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Oral history interview with Abraham Klausner

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1995.H.1023.9 | RG Number: RG-50.054.0009

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    Oral history interview with Abraham Klausner
    Transcript
    OK.
    Today is October 21, 1992.
    I am Cheryl Miller here at the Simon Wiesenthal
    Center in Los Angeles.
    Could you please state your name and where and when
    you were born?
    My name is Klausner, Abraham Klausner.
    I was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1915.
    What was your father's name?
    Joseph.
    And your mother's name?
    Tillie.
    Did you have any brothers or sisters.
    Oh, yes.
    I have brothers and sisters.
    I have one sister--
    two sisters, actually have passed on.
    But I have at the present time two brothers and a sister.
    What are their names?
    In Denver, Colorado and Dallas, Texas.
    These are the ones that are still living?
    You have two brothers and one sister still alive?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And could you tell me their names?
    Yeah my brother is Aaron, and I have a sister Sylvia,
    another brother David.
    What did your father do for a living?
    He was a merchant in Denver.
    What did he sell?
    Dry goods.
    Did he have a store?
    Yes, he had a store, with a variety of items
    and made a living.
    Now you said you were born in Memphis.
    When did you move to Denver?
    I was a youngster.
    I must have been six or seven years old.
    The family migrated, so to speak, from Memphis to Denver,
    and that's where I grew up.
    Was your father's business a very prosperous business?
    It was a successful business.
    We lived well in terms of our needs were taken care of.
    It wasn't luxury of any sort.
    But I don't look back upon it as any kind
    of an affliction of any kind.
    We lived nicely.
    Was your family an Orthodox family?
    Yes, traditional.
    Yeah.
    Could you maybe describe for me what a typical Shabbat was
    like when you were growing up?
    Well Shabbos service, first the family went to the synagogue
    for the service.
    And then came home.
    My mother had worked all day usually on Friday
    to prepare the Sabbath meal.
    And it was the typical Sabbath table,
    with the white cover, and the candles, and the kiddush,
    and the traditional foods.
    Was there a large Jewish community
    in Denver at that time?
    Oh, yes.
    Denver had a kind of a west side of Denver
    was quite a Jewish community with a number of synagogues,
    and then usual establishments that serve Jewish interests.
    It was a rather wholesome kind of a Jewish community.
    Did you attend public school or did you attend strictly
    a Jewish school?
    No.
    No, I went to public school and in various public schools.
    And then at the age of about 14, I left Denver and I went to New
    York to attend the yeshiva, Yeshiva [NON-ENGLISH]..
    And I was there for a while.
    And I actually finished my high school experience
    at the academy there, as they called it, and then
    came back to Denver to attend the University of Denver,
    where I took a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree.
    And after that, I left for the Hebrew Union College
    in Cincinnati, Ohio.
    And from then on, my lot was cast in the reform rabbinate.
    When you were still in Denver, before you left for New York,
    did you experience any antisemitism
    from the non-Jewish classmates in your school?
    No.
    No?
    No, I don't recall.
    In fact, in all my life I don't recall a critical experience
    in which antisemitism was a factor.
    So it sounds like Denver was a rather modern town
    in that respect.
    Well, at least my life was not buffeted by any
    of these negative factors.
    I was a good student, so to speak, at the university,
    a bit of a maverick.
    And I took my master's in a year after my bachelor's degree,
    and found that the only drawback was that we were then
    going through a depression.
    But even the depression did not impose itself upon me
    in such a way as to create serious problems.
    I had to go into work.
    I was able to work.
    And I found some difficulty in paying the tuition for school.
    But eventually, I paid it.
    And I made my way.
    I would say it was a more or less pleasant experience.
    Yeah.
    What did you get your master's degree in?
    I took a bachelor's in philosophy
    and a master's in education.
    And you said you were able to get a job.
    Was that a teaching position?
    Yes, I was teaching while I was going to school.
    While the depression was on, things
    were happening in Europe.
    Hitler was coming to power in Germany.
    Yes.
    Did you hear what was happening over there,
    or did you read about it in the newspapers?
    I would assume so.
    I just at this moment can't recollect a moment, or a place,
    or a headline.
    I do remember a few little incidents that occurred,
    which indicated that things were not going well
    on the European scene.
    But I wasn't into it in the sense
    of knowing and being familiar, or following the reports on it
    in any--
    the only newspaper we had was the Denver Post.
    And whatever the Denver Post wrote I read or didn't read.
    But I wasn't into it, so to speak,
    knowing what was happening.
    Yeah.
    So throughout the '30s, it sounds
    like your life was pretty much teaching,
    and studying and learning.
    That's right.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    And you stayed in Denver that entire time?
    Until I received my master's degree.
    Immediately thereafter, I left for the Hebrew Union College.
    Right, in Cincinnati.
    Yeah, OK.
    Do you remember hearing about Hitler invading Poland?
    Pardon?
    When the war started, do you remember
    what you heard when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939?
    I remember Hitler's-- whether it was you want to call it
    an invasion or not, moving into Austria.
    And that was something that I remember very clearly,
    the Anschluss with Austria.
    I don't know whether I followed each movement, and so forth.
    But there was the general picture
    that things were moving abysmally
    in terms of the European scene.
    But again, it would be hard for me to pinpoint just
    how I reacted and when, in terms of the whole Hitler phenomenon.
    Since I was a student at the Hebrew Union College
    during this period, our class, which was the 1943 class,
    was rushed.
    Because we were designated as replacements
    for rabbis who were going into the chaplaincy corps.
    And at that point, it became an immediate concern
    because our careers were now affected by what was happening.
    So in 1943, was that when you graduated?
    That's when I was ordained, yes.
    Where did you go then?
    Well, we were not able to apply for the chaplaincy
    at that moment because of military requirements.
    The requirements were that you had
    to have two years of experience.
    But somehow in the process of figuring time,
    the two years was reduced to one,
    which meant that if you served in a congregation for a year,
    you then could apply for the chaplaincy.
    And so I went to New Haven, Connecticut for a year.
    That was an academic year.
    And while there, I applied for the chaplaincy.
    And by the time my academic year was over,
    I was accepted into the military.
    Which branch of the service?
    The army.
    The army?
    Yes.
    So this would be 1944.
    That would be in 1944, yes.
    So what happened to you once you are accepted into the army?
    Well, there was a process at that time.
    I reported to Harvard University, where the chaplains
    school was situated, and took the course in chaplaincy work.
    And after the course, I was sent down
    to Louisiana, Camp [PLACE NAME] as a holding company
    in terms of all chaplains being sent
    there awaiting assignments.
    Then I was sent from there to Atlanta, Georgia
    to the Lawson General Hospital, where I was there
    for a short period, and then shortly thereafter processed
    for shipment abroad to Europe.
    I was part of what you might call an Officers
    Corps, a replacement corps, as we were a number of officers.
    I don't remember how many of different branches
    which were being sent to Europe in order to replace others.
    And we traveled, and came actually to England,
    to Scotland.
    From Scotland down to England and then
    over to Le Havre in France.
    And from Le Havre, we began to move towards Germany.
    [? Dallon ?] was the community that we finally ended up in.
    It was right in back of the pocket.
    The famous pocket had just been attacked by Patton,
    and successfully brought to an end.
    And then in different stages, I moved about Europe
    until I ended up in a hospital in France.
    And the day after I arrived at the hospital,
    an order came relieving me of that assignment
    and asking me or ordering me to report to the 116th evacuation
    hospital.
    And I wasn't aware where the 116th might be located.
    And I got into a bit of a hassle with the military
    for the assignment.
    I had just arrived in the hospital the day before.
    I even went to Paris to argue the point.
    And the chaplain in charge of personnel
    there pulled out a wire, and he said, read it.
    And I read it.
    And it said prisoner of war cage overrun, many Jewish prisoners,
    chaplain needed.
    Well, I kind of argued a bit.
    I knew it wouldn't do any good, but for the sake of arguing.
    I said, it's an impossible situation.
    You couldn't have that many Jewish soldiers
    in any one camp.
    But anyway, that was the beginning of my German career.
    Because the 116th turned out to be in the Dachau concentration
    camp.
    Had you heard about concentration camps
    before you were actually sent to the evac hospital there?
    Yes, in traveling around Europe in different assignments,
    I would run into Jewish refugees in one category or another.
    And they would tell their stories.
    But even then, I hadn't gotten a picture of the camps
    as they were.
    They were stories, and they were told
    under different circumstances in different ways.
    And you just got the impression that the Jews were oppressed,
    and were constantly in flight, but nothing
    in depth of any kind.
    Were you taught how to deal with any survivors
    while you were back in chaplain school or in the United States?
    No.
    No I never had any, no.
    You weren't given any training specifically
    on what to do in case a refugee--
    Oh, no.
    This was never part of the chaplains course, no.
    So when you got to Europe, when you got to Germany,
    it was basically you were on your own
    in terms of learning how to deal with the problem.
    That is right.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    Tell me about when you were actually
    stationed at the 116th evac.
    Pardon?
    Tell me about what your first days were like at the hospital
    near Dachau.
    Well, the hospital was not near Dachau.
    The hospital was in Dachau.
    The hospital, what had happened was
    that when the camp was overrun, the Rainbow Division
    was the unit that took Dachau.
    Then the army immediately brought
    in a number of hospital units, the 116th, the 127th, and then
    another hospital unit for a nearby camp called Allach.
    Now, when I came into the camp, I came into the hospital.
    And what had happened after the liberation
    is that the camps were closed.
    In other words, it wasn't the kind
    of a liberation where you say you're free now,
    and go wherever you want to go, and so forth.
    It was a situation where the army came in and locked
    the camps immediately, so that the people who
    were prisoners of the Nazis were now not prisoners,
    but were confined.
    They were behind barbed wire and there were guards.
    Some got out of the camp during the hectic first days
    and so forth.
    But basically, the camp was locked.
    Now, a great number of the people were ill.
    And a lot of them in the first days of liberation
    stuffed themselves with food, and whatever
    they could get their hands on.
    And this turned out to be detrimental to them.
    And so the hospitals began to treat the liberated, which
    were great numbers.
    And my first day in Dachau was rather dramatic,
    because I felt strange to this scene.
    It was overwhelming.
    And I was a bit envious of the doctors, nurses, and so forth.
    At least they had some kind of expertise to do something.
    And my question was, what was I going to do?
    I wasn't going to start preaching to them
    or instructing them in any kind of wisdom
    or anything of that sort.
    I felt completely inadequate.
    In fact, the first morning as I stood in the so-called compound
    of the camp, looking towards a gate, a wire gate where
    there were two soldiers with the pump guns, DDT pump guns.
    Because as you walked in, you had to be pumped or covered
    with DDT powder.
    And I stood there watching the military,
    the members of the medical team walk in and out.
    And I just didn't know what to do.
    But at one point, I had to say to myself,
    well stop playing games with yourself.
    Do something.
    And so I walked over to the gate.
    And I lifted my arms out, and the guns
    were placed in my sleeves, and the powder and the
    was pumped in.
    And the cloud of powder formed, and I walked in that cloud.
    And now I was in the world of the liberated.
    And I still didn't know what to do.
    And there were a row of barracks.
    And so I started to walk down the row,
    and looked at each barrack.
    And finally I stopped at one and decided
    I was going to walk into that barrack.
    And so I walked up the door, and it
    led into a little kind of an alcove, and then another door.
    And there they were.
    The barracks was the typical German barracks with nothing
    in it except shelves.
    And it was a desperate scene.
    The place had hardly an opening for light to come in.
    And you could see all the little dirt,
    fuzz that climbs up on beams of light
    as it breaks in here and there.
    Stop for tape change.
    OK.
    OK.
    You had seen the light coming in.
    And I just stood there.
    And I was wearing a military uniform,
    with the chaplain's insignia.
    But no one seemed to pay any attention
    to me, a strange world and figures were moving around
    as if in a shadow.
    And finally, somebody walked over to me, stared at me,
    saw my insignia.
    And simply asked me a question out of nowhere.
    He looked at me.
    He said, do you know my uncle in Toledo?
    So I kind of hemmed and hawed a bit.
    And said that I wasn't from Toledo.
    But I didn't want to discourage him in terms of his question.
    I wanted to do something.
    But there was nothing I could do.
    Well another figure came.
    And another question, and the questions
    fell into that kind of a pattern.
    They were asking me if I knew certain people.
    And while this was going on, a voice
    came from one of the shelves.
    And it was a thin, crying voice.
    And it also asked the question, do you know my brother?
    And when that voice came forward,
    I couldn't see the figure.
    The room was too dark.
    The other figures seemed to move aside
    to let the voice come forward.
    There was a certain respect for the voice.
    And the voice began to tell me that he had a brother.
    And he left the village where they
    lived, and came to the United States, and became a rabbi.
    And would I know the brother?
    I asked him for the name.
    As soon as he gave me the name, I said to him,
    I know your brother.
    He is here in Europe.
    And I'm going to bring him to you.
    His immediate response was to say to me, don't do that to me.
    Don't give me information just to comfort me.
    So I said, no.
    He's here.
    I'm going to bring him to you.
    And I couldn't handle it any further.
    And so I turned and left.
    I walked out immediately out of the barracks.
    And that was the turning point in my life.
    Because he had told me that there was something
    that I could do.
    See, I knew the brother.
    I didn't know exactly where he was.
    He came over in the same company I came in.
    And I would find him.
    And if that's all I did was to go out and find the brother
    and bring him to his brother, but that was the turning point.
    I knew then when I walked out of that barracks
    that there was work to be done.
    And I was going to do it.
    That's where it all began, that little incident.
    How long were you stationed in Dachau?
    I stayed in Dachau until we closed Dachau.
    I became an important factor in the whole Dachau scene,
    because of the number of incidents that took place.
    And my relationship with the commanding officers
    was such that I was able to accomplish the things that I
    set out to accomplish.
    I then began to set objectives or goals for myself.
    For example, I wanted to know who was in the camp.
    I wanted to have a consensus.
    And so I got people together.
    And we were going to find out who they
    were, and collect the names.
    I had to get paper.
    I had to get all the materials necessary,
    and get the people who would do this.
    In the meantime, Dachau being a very dramatic representation
    of what the Nazis did in terms of concentration camps,
    soldiers were coming from all over Germany
    to visit, to see the crematorium,
    and so forth, and so on.
    And many of them would find me, and give me
    information about what's going on in Germany.
    And so now I began to collect materials.
    I was told there was an incident in this town or that town,
    and I made a mental note that somehow I
    was going to look into it and so forth.
    And the picture began to develop of what
    was happening all over Germany.
    I was simply in Dachau at the moment.
    The first thing I heard was that just down the road
    was another camp called Allach.
    And I went down to the camp.
    Just let me back up a bit.
    Since many of the people who were in the hospital
    were dying, the majority were going to die.
    They weren't going to be saved.
    Part of my job was to bury the dead.
    Now, in the first days, the dead were
    many laying all over the place, especially
    where the boxcars came in with them
    from different parts of Germany.
    And the military decided that these would
    be buried in a common grave.
    And so we have a number of common graves located not far
    from Dachau.
    I tried to get a recognition of the graves
    and some kind of markers to be placed on them.
    But I don't know whether that's ever been done.
    But we'll get back to that.
    After we had buried the masses, so to speak in common graves,
    we began to bury them in single graves.
    And the procedure was for prisoners of war
    to go out to the Munich cemetery and dig rows of graves,
    just keep digging.
    And during the day, the trucks would take the bodies out
    and place them each one in a grave.
    And then I would come out in the evening,
    and I would recite a service, say some words,
    and recite the Memorial Kaddish.
    And nobody was there.
    I was the only one present at this service.
    Except a short while afterwards, one of the liberated
    asked me if he could come with me.
    And gladly.
    And I would take him.
    And he asked if he could recite a prayer,
    or recite the Kaddish.
    And so we both began to share this.
    When I heard that there was a camp nearby, I went there
    and I walked into the camp.
    It was a desolate place.
    I couldn't see anybody around.
    And I walked into the main building.
    And the main building had been turned into a hospital.
    And the rows, and rows, and rows of beds, and there
    was hardly a sound in the room, no one moving
    around, no doctor, no nurse, just the beds.
    And at the further end of the room, I did see a figure.
    And he began to walk towards me.
    And I walked towards him.
    We met in the middle of the room.
    And he happened to be a doctor in charge of this operation.
    And I said to him, well who are these?
    He says these are the ones you're burying every day.
    He says, you're going to bury all of them,
    they're all going to die.
    Well, I became very friendly with this doctor, captain.
    And after a few days, I asked him
    if he would travel with me out of Dachau
    and visit the places now that I had names.
    And so we now started traveling through Germany,
    finding the pockets of Jews, wherever
    they were, and began to identify them, have them draw up lists.
    That became the beginning of the Sharit Ha-Platah volumes.
    Wherever we went, we made lists, and found
    out what the problems were.
    And there were severe problems because in the process
    of the United States Army coming across Germany,
    and here we begin to come face to face with part of procedure,
    which created problems.
    When a military unit would come across a place like Tutzing,
    for example, towns, Southern Bavaria.
    And they found a pocket of Jews, they really
    didn't know what to do with them.
    The army was not equipped to handle liberated peoples
    or liberated Jews.
    And so what would happened would be is the commanding officer
    would ask an officer or enlisted men
    to stay back while the unit went forward
    and take care of these people.
    In most cases, the people that were dropped off, officers
    and enlisted men, to take care of the people
    were insensitive, sometimes crude,
    and didn't really know how to deal with the Germans
    because that's the only way you could take care of them.
    You had to go to the Germans and say,
    we have 300 or 400 liberated.
    We need a place for them.
    The Germans are simply are not going to say,
    come into our homes.
    And they'd find a place which was usually substandard.
    And they'd be crowded into those places.
    And then with a few exceptions, the officers or enlisted men
    would then go about their own perverse business
    with German women, and liquor, and so forth.
    And the people would be left to themselves.
    That was part of the beginning of the problem.
    Furthermore, the people were still confined.
    They had no rights to move about and so forth.
    But we traveled.
    And we collected the names.
    We found out where the people were.
    We designated them now.
    All this is a matter of record.
    All you have to do is take the first volume of the Sharit
    Ha-Platah and in the first pages,
    you will find the list of all the places
    that we had found, identified, and the names of the people
    who were there at that time.
    And at each camp, we dealt with the problems of the people.
    Down in Mittenwald, for example, we had a serious problem
    because the military under the United States supervision
    were actually shooting at people with live ammunition.
    And the reason was that they were
    rebelling against the conditions and the lack of food.
    And we had to concern ourselves with this situation,
    meet with the commanding officer,
    and try to resolve the situation.
    Each place we went had a problem of its own.
    We found a group of Hungarian women
    way up in the mountains, just lost in the mountains,
    and so forth.
    But those are all individual stories
    of what happened as we traveled.
    Had anyone asked you to travel to the various camps?
    Pardon?
    Had anyone requested that you travel to these camps?
    Oh, no.
    No.
    It was an improper action on my part.
    I had no authority to travel and to do these things.
    I just did it.
    That's what I thought I should be doing.
    Now, a second moment that occurred,
    which again determined my role, was that after a month
    or so of this kind of work, a notice went up on the bulletin
    board at Dachau that the 116th evacuation
    hospital was to leave Dachau.
    Technically, these hospitals should not
    have been in Dachau because their designation is
    to treat military.
    But this was the exception that was made in Dachau.
    I don't know of any other exceptions that were made.
    And the 116th had come up all the way from Italy, from Anzio.
    All the other units had been relieved
    of their responsibilities and you had
    new administrations coming in.
    But they were still working.
    And the army felt that they could
    relieve Dachau of the 116th, and for the time being
    keep the 127th.
    So a notice went up on the bulletin board
    advising the staff of which I was a member that one
    half would be leaving first, in the first unit,
    for a rest center.
    They were going to now be compensated for what they did.
    They did a good job in Dachau, no question about it.
    And I was in the first section.
    And so that day when the trucks rolled around,
    I got on a truck, and moved out of Dachau.
    That was the end of my career in Dachau.
    I came in May and left in--
    of course, don't remember the exact date, but sometime
    the end of June I would say.
    And that was a miserable trip emotionally.
    First of all, I felt that I wasn't entitled to rest.
    I hadn't been with the unit through their experiences.
    And I hadn't done what they did and so forth.
    And here I was being told, here, go and rest, and have
    a good time, so to speak.
    And I wasn't able to communicate with anyone in the unit.
    I felt that they were icons.
    They were things that you looked up to for what they did.
    And here was I with no credentials.
    So we got to this place, a beautiful recreation hotel.
    And the trucks began to roll in one after another.
    And there was a circle of some sort in which they parked
    and each truck unloaded.
    Soldiers, everyone jumped off rushed
    towards the hotel to make sure you get the best
    accommodations.
    And I held back.
    And when all the trucks were unloaded
    I was still left on the circle.
    And now the trucks began to move around the circle.
    And they were going to return to Dachau to pick up
    the second half of the unit.
    And so the first truck left, the second.
    There were six, as I remember.
    The sixth truck was now in front of me.
    And I can't tell you why or what.
    I grabbed the tailgate of the sixth truck.
    I was back in the truck and back to Dachau.
    When I got to Dachau, I jumped off the truck
    before the trucks entered the camp
    and waited until the trucks were loaded and left.
    When the rest of the 116th had left,
    now I went back into Dachau.
    I went over to the 127th evac hospital.
    And I said to them, well I'm going
    to be reassigned to the 127th.
    And the commanding officer said, well that's all right find
    a place.
    There were no accommodations.
    We didn't live in rooms or have beds or anything.
    You found a spot someplace.
    You took one of these folding cots.
    You opened it up.
    That's where you live.
    I didn't have any properties of any kind.
    And now I was with the 127th, but technically I was AWOL.
    I was unassigned now.
    And that began a second phase of my career.
    Now that I knew I was unassigned and had no authority,
    I felt free to do whatever I wanted.
    And now I began to continue the work
    that I did, but in earnest.
    And I came to know what the problems were,
    serious problems, and pursued them.
    Now in this process I came upon a hospital.
    It wasn't really a hospital.
    It was a monastery called St. Ottilien.
    And I found a small group of Jews
    there, and came to know how they got there and so forth.
    The German army, the Wehrmacht, had
    taken over the main sanctuary of the monastery
    and used it as a Wehrmacht hospital.
    So there was a kind of a natural situation where
    these Jews who were brought to a hospital
    had been brought to this place.
    And I decided, together with the doctor,
    the Jewish doctor that was in charge, Dr. Zalman Grinberg
    that we would turn the St. Ottilien into a Jewish hospital
    because we had no hospitals.
    And once the medical units were out of Dachau,
    there was no medical service for the people.
    The army was not going to provide medical service
    for the people.
    It wasn't charged that way, and I don't
    believe it was in its purview.
    And so through a series of steps,
    I managed to get the Germans out.
    We kept the German doctors because we needed the doctors.
    In the meantime, my relationship with the commanding officer
    of Dachau became one in which we communicated with each other.
    We expressed ourselves.
    He would ask me to come to his quarters in the evening
    and over this new warm beer which I had to stomach.
    He would tell me about his feelings, and his anger,
    and his compassion for the people,
    a wonderful human being.
    And eventually he received an order
    to close Dachau to the liberated,
    and turned it into a prisoner of war
    cage for another court, a lower court to try Germans who had--
    Tape change.
    OK.
    They were going to turn Dachau into a prisoner of war camp.
    No, no.
    What we were able to do then after we turned the St.
    Ottilien into a hospital, I was able to take
    all the sick out of Dachau.
    I was given an ambulance corps.
    I was given all the support, the instruments that I needed.
    And turned St. Ottilien into--
    well, it became our large Jewish hospital.
    And eventually, we were able to staff it
    with Jewish doctors, refugees, and liberated.
    And removed the German doctors.
    But for a while we kept the German doctors.
    That was the first of one of the hospitals that we established.
    Now at this juncture also, I made another decision
    which is one that may be argued as to its rightness
    or its validity.
    I decided that the liberated would be congregated in camps.
    The option could have been that they could have just spread out
    and wherever they were to go into towns, German towns,
    and say here we are.
    You have to provide accommodations.
    Now, a number of them did that.
    And they were accommodated in Munich, and so forth,
    and other towns, and so forth.
    But I felt that that was not the way
    to go that we would be better off if we collected
    the liberated in camps.
    Now, the reason was simple and perhaps naive.
    And this is where I have been judged
    and can be judged again in history.
    I was confident that within a day,
    a week, the Jewish community of America in one form or another
    would be there with all its resources
    to begin to attend the needs of the people that was liberated,
    not given a garment, not given anything
    in terms of necessity, no one to talk to,
    no identification card of any kind,
    people that were just kept anonymous.
    And at the time I felt had come that the institutions would
    be there.
    There was no question in my mind.
    Now, if they had spread out into villages and towns
    all over Germany, it would be difficult I
    felt for the institutions to cope with it, cope with them.
    And so I, in my whole mind, was set upon camps.
    Now the other problem was that the camps that did exist,
    because as people were collected they were moved into camps,
    they were mixed camps of all European Nations.
    And we found immediately that the antisemitism
    that existed before Hitler came into power continued.
    And day by day, I had to go to different camps
    to find some of our people killed by others in the camp.
    And I felt that there was no salvation to this situation
    unless we had separate camps.
    Now the army was against separate camps.
    I worked on two levels.
    I worked with the army and then I worked moving people.
    Now I arranged with the commanding officer of Dachau
    who wanted to move the people out
    because such were his orders.
    But he didn't know where to move them to.
    And so I told him, I'd take the sick, which I did and took them
    to St. Ottilien.
    And I would take the others to Camp Feldafing.
    My purpose in taking to Camp Feldafing
    was that if I would bring them into the camp,
    I would create pressure in the camp,
    and we'd have to take others out.
    And in this way, I would begin to force the making
    of the segregated camps.
    But what happened, again, things began
    to happen in different ways.
    It became a very complex situation
    in terms of getting to know other people,
    and where the sources of power were, and so forth.
    I came to know an officer who was in charge of the DP
    situation camps, called DP 6.
    He was a lieutenant colonel.
    For the moment, I just can't recall just where I met him
    but I got to know him.
    Oh, yes.
    I'll tell you how I got to know him.
    It was a wonderful story.
    One day coming back from a trip around Bavaria
    looking for various pockets of Jews, as I came to the gate
    there was a group huddled.
    I stopped the Jeep and I recognized the people
    as being the people that I was interested in.
    And they came over and told me that they were from a camp
    on the other side of Munich called Freising, I believe.
    And they'd been ordered out of the camp.
    There were 60 trucks waiting to take them away.
    They didn't want to go in the first instance.
    And secondly, this was part of The army procedure.
    The army was just taking them to different places,
    as if they were commodities rather than human beings,
    and decided to move them out, and so forth.
    Later on, I learned the reason this was happening
    is because George Patton, General Patton
    was coming in to take command of the Third Army.
    And he didn't want them.
    Because we now know his attitude towards-- and knew them
    then too.
    But we even more specifically because of his diaries,
    his whole attitude towards the DPs,
    and his intense antisemitism.
    Well, this group came to see me.
    And I told them to go back to the camp.
    And not to prepare to leave.
    They were not going to leave.
    Shortly thereafter, after I checked back into the camp,
    I drove out to Freising.
    And I met with a captain who was in charge of the camp.
    And I told the captain that there were 1,200 Jews there
    they were not going to move, and advised him not to do anything
    because it would create a situation in which his career
    might be affected.
    And I further advised him that the best for him to do
    was to report to his senior or commanding officer
    that this chaplain came along and said
    they're not going to move.
    And that would protect him, and he's off the hook, so to speak.
    And if anybody wanted me, I'm in Dachau.
    Well, the following morning, a command car came.
    And I was ordered to Freising.
    And I came there, and there were two colonels there.
    And I was brought into a room and the first colonel
    began to speak.
    Actually, he wasn't speaking.
    It was shouting.
    He didn't ask me any questions.
    He just opened up a barrage of accusations.
    How could you, an officer of the United States Army,
    contravene, or counteract, or interfere?
    And there are trucks here to take these.
    We kept at it and kept at it.
    And I just waited.
    And when he was through I simply said, do you mind if I respond?
    And he said, fine.
    And I simply said to him, listen,
    you got 1,200 people here, human beings.
    You're kicking them around.
    You treat them as commodities, no respect for them.
    You don't even tell them why they're
    moving, what they're moving to.
    They're trying to establish themselves with an address.
    They have no address.
    You can't send a piece of mail.
    You can't receive a piece of mail.
    You can't make a telephone call.
    You can't do anything.
    You're just a nonentity.
    And here you come along and you're just
    going to pick them up, gather them up, throw them on trucks,
    and repeat the story.
    Well the other colonel listened.
    He said to the first colonel, the chaplain has a point.
    That's where I met the chaplain, because he plays
    a large role in my career.
    And they suggested that it would be
    a good thing for me to talk to the commanding general
    of the area.
    And they would take me to see the commanding general.
    So I went with them.
    We went up to headquarters, military headquarters.
    And the commanding general didn't want to see me.
    He suggested that I see the repatriation officer colonel.
    And so they brought me into the office of the repatriation
    officer.
    And he didn't want to talk to me.
    But the two colonels implored, so to speak,
    and tried to get him to.
    He says, all right.
    It was a concession.
    And I said to him, these are the words I began with.
    I said there are 1,200 Jews--
    and at that point he exploded.
    He said, there are no Jews.
    And I was a little bit flabbergasted.
    I was very much involved with the Jews and so forth.
    There are no Jews.
    And then he said, look at that board.
    And there was a board on the wall.
    And it listed the peoples in the camp
    by nationals, by nationalities--
    Yugoslavs, Turks, Romanians, and so forth.
    See, he said, no Jews.
    So I then quipped, and that was one of my little mistakes
    perhaps.
    I said, if there are no Jews, colonel, what
    do you need the 60 trucks for?
    And he ordered me out of the--
    well, I went out.
    And I was in the company of the two colonels.
    And I looked at them.
    And I said, what's going on?
    And that's when they told me Patton
    was coming into the area.
    Patton doesn't want any DPs in his area,
    and the order is to get them out.
    What are you going to do with the camp, I said.
    He said, they're going to make a motor pool out of it.
    And then I told him, well, you may have your motor pool.
    But you're not going to have the 1,200 Jews, because I'm
    going to take them.
    You won't get them, which I did.
    And that's how I came to know this colonel.
    And the incident ended.
    When I left to go back to Dachau,
    this colonel said to me, listen chaplain, if you ever need me,
    I'll tell you where you can find me.
    He told me.
    And I needed him.
    So I now went to visit him.
    And we started a relationship which was very interesting.
    But I'll just skip the details.
    I'm sorry.
    What was the colonel's name?
    His name was-- I don't remember his first name.
    But his name was Richmond.
    Colonel Richmond.
    Richmond.
    I imagine in my notes someplace we can find the full name.
    I went to see the colonel, and he,
    being in charge of a DP unit, lived independently.
    They lived well, these units, had
    a big house with German help, and they ate well.
    And it was kind of a pleasant place to be.
    And it was a good place for me because I had no place to eat,
    and I had to find food.
    And this was a wonderful place.
    And he was very nice to me.
    He would ask me to stay over, use his shower,
    and so forth and so on.
    But I came to him and told him that we needed to segregate
    the people in the camps.
    That was my mission.
    So these were the things that were happening.
    I was determined first to find out
    who was in Germany, who was alive, identify them.
    I was determined to keep them in camps.
    And I now was determined to segregate the camps.
    These were the stages of my moving from one
    development to the other.
    In the meantime, one day I came back to Dachau
    and the 127th was gone.
    I didn't have even the 127th to be attached to.
    And so again, I had my little knapsack.
    And I had to find other places to light.
    Now, when I came to Richmond, the colonel,
    and argued the case for--
    his argument was he couldn't do it.
    And here again, you begin to see what the picture really is.
    He said, we are Americans.
    We don't believe in segregation.
    We are here to pull people together.
    This is a democracy.
    Here's where we're going to begin.
    And he gave me this wonderful analysis
    of policy in terms of what the army was about and so forth.
    And I said to him, well, that's very good, except you want
    to pick up the dead every day?
    Dead, the wounded, is that what you want to do?
    I says, after all, I'm as much in the spirit of democracy
    as you are.
    But we're dealing with practical problems,
    people coming out of certain kinds of worlds, and attitudes,
    and so forth.
    I said, you don't have to do anything contrary to policy.
    All you have to do is make room in camps for me.
    I'll do the rest.
    Now, you go down to Feldafing and you say to the Poles,
    for example, wouldn't you prefer being among other Poles?
    Take them to a Polish installation,
    or to Hungarians or something.
    As soon as you take them out, I will bring others in,
    and eventually what you're going to find
    is that all your camps are segregated,
    and you're going to have it easier.
    Well, he turned to his staff, and well he
    talked about it and so forth.
    And finally I said, whether you do it or you don't do it,
    it's going to have to be done because it has to be done.
    So we might as well do it.
    And he kind of agreed that he would move certain peoples
    at certain times.
    And I would have the space.
    And so the decision that I made originally
    was now effected by his concurrence,
    and in a short period of time we began to have Jewish camps,
    and the two big ones were Feldafing and Landsberg.
    And then we had Jewish hospitals.
    And at this point, I felt that we should have
    an overall Jewish community.
    And so that brought on the formation
    of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews of Germany.
    Now this, before the formation of this committee,
    it was still the army in charge of the camps?
    Yeah.
    The army was charge of the camps.
    Now bear in mind that in all this time
    we have no outside help.
    We have no American Joint Distribution Committee.
    We have no UNRRA.
    Red Cross?
    We have no Red Cross.
    The Red Cross is there, but Red Cross
    functioned only for a week at the beginning,
    and then was ordered out of the picture, which these
    are details that I can give you in my negotiations with them
    and so forth, if you remind me at certain points.
    But we had nothing.
    Nobody else?
    Nobody, no one was there.
    No one was there.
    We were moving along, just the people and myself.
    We were collecting names, Sharit Ha-Platah.
    We were trying to resolve problems within camp.
    We were beginning to move people around.
    We were establishing camps.
    And we were segregating camps.
    We were doing all this, all contrary to policy.
    Everything we were doing is contrary to military policy.
    Except that there were military people
    were making it possible for me.
    If it weren't for certain military people,
    I couldn't do this and so forth.
    Now came the point where I felt we've got to have a community.
    And so I decided that I was going
    to organize the Central Committee of Liberated
    Jews of Germany.
    And so I sent word to different camps
    for their delegates to meet with me at Camp Feldafing.
    We have the dates in the record when the meeting was held.
    It was an interesting experience.
    First of all, these people were under curfew.
    They couldn't travel in the sense
    that they take a bus, or a car, and come to Feldafing.
    I had to arrange for them to get there, and I had a driver,
    and I had a truck.
    And I would have to send the driver
    to get them, and then make sure that they had a place
    to stay overnight.
    Because you couldn't be caught on the road because a DP
    on the road, he has no identity.
    He has no rights of any kind, even in June
    after for all the liberation, they were not
    considered human beings.
    So we call this meeting.
    And there was a captain, a military captain
    in charge of Feldafing.
    His name was Smith.
    I went to see Smith and told him that I
    was going to have a meeting in the camp,
    and I'd like to have space where we can have the meeting.
    So he broke out in a harangue against me.
    He told me he didn't need any goddamn meetings.
    He was running the camp the way a camp should be run.
    And the other people can run their camps.
    And it was a display of insensitivity, of ego,
    of power, of a man trying to run a camp as an autocrat,
    and having no real ability or sensitivity and so forth.
    There are other incidents too which support this description.
    Well, I didn't take him seriously.
    And I went around looking for a place.
    And I found a balcony off of a building.
    And we all gathered there.
    But still I figured, you need these people.
    And so I invited him to the meeting and also
    another chaplain who was a Seventh Army chaplain,
    a fellow named Browdy, also an interesting--
    I met Browdy originally.
    He was an instructor at the Harvard University
    when I was a student in the chaplain school.
    And there was Browdy.
    He was a strange fellow.
    He always wore boots, and carried a crop.
    Of course he wasn't with the cavalry
    and there was no need for a crop.
    But this was his gear.
    And the two of them came to the meeting.
    I don't remember how many people,
    but I would guess there were 20 or 25 of us there.
    Tape change.
    OK.
    There was about 20 or 25 people.
    Yeah, they were there.
    And so I turned to the commander of the camp, Smith,
    and I said, would you like to speak.
    He said, I sure would.
    He got up and he gave a very interesting rousing
    speech in which he used half German and half English.
    And here were seated a group of men who in their day
    were eminent in their communities.
    One was a lawyer.
    One was a doctor, an X-ray specialist.
    And he says to them, [NON-ENGLISH]..
    And you too will get [NON-ENGLISH]..
    It was so ugly.
    And I was so embarrassed in the presence of these people,
    and the other chaplain didn't say a word, or wink,
    and so forth, that I adjourned the meeting.
    I just couldn't take it.
    And I said, let's get out of here.
    And so we left the balcony.
    And we wandered around the camp here and there for a while,
    until I kind of cooled down a bit.
    And then I said, OK let's get together.
    And we went to the kitchen, the kitchen area.
    And we all sat around tables.
    And I then instructed them.
    I wasn't going to get involved in any discussions
    at this point, that the spirit had changed completely.
    I simply said to them that I am moving from Dachau to Munich.
    I have a building, Deutsches Museum.
    And we are going to start the Central Committee
    of Liberated Jews of Germany.
    And now I'd like to have you elect your officers.
    There was an election of officers, [NON-ENGLISH],,
    a board and so forth.
    And then we began the process of moving from Dachau to Munich.
    Now in the Munich situation, there's also a story.
    What happened was that when I came back from a trip
    to a camp called Mittenwald, which
    is down near the southern border of Germany,
    on the other side of Garmisch, where Hitler had his tower.
    And what happened there was that this rioting began
    because there was a lack of food.
    And the army, not knowing how to handle it,
    tried to quell the riot with guns
    instead of trying to find a source of solution, the food
    problem.
    And I realized that I was not really
    capable as an individual of handling this whole food
    problem.
    So I decided to go to military headquarters,
    find out who was in charge of food, and see what we can do.
    So I came up to headquarters.
    And I saw a strange scene in the lobby, rather than the office.
    There was a desk there and there were all kinds
    of people around the desk.
    And they looked like liberated people.
    They weren't in uniform and so forth.
    And I kind of nudged in.
    And I found the captain sitting at a desk.
    And he was being charged by these people coming
    from different places that there was no food.
    So I said to him, I'm going to help you out.
    I'm going to relieve you of a big piece of your problem.
    Give me the Jewish responsibility
    and I'll take care of it.
    And he stared at me and said, you say that again?
    And I repeated it.
    He said, come with me.
    So he left that and we went upstairs
    and we went into an office of a colonel.
    And he said to me, tell the colonel what you told me.
    And I repeated to the colonel.
    Just give me the whole Jewish scene,
    and I'll take care of it, and you'll have
    that much less to worry about.
    So the colonel said, well, who are you?
    What are you?
    And I explained.
    I'm in Dachau, and what my role is.
    And this is what I want to do.
    And so he says, I'll tell you what.
    We have just turned over the Deutsches Museum to UNRRA.
    And there's plenty of room there.
    Why don't you take a piece of the Deutsches Museum,
    and you operate together with UNRRA
    and do whatever you're going to do?
    So I said, thank you.
    So I now go down to the Deutsches Museum,
    and I find that the building they gave me
    is half a building.
    It's all bombed.
    There's no rooms or anything.
    But I figure that's better than nothing.
    I have nothing.
    So I now went back to Dachau, and went
    into the commanding officer who we were good friends.
    And I told them I needed all kinds of things,
    lumber and so forth.
    So we got lumber and all that.
    We brought it back to Deutsches Museum, built a stairwell.
    There was no stairwell up to this.
    This was once an exhibit hall of the museum and so forth,
    and put up a number of rooms, and so forth.
    And that was going to be the Central Committee.
    And next time I came back to the headquarters
    to talk to the captain, because I'm
    going to take the responsibility,
    but I want to know where the food's going to come from,
    and how much food we're entitled to, and what the process is.
    So when I came he wasn't prepared to discuss this,
    except he said, the colonel wants to see you.
    So I went back up to him, and I came in.
    The colonel said that he was terribly sorry
    that I couldn't have the space at the Deutsches Museum.
    He had received instructions.
    And he regrets having offered it to me.
    Well, I didn't pay much attention to it
    in the sense of getting into a discussion.
    I turned to leave, and just as I put my hand on the door.
    He called me.
    And he said, chaplain, do a good job.
    And I thanked him.
    I understood what he was doing.
    In other words, he was saying to me
    that he'd been ordered to rescind the order,
    but from a personal point of view.
    So I went and moved into the Deutsches Museum.
    And that's where we started the Central Committee
    of Liberated Jews of Germany.
    And we operated out of the Deutsches Museum.
    It became the big center where Jews
    coming from all over Europe now began to come towards it.
    Here's where we send people to different camps,
    and here's where we received word of the problems.
    And I kept moving now from place to place
    to resolve whatever problems that came to us.
    And now began a formal institution
    which was not recognized for a long period to come,
    of a community organized as a central committee.
    And we went from there.
    Now, the problems were being defined.
    In other words, there were no Jews was part of the problem.
    Now what the understanding was, though it wasn't clear to me
    at the moment, was that the policy of the United States
    government, especially under Eisenhower,
    was that the solution to the liberated was very simple.
    That all you do is you take these people
    and you take them back to the countries from which they came
    or from which they were driven.
    And you create inducements.
    You give them cartons of what they call
    10 and 1 rations or something.
    Get them to go, and people were moving.
    Trucks were leaving regularly for the different countries,
    or railheads, or so forth--
    Hungarians, Romanians, Yugoslavs, and so forth.
    Except that the policy could not account for Jews,
    because there was no place to send Jews to.
    In other words, you could send Hungarians to Hungary.
    And therefore, they were Hungarians and not Jews.
    They were Romanians and not Jews.
    The fact that they were going to be Jews that were not
    going to go back was something the army was not aware of, did
    not anticipate, did not anticipate
    the nature of the problem, the size of the problem.
    And as typical army, instead of settling back
    and to discuss or to reason, find out
    what the conditions are, to communicate with the people--
    it's an interesting scene, world scene.
    Here you have the initially 14,000 or 15,000
    liberated people.
    And here you have a great army.
    And in these liberated people you have people of stature
    and so forth.
    At no time would anybody of the army come and say
    let's sit down and talk.
    Who are you, what do you want, and so forth?
    All the decisions are made in terms of army structure.
    And consequently, the problems began to accelerate.
    And they became nasty at different times.
    And I was involved in terms of these problems.
    So that brings us up to a point where now I'm out of Dachau.
    I'm in Munich.
    I'm running an organization called the Central Committee
    of Liberated Jews of Germany.
    We have an organization.
    But they have no authority.
    They can't even travel.
    They have no identity cards.
    They are nobody.
    And we are working.
    We're working on the Sharit Ha-Platah volumes.
    We are finding the sick, wherever they are in Germany.
    We can tell you, we take the ambulances.
    We rush in and we take out the sick,
    wherever they are, and bring them to St. Ottilien,
    and then we have a TB hospital.
    We're segregating camps.
    We're trying to build up food situation.
    Now, we're trying to get necessities for people.
    A liberated person, let me take you tell you one little scene
    and give you an idea.
    I was in a camp.
    I'll think of the name in a moment,
    down near Wolfratshausen, a part of a powder factory.
    Shacks, people living in shacks.
    And the first time I came there, I
    met the people that were running it.
    And one of the men who I remember very well,
    his name was Jochelson, who later
    became an important person in our organization.
    He ended up in Toronto as a teacher
    and an organizer of schools and so forth.
    Anyway, Jochelson took me around the camp.
    And I came along one little dirt road.
    And there was a shack there, and a woman was sitting on a step.
    And I stopped.
    And I just stood there staring at the woman.
    And everybody was embarrassed because here a young chaplain,
    you know, and there's a woman.
    And he's suddenly got caught in this little scene.
    But what they didn't know is that I saw
    something that fascinated me.
    She wore a dress.
    She had lipstick on.
    Obviously, she had a brassiere on.
    And I said to myself, where did you get the lipstick?
    Where did you get the brassiere?
    Where did you get the dress?
    Where do you get these things?
    Nobody is here to distribute them,
    no Jewish organization has come with supplies.
    The army certainly is not going to do it.
    The Germans are not going to do it.
    How in the world did this woman come into these items?
    Well, I was not only working.
    I was learning.
    I mean, after all, I wasn't acculturated,
    so to speak, in terms of this kind of life.
    And that put me back into a remembrance of a scene
    at Feldafing.
    One day I came to Feldafing, and the people
    whenever I'd come into a camp they'd
    all surround me with their complaints and so forth.
    And they were complaining about the food.
    So I thought a good way of handling the food situation
    is to have one meal, a community meal, in which a stew would
    be served.
    We would take from every ration, entitlement that a person had,
    a certain portion and the Germans
    had these big vats, these tremendous vats
    with little ovens, fire underneath.
    And we would make a rich stew of a little meat, of vegetables.
    And so at least one thing you'd know that--
    and they get as much as they wanted,
    that you'd get one solid meal a day.
    And then the other two we'd worry about.
    And I thought I was making a wonderful suggestion.
    But the reaction was intense.
    They were going to stone me practically.
    I couldn't understand it.
    I couldn't figure out just why they would be so intent.
    I could understand if they'd have
    a different opinion or a different way,
    but it was intense.
    But then when I put the two together,
    when I saw the woman and I remembered the soup.
    I realized what was happening.
    I put other things together too.
    What the people were doing is were not eating their food.
    They were eating as little as possible.
    But they were taking the food and bartering it
    with the Germans.
    That's where the first clothes came
    from, first lipstick, first brassiere,
    first pair of stockings, first everything
    came from the German economy.
    And the Germans too were in need, because they
    didn't have these things.
    And so you had a tremendous barter system
    was established which was later called
    the black market for which the people were accused of having
    a black market, as if there were a white market for them,
    as if they had currency where they could go,
    if there were stores where they could go, and didn't want to
    and went into this black market.
    And so we now had the problem of an economy,
    of establishing an economy, of finding things
    that we could buy.
    And this we did buy on the black market.
    We'd get the money for it.
    We set up manufacturing firms together
    with Germans who wanted to get back
    into business and so forth.
    The printing of the books, we had
    to find ways of getting printers.
    It was illegal for a printer to run a press in Germany
    at that time.
    We had to do.
    So we then began to whatever we could
    to start a little industry or business, where
    we would at least get some products into the camps,
    and so forth.
    And this brings us up to a point where we now
    begin to establish an economy, and schools,
    educational system, and so forth.
    Still no one's there.
    We don't have the American Joint Distribution Committee.
    We don't have UNRRA doing anything.
    And there are problems too, because the army
    has restricted-- it isn't that the American Joint didn't
    want to come into Germany.
    It isn't that they weren't there because of some failure
    on the part of the directors.
    It was that they couldn't come to terms with the military.
    Now, I fault them in terms of what
    I know for not being able to effect in terms of their role
    in the American Jewish Community and the political system
    and not being able to do it.
    I also fault them that once they were able to get in,
    they misunderstood the problems.
    They thought they were running a social service agency.
    They were going to send social workers in
    to do jobs that had to be done on an entirely different basis.
    And in all the time that I worked
    with them or against them, whatever it is,
    they never came around to see the nature of the problem
    and to respond to it effectively.
    Well, that brings us up to about the fall of '45.
    In other words, all I've given you
    was May, June, July, August.
    So in four months, you accomplished--
    This is all that I've said now it
    occurred in a four-month period.
    The end of August, the middle of August,
    the American Joint Distribution Committee appeared.
    Of course, when they appeared, they
    appeared in the form of one person, a fellow named
    Eli Rock, very nice fella.
    He was from Philadelphia, gracious, nice fella.
    And he came with a truck, a weapons carrier I think.
    And he came to Deutsches Museum, and he announced, we're here.
    And I kind of smiled.
    And I says, good.
    What have you got?
    He says, well, I got two other personnel
    in Pasing, that's where the people were
    processed for UNRRA.
    And we going to be here.
    Do you have anything, I said, in terms of helping the people?
    No.
    This will come later.
    In the meantime, I said to one of my assistants
    there, if you see the truck down there,
    will you go down and take the gasoline,
    take the jerrycan of gasoline.
    Steal the gasoline.
    We need the gasoline.
    He came out and he noticed what was happening.
    And he started to make an issue of it.
    And I told him, don't make an issue of it.
    Just record it as the first contribution
    that the American Joint Distribution
    Committee is making to the Liberated of Germany.
    Then of course began kind of a the work of the Joint
    and in terms of their problems in working with us,
    and the problems that accrued after they
    had established themselves.
    Now, we were in the Deutsches Museum.
    And two things happened of consequence.
    We organized-- well, let's say a number
    of things happened of consequence.
    One was the Sharit Ha-Platah volumes.
    We had gotten the first volume printed.
    And I said to one of the people working with me
    to place a volume on a table in the lobby, so to speak,
    of this hall.
    So when people came, and they came by the dozens,
    you can check the book.
    So he--
    Change tape.
    He took issue with me and suggested
    that would be a mistake.
    So I said, no.
    No, you put the book out there.
    We had a crude table and so forth.
    He did and 15 or 20 minutes later he came back
    and said the book's gone.
    OK.
    So I thought about it.
    And I said, I'll tell you what you do.
    Take the next book and nail it down.
    So he took the next book.
    He nailed down.
    He came back in 15, 20 minutes.
    He says, the nails are there but the pages are gone.
    So we realized that we had a problem.
    What was happening was that people
    were coming looking for family.
    You had this swirl, so to speak, of people
    coming from different places, stopping.
    And they would ask others.
    Check the books.
    And then they would go on to a big wall.
    There was a big white wall.
    And they began to write notes on the wall.
    And they would read the wall, and leave a note themselves
    saying I was here or something of that sort.
    That was one thing that was happening.
    The other thing that happened which was significant
    was that one day before we left the museum, which
    I'm going to tell you about, a Lithuanian
    walked in carrying a child.
    And he came in.
    He put him on my desk.
    He couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak Lithuanian.
    And he pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket.
    It was a page from one of our books.
    And he showed me the name, Zalman Grinberg, son.
    Child of Zalman Grinberg.
    Of course, this was a highly dramatic thing for us.
    Because we had no children in all of the camps and so forth.
    And this child became a symbol for us,
    the resurrection so to speak.
    And I regret that moment for one reason.
    Because I became so excited about the child,
    and I tried to at least talk to the child.
    And as I related myself to the child, touching the child,
    the man that brought the child walked out of the office
    and disappeared in the crowd.
    I never saw him again, was never able to thank him
    or say anything.
    Now the other thing that happened
    was that two officers came in one day, and junior officers,
    and they told me I had to get out
    of there, that the commanding officer of the Seventh
    Army, which was in control of the area wants us out.
    So I argued with them.
    And I said it's a mistake.
    What are you going to do with all these people.
    They come.
    If they don't come here, they'll go elsewhere.
    How are you going to control the situation?
    How are you going to respond?
    Well, their orders were to get me out.
    And it wasn't for them to discuss the matter.
    So I said to them, well, if that is
    the order of your commanding officer,
    you go back and tell them he's wet behind the ears.
    Those were the exact words I use.
    Well they turned around and as they walked out and saw
    this wall, which was the most sacred thing in the world,
    they said, and get the goddamn wall cleaned off.
    Well, shortly thereafter, I was called
    by the commanding officer.
    Now, by this time I was pretty well
    schooled in this whole business of peoples, and military,
    and forces playing one against the other, and so forth.
    And I didn't take these things personally
    and I didn't get upset by them.
    My first inclination was to figure, how do you
    get around this or out of it.
    Now I remember saying to one of my staff people,
    maybe I'll go see the commanding officer about lunchtime,
    so he'll take me to lunch.
    Well I went to see him.
    Nice fella.
    He sat there and he began by telling me that he's
    a West Point graduate.
    He has a good military career.
    And he is not about to allow anyone, especially
    this lieutenant that I was, to deprecate his career by telling
    his junior officers that he's wet behind the ears.
    So I tried to reason with him.
    And I told him I didn't know him personally,
    so he shouldn't take it personally.
    I'm involved in a situation where
    I have to defend a program against the forces and so on.
    Well, he wasn't interested.
    I was to be court martialed, and I was to close the operation.
    And that was supposedly the end of that incident,
    except again one little thing happened,
    which changes the color, the drama of everything.
    He said just a moment, chaplain.
    He opened the drawer and he took out an envelope.
    And he says this envelope came to me.
    I don't know why, he said.
    But I think it would be better in your hands.
    So he hands me the envelope.
    And I opened it up.
    And it was a statement stating that the British had designated
    13 certificates for immigration to Israel, to Palestine.
    So again, I began to put two and two together.
    If he were really angry with me, and terribly upset,
    and so forth, he wouldn't hand me that envelope.
    So he I felt was caught again in terms of his commanding officer
    telling him that I had to get out of the office,
    because they didn't want this kind of an operation going on.
    And the second, he was sympathetic to what
    I was doing.
    Well, to be court martialed, to close down the office
    was a serious thing.
    And so I then made two moves.
    I had met the property control officer of the area,
    and I took my problem to him.
    And I told him I wanted a building, a colonel
    by the name of Silvy.
    And he says, I'll get you a building.
    Then I went back to the DP-6 officer, Richmond,
    and I told him my story.
    I told him that here's what's happening.
    I'm ordered to close down the operation
    and I'm to be court martialed.
    So he said to me, listen.
    Why don't you take a shower, take a rest,
    have something to eat.
    Let me handle this for you.
    You'll come to dinner next Thursday night.
    That Thursday night when I came to dinner, all the peoples
    that I've had differences with were there,
    the colonels, the colonel that told me there were no Jews
    was there.
    I was seated next to him.
    This colonel who was in charge of this operation,
    we all sat around this big table, the different staff
    officers, ate well, drank well, told stories.
    I wasn't allowed to say anything about my problem.
    He served cigars, candy that he brought back from Switzerland.
    And then he said to the crowd, what
    are we going to do about our chaplain.
    And each one began to say, well, this,
    and we got to court martial him, and so forth, and so on.
    The discussion went on and on and on.
    And finally it came down to a point
    that if I would apologize, and just leave the area,
    everything would be fine.
    I'm willing to apologize.
    And that's the way it was left.
    And the dinner was over.
    And I spent the night there.
    And the following morning, the colonel
    said to me, OK, go back to your office.
    But don't steal all the gasoline on the way out.
    I always stole the gasoline.
    I needed gasoline.
    Where was I going to get it?
    We had a little motor pool.
    And now, we are going to move out
    of the Deutsches Museum into a building on 3
    Zibert Strasse where we now established
    a more developed program.
    And we bring the Joint in.
    We allow them to come in and to take offices in that building.
    And now begins another phase of our work.
    Now, had you been sending reports?
    pardon
    Had you been sending reports of your activities to anybody?
    That's a very good question because that brings up
    another sad chapter.
    In June of '45, I wrote a report on what really was happening
    and sent it to the American Jewish leaders, Stephen Wise,
    Abba Hillel Silver, a number of others.
    Right.
    And I told exactly what was going on.
    And shortly thereafter, the chaplain
    that I made reference to that came to that meeting
    in Feldafing came to Dachau to see me
    with his boots and his crop.
    And he says to me, I understand you sent a report to the United
    States.
    I said, I did.
    He said by what right?
    I said, what do you mean by what right?
    I sent it.
    Well, he got angry.
    And he laced into me, you had no right to send it.
    And now you'll see what the army is going to do for you.
    Yeah, I just kind of shrugged it off.
    And that was the end at that moment.
    I never got any responses from my report.
    Nobody wrote to me, or conveyed messages, or so forth.
    Many years later, I had occasion to write a letter
    to Abba Hillel Silver's secretary,
    or somebody who takes care of his documents.
    And I asked if she could send me a copy of the original letter
    that I sent Silver from Germany.
    And she wrote back and she said, no, I'm sorry.
    I can't find the original letter.
    But there's another letter that you might be interested in.
    This letter is from the Jewish Welfare Board
    to Silver in which the author of the letter, and we
    have a copy of it now, writes to Silver saying
    that we understand that you received
    a report from a chaplain in Germany
    by the name of Klausner.
    Please don't pay any attention to that report.
    And another paragraph, it would be
    best to forget about the whole thing and so forth.
    This document now appears in my account.
    I didn't know about this, of course, until many years
    later that an effort had been made to squelch the report.
    Now after that, a number of reports--
    and each report became the basis for contention.
    The last one that I had sent, there
    was a meeting in New York of every top Jewish leader
    and I was present.
    And there were reports prior thereto.
    The reaction of the established Jewish community,
    especially the JDC which was entrusted,
    was to negate all my reports, to argue against them.
    Because in my mind the JDC with Leavitt and Schwartz,
    as nice as they were, they were gentlemen and so forth,
    Leavitt in particular felt that he was entrusted
    with the salvation of the Jews, and he was behaving the way
    the JDC behaved when the ship, the St. Louis,
    came across the ocean.
    And JDC was charged with trying to effect the settlement
    of the Jews in Cuba.
    And they failed.
    And even failed to have the people
    settled in the United States.
    And stood by while that ship was returned to Europe.
    This was going back to this whole pattern
    of the so-called enlightened Jews,
    and you, the unenlightened, and their whole attitude
    was one in which they too, like the army,
    never came to Germany.
    This was the thing that disturbs me intensely,
    never came to Germany, Leavitt himself.
    He came much later, or Schwartz, or any
    of the Board of Trustees, to come to Germany
    and sit down with the people.
    And say, come let's talk.
    Who are you?
    Here we are.
    What are your needs and so forth?
    There was never this.
    There was only the buying of loads of schmattas, junk, dirt,
    filth, in bales that was sent into Germany for the people
    which they couldn't wear.
    When I wrote to Joint and asked him for medical supplies,
    they told me they weren't available.
    When I asked for a Yiddish typewriter, it was unavailable.
    Anything I asked them for was unavailable.
    They had no-- they were more or less concerned
    about their role as operators.
    And they were going to do what they wanted to do.
    They were going to collect social workers
    and send them in.
    And the social workers were going
    to make case studies, which later on they
    had piles of them.
    Some of them were fascