how 300 people attended, bringing food and instruments; how they got legally married in Landswood, Germany before the religious ceremony; having a son two years later; immigrating to the United States and having to get married a third time because of a legal technicality; additional details about the wedding in Landsberg; welcoming David Ben-Gurion to the camp; and trying to go to Palestine illegally.

    Oral history interview with Sonia Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Sonia Brodecki

    Oral History

    Sonia Brodecki describes how she was in three concentration camps during the Holocaust, including camps in Kindabricka, Kletendorf, and Ludwigsdorf; how in Ludwigsdorf she made ammunition and her whole body was blue-green from the powder; how she was warned on May 7, 1945 that they were going to blow up the camp, but the Russians liberated them the next day; how she had kept up her hope in the camps by envisioning her return home; how she and three friends went to Waldenburg, Germany; going home and learning her immediate family was dead; details on how she felt when she first arrived in her home city; going to the displaced persons (DP) camp in Landsberg, Germany; knitting items in the DP camp to be sent to Israel; meeting her future husband in the DP camp and their courtship; how he wrote her poems; how they married after knowing each other three months; her wedding in the camp on December 21, 1945 and how people brought baked goods and played music; their initial legal marriage in Landshut, Germany; and how the wedding was like starting over again.

    Oral history interview with Jim Cacioppo

    Oral history interview with Jim Cacioppo

    Oral History

    Jim Cacioppo describes being in Linz, Austria when there was a false report of the war’s end and how there was a celebration; driving Major Tuthill to Mauthausen; arriving at the Mauthausen concentration camp; the physical condition of the prisoners; how many of the prisoners died from eating food that was too rich; seeing bodies in the quarry; how the surviving inmates were happy to see them; being shown around the gas chambers and crematoriums by the survivors; seeing piles of weapons; guarding three of the survivors who had killed a German guard; how the engineers dug graves and civilians brought wagon loads of bodies to bury; seeing the German guards imprisoned and how he wanted nothing to do with him; and the number of surviving prisoners in the camp.

    Oral history interview with Helen Fagin

    Oral history interview with Helen Fagin

    Oral History

    Helen Fagin discusses being in her house in Radomsko, Poland when it was bombed on September 1, 1939; living in the Radomsko ghetto until the liquidation in 1942; her parents had already been sent to Treblinka; being with her two sisters until she escaped during a march to the railroad station; staying in the Warsaw ghetto and getting out with Aryan papers; being caught and released back into the ghetto; wandering in western Poland for a period of time; the arrival of the Russians; moving further east; being liberated on February 14, 1945; reuniting with her sisters after a long search and returning to their home town; feeling like they could no longer stay in Poland; not getting their possessions back from friends they had left them with; a group of young Israeli boys who had organized to help survivors and take them to Palestine; travelling through the Carpathian mountains to Czechoslovakia, then to a camp complex in Bratislava (Slovakia), and then to Austria; going to the American zone from the Russian zone; pretending to be Jewish refugees from Greece to pass over to the American zone; taking a boat on the Danube to American sector; living in the Wels displaced persons (DP) camp for a few months; going to Linz, Austria, where the DP camp was full; going to Bad Gastein, Austria administered by UNRRA in the fall of 1945; meeting a kind US soldier in Bad Gastein, Lt Kyle from Dayton Ohio, who brought her a blanket; working in the office because she spoke fluent German; being declared stateless; experiencing a period of feeling empty and depressed; learning English and becoming politicized after she heard the British would not let them into Palestine; her sister’s work at the Bad Gastein hospital; and getting a ticket to travel from Bremerhaven to New York.

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral history interview with Suzanne Foldes

    Oral History

    Suzanne Foldes (née Zsuzsi Morvai), born in 1921 in Miskolc, Hungary, discusses being separated from her mother when they arrived at Auschwitz in 1944; her mother’s death in the gas chambers; doing forced labor at the end of the war at a Buchenwald kommando run by I.G. Farben; hiding in the woods with eight others when the guards began fleeing the camp; going into the nearby village (Mishgots?) and hiding in a barn; being fed and hidden by the owner of the barn; the arrival of American troops; the mayor of the town giving them places to sleep; her memories of hearing that FDR had died; being moved into a hotel; GIs visiting them in the evenings; one Jewish GI who brought candles and Challah on a Friday night; some of the group returning to Budapest, Hungary; travelling to an area of south Hungary; going to Prague, Czech Republic and getting back her citizenship; returning to Budapest; finding her aunt and reuniting with her father; traveling on a train when Russian soldiers sexually assaulted some younger women; and getting some of their belongings back from a man who had been in the military security forces and had been kind to her family.

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral history interview with Nesse Godin

    Oral History

    Nesse Godin (née Galperin) discusses living from age 13 to 17 in various ghettos and concentration camps; being on a death march with about 600 women when the group was pushed into a barn, where they stayed for three weeks; being liberated by Russians on March 10, 1945; her physical condition upon liberation; being sent to a hospital in Chinow (Chynowie), Poland for six weeks; suffering from typhoid, dysentery, and frostbite; going with another Lithuanian woman to Łódź, Poland in May 1945; receiving help from various organizations; meeting a woman from her town who said she had been with Nesse’s mother in a camp near the Polish/German border; going to look for her mother; reuniting with her mother in Łódź; reuniting with her brother Yaheskiel Galperin in Feldafing displaced persons camp; meeting her husband Jack in the DP camp; spending five years in Feldafing, during which time she had two children; conditions in the DP camp; her memories of the formation of Zionist organizations in the DP camp; David Ben Gurion’s visit to the DP camp; the response after the creation of Israel; immigrating to the US; and settling in Washington, DC, where her mother’s sister had a small grocery store.

    Oral history interview with Henny Gurko

    Oral history interview with Henny Gurko

    Oral History

    Henia (Henny) Gurko (née Durmashkin), born in 1926 in Vilnius, Lithuania, discusses being deported from the Vilnius ghetto to Kaiserwald concentration camp for two days and then to Dünawerke for nearly a year; being sent to Stutthof, Ponewesch, and Landsberg; being forced to sing at Landsberg with six other musicians in front of the SS and others; singing the Schubert Serenade in German; walking with the orchestra for miles on Sundays to other camps and giving concerts; performing forced labor in Moll, where she was made to walk up and down a man-made mountain carrying rocks and stones; being with her sister during this time; being sent on a forced march; hearing encouragement from anti-Nazi people on some of the farms they passed; arriving at a Ukrainian camp, where the men were very rough; being liberated by the Americans; the hanging of the camp’s leader; the orchestra continuing on for years after the war; being taken to St. Ottilien, a church in Eresing, Germany; going to Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany and staying there for two years; participating in the orchestra; hearing David Ben Gurion speak; Leonard Bernstein conducting the orchestra in 1948; conditions in the displaced persons (DP) camp; learning that her brother Shimshonzaev (Vladimir Durmashkin) had been killed in a camp; finding it difficult to be happy after so many losses; the orchestra performing during the Nuremberg trials in striped jackets; and singing songs from the ghettos about children, because so many of the children were killed.

    Oral history interview with Irving Heymont

    Oral history interview with Irving Heymont

    Oral History

    Irving Heymont describes coming upon a sub-camp of Mauthausen, Gunskierken, in Austria with the United States Army 5th Infantry Regiment, K Company; visiting the camp and the conditions of the surviving inmates; not knowing about the concentration camps before seeing one; testifying to a board proceeding in Paris, France in September 1945; going to Landsberg, Germany where his unit was stationed; going to a German displaced persons camp, which was created for the survivors of Dachau’s sub-camps; the poor conditions in the camp; receiving orders from General Anslau Ralph to clean up the camp; his efforts to improve it; making the camp an all-Jewish DP camp; tensions between Jews and non-Jews; the survivors creating a camp committee, which established a hospital and schools; the nationalities of the camp’s Jews; the role of Dr. Jake Wallaisky who was part of the committee and worked for the Jewish Organization for Rehabilitation; the black market in and around the camp; preparing the camp for the winter; the crowding of the camp and the resistance of the residents to spread to another camp; his relations with the camp residents and the local Germans; holding elections in the camp; sanitation in the camp; the treatment of children in the camp; visitors to the camp, including Rabbi Abraham Klausner; the trouble caused by the camp’s truck drivers; and helping a man find his son.

    Oral history interview with John Holmes

    Oral history interview with John Holmes

    Oral History

    John Holmes, of Chicago, IL, describes coming upon a labor camp with his unit after fighting in the Hartz mountain sector; conditions of the surviving inmates; the German’s abandonment of the camp; his role as a tank commander; exchanging fire with German soldiers while saving the 14th Reconnaissance Platoon; hearing that German troops were scared of black American soldiers; delivering a letter for a woman he met in the camp to her sister in Illinois; being ordered not to feed the inmates; the impact of the experience on his life; and his combat experience.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Kahoe

    Oral history interview with Joseph Kahoe

    Oral History

    Joseph Kahoe describes being with the United States 761st Tank Battalion in Austria when he and his unit saw individuals coming out of a prison camp; being the liaison officer between his company and the regimental headquarters; the conditions of the inmates and being warned not to feed them by his superiors; only seeing male inmates; and being the commandant of the Polish displaced persons camp near Nuremberg, Germany.

    Oral history interview with Henry Kanner

    Oral history interview with Henry Kanner

    Oral History

    Henry Kanner discusses being in Auschwitz working in the laundry when he was 15 or 16 years old; the death of his family members in the Belzec gas chambers; being taken in January 1945 on a death march; conditions during the march, including the extreme cold and the deaths of many of the prisoners; killing a pig on the second day and eating it raw with other prisoners; being put in an open-air train car; arriving at Mauthausen; encountering a prisoner who had once worked for Henry’s father; the man saving Henry’s life by changing his information in the registry and telling him to pose as a Polish Catholic; noticing the SS officers either disappearing or changing into regular Wehrmacht uniforms in May 1945; three American soldiers who were shot down, beaten, and thrown into the gas chambers; the day of liberation; the capture of many of the German guards; leaving the camp on foot with another boy; walking to Linz, Austria; going to Passau, Germany, where they were captured by German farmers and escaping before being shot by the farmers; staying in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Passau (possibly Pocking DP camp); going to a DP camp in Nurnberg, Germany; working in the office with a US Army captain, who was a representative of UNRRA; conditions in the DP camp; details on the emigration of people from the camp; immigrating to the US, where he had relative; getting married and having three sons; and feeling lucky as well as guilty to have survived.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Klausner

    Oral history interview with Abraham Klausner

    Oral History

    Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner discusses being attached to the 116 Evacuation Hospital during WWII; entering Dachau concentration camp in May 1945; arriving at night, and seeing the devastation in the morning; the efforts they all made to bring the survivors back to life; helping to organize lists to name survivors as well as their places and dates of birth; how people were helped to get to Italy where they could get on ships to Palestine; finding Hungarian women survivors in a displaced persons (DP) camp in the Alps; learning how former inmates hid prayer books while living in the camps; finding a Polish Hebrew library in Munich, Germany that had been confiscated by the Nazis and taking a few books at a time and distributing them to people; finding the Klausenburg rebbe in Dachau, nursing him back to health, and bringing him to Feldafing DP camp; seeing Jewish and non-Jewish survivors in the DP camps; the administration of the camps; the DP camps Feldafing and Landsberg am Lech; the issues with the mixed nationalities in the camps; segregation in the camps; the lack of freedom in the camps; the compulsion people felt to find their family members; a center that was set up in Munich where people could search for family on lists; the efforts to reconnect children with their parents; finding a printer in Landsberg and getting books published and distributed; helping to establish a newspaper in Feldafing along with journalist Shalatin Levy from Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania); meeting with David Ben Gurion in Munich, and taking him to St. Ottilien hospital, Landsberg, and Feldafing; and working near Dachau for several years with the US Army.

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

    John Komski discusses being taken to Dachau concentration camp from camp Hersbruck and staying there for 20 days; being made to shower, but not being given anything to wear except a blanket; being in an area separated from the rest of the camp; finding on April 29, 1945 that the camp gates were open to the rest of the camp; finding clothes and standing for 2-3 hours for roll call, but no SS came; how the fighting began in the afternoon and then there was silence; some prisoners running to the gates, and some getting guns; a US soldier who came into the area and commanded that the guards surrender or be shot; how thousands of prisoners gathered and many had flags of different countries; seeing a glorious sunset with dark clouds in the east; some people lighting fires and cooking food; many of the former inmates dying from eating too much; being moved to a displaced persons (DP) camp; not being allowed to leave the DP camp; being very sick and moved to an American hospital; going to a DP camp outside of Munich in June 1945; UNRRA officials forcing people to be repatriated to their native countries; going to Garmisch, Germany; meeting an artist who was a former prisoner of Auschwitz, and receiving help from him; meeting his future wife; drawing and painting scenes from the concentration camps; and immigrating to the US.

    Oral history interview with Pat Lynch

    Oral history interview with Pat Lynch

    Oral History

    Pat Lynch discusses being an American nurse attached to the 123rd Field Evacuation Unit during WWII; being near a subcamp of Dachau; how the nurses did not go into Buchenwald because the conditions there were too terrible; going into the camp and being shocked by how horribly sick the survivors were, with typhus and TB; Germans from the area who were conscripted to work in the kitchens and laundries of the various DP camps; the young Hitler youth who marched in cemeteries; moving from tents to real buildings in the summer of 1945; praying often to St. Jude about the conditions; seeing a big difference in some of the survivors between March and August as they regained some strength and bodyweight; seeing a lot of Russian children in the summer; treating some pregnant women; being told that the women officers in the camps were often more cruel than the men; and her long working days during that time, which prevented her from speaking more with the patients.

    Oral history interview with William McWorkman

    Oral history interview with William McWorkman

    Oral History

    William McWorkman discusses being with the 12th Armored Division during WWII; going through Weilheim, Oberau, Innsbruck and south to Bringer Pass; entering into Landsberg concentration camp; seeing hundreds of dead prisoners; interacting with the former prisoners; the arrival of the 493rd Field Artillery Battalion; being told not to get too close to the prisoners because of typhus; giving the former prisoners clothing and food, but not too much food; the battalion surgeon who said not to overfeed them or they would die; the attempt to triage the survivors; General Allen, commander of the 12th division, entering the camp and later ordering all males in nearby village to walk through the camp; and his regret that they did not spend more time comforting the living.

    Oral history interview with James Moncrief

    Oral history interview with James Moncrief

    Oral History

    James Moncrief discusses being a Lt. Colonel during WWII; working as a staff officer in general headquarters when the 11th Army overran Buchenwald; leaving supplies and a medical company at the camp; being sent to the camp by Captain Bennett; conditions in the camp; the crematoria; and the US soldiers’ awareness of the camps.

    Oral history interview with George Salton

    Oral history interview with George Salton

    Oral History

    George Salton discusses being a prisoner of the Nazis; being liberated from camp Wöbbelin in the spring of 1945 and his memories of that day; the prisoners’ fears that the Germans would return; a soldier who shared his rations with George; his attempts to contact his relatives, including his brother; going to the British zone in Lübeck; staying in the Neustadt displaced persons camp (DP camp); the different refugees in the camp; being sponsored by his relatives for immigration to the United States; living in Deggendorf, Germany until his paper to the US came through in 1947; and seeing German teenagers in Deggendorf before he emigrated and his feelings envy, pain, and loneliness, knowing he would never have normal teenage years.

    Oral history interview with Richard Seibel

    Oral history interview with Richard Seibel

    Oral History

    Colonel Richard R. Seibel, US Army veteran and participant in WWII, discusses being on a patrol when he came across the concentration camp Mauthausen; his lack of knowledge about concentration camps before seeing Mauthausen; reporting back to General Daiger who asked him to take supreme command of camp; the two Americans in the camp, one of whom was Lt Jack Taylor of the OSS; his memories of the camp; seeing corpses piled up; the unrest in the camp and division between the inmates; a former prisoner, Premislav Dobius, who was the interpreter for army; how the Jewish survivors wanted to be separated by their religion, not by nationality as the others were; members of a Swiss Zionist organization who arrived demanding the Jewish survivors be given their own space; the prevalence of typhus and TB; the deaths of hundreds of people after liberation; 400 Wehrmacht soldiers who were brought in to repair the sewage and water system; the conditions of women prisoners; the camp’s former SS commander Franz Ziereis who was absent from the camp before liberation; and the capture of Ziereis.

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral history interview with Milton Shurr

    Oral History

    Milton Shurr, US Army veteran and participant in WWII, discusses being part of a displaced persons team (DP2 unit) attached to the 1st Army beginning in the fall of 1944; being in Verviers, Belgium; his previous work as the head of a Jewish community counsel in Oklahoma City; the approximately 500 displaced persons; contracting hepatitis; rejoining the regiment in April 1945 in Wetzlar, Germany; going to Buchenwald; seeing barracks with two-story bunks and 6 people in each slot, buildings full of clothes and shoes, and piles of bodies; disinfecting survivors with DDT; the high rate of death for survivors; one of his colleagues who spoke German and acted as an interpreter, and how this affected the officer’s mental health; his work with administrative tasks; Allied prisoners being sent home; the desire for many survivors from eastern countries to not return home; the work of the Red Cross to reunite families; being told by the Joint to take care of about 2000 children; being in Buchenwald until the area of Thuringia was turned over to the Russians; and paying the Poles in the DP camp with cigarettes to run trucks.

    Oral history interview with Alfred Sundquist

    Oral history interview with Alfred Sundquist

    Oral History

    Dr. Alfred B. Sundquist, a major and physician with the XVIII Airborne during WWII, discusses being stationed a few miles from Ludwigslust, Germany; being instructed to go to a small concentration camp (Wöbbelin) and report back; arriving in a jeep, and seeing that the Germans had already left; conditions at the camp, which took up a few acres and had no crematoria and a couple of barracks; seeing corpses piled up and prisoners with striped uniforms who were too weak to get up; seeing the physical results of starvation in the former prisoners, including the loss of teeth and swollen legs; seeing evidence of cannibalism; writing a report recommending survivors be sent to apartments in Ludwigslust; many survivors dying from complications from starvation; the 82nd Airborne connecting to the 18th Airborne; the civilian Germans from the town being made to dig graves and attend funerals for the camp’s victims; taking pictures of the camp (he donated these pictures to USHMM); his thoughts on the local Germans of Ludwigslust; and his thoughts on Hitler’s mental health.

    Oral history interview with Fela Warschau

    Oral history interview with Fela Warschau

    Oral History

    Fela Warschau discusses being in a labor camp outside Hamburg at end of March 1945; being forced to clean streets after the city was bombed; being taken by train to Bergen-Belsen; the conditions in the camp; staying together with two friends and her sister; sharing a single potato amongst themselves for several days; liberation; survivors being disinfected and given different clothes; staying in Bergen-Belsen for two months; German doctors and nurses who were brought to the camp to work; her feelings of satisfaction seeing Germans being forced to help bury the dead; finding two of their cousins; hearing that her father had died at Auschwitz; going to Feldafing displaced persons camp; life in the DP camp; signing up for ORT courses; the tendency for survivors to marry each other; getting married in 1946; the differences between the American and British leaders of the DP camps; the children in the DP camp; and her thoughts on emigration.

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral History

    Irene Weber discusses being liberated from a prison in Czechoslovakia at the end of WWII; the Russians who liberated the prison; being deloused and sent to a hospital; being given a change of clothes and a little money; her decision to not return to Poland; staying in an apartment with a friend; registering as a Czech citizen; going to Prague in an attempt to leave the country after the communists took over; going to the American Zone of Germany; staying in Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp; the crowded conditions in the DP camp; living in Rosenheim, Germany; working on a farm to pay rent; attending an ORT school for nursing in Föhrenwald; graduating and then working in a hospital in the DP camp in Pokcing where she cared for survivors; continuing to live in Rosenheim and taking the train to get to her job; and receiving assistance from UNRRA and the Joint even while she was working as a nurse.

    Oral history interview with Nick White

    Oral history interview with Nick White

    Oral History

    Nick White discusses being with the VI Corps, part of 7th Army, when he saw Dachau for the first time on April 29, 1945; going to the camp with his colleague Englehardt, who was a photographer and took pictures of the camp; seeing a trench in the camp filled with dead SS soldiers killed by American infantry which had been in the camp before them; being overrun by the survivors who were joyous to see them; giving out caramels and k-rations to the survivors; conditions in the barracks; a large room that led from the gas chambers where several thousand bodies were stacked up; the high rate of mortality for the survivors after liberation; finding 39 boxcars with corpses inside; and his incomprehension of the inhumanity they found.

    Oral history interview with Alan Zimm

    Oral history interview with Alan Zimm

    Oral History

    Alan Zinn discusses being sent from Buchenwald in January 1945 to Dora concentration camp; conditions in the camp; seeing American planes at end of March going to bomb Nordhausen; being taken by train for six days to Bergen-Belsen; the Russian POWs who set up a tribunal in the camp after liberation and executed about 50 SS guards; being liberated on March 29, 1945; the delousing of the inmates; the deaths of many survivors from typhus and other diseases; returning to Łódź, Poland in June 1945; meeting his future wife in Łódź; going with his wife and her two sisters to the displaced persons camp in Landsburg, Germany; reuniting with his brother; and immigrating to the United States.

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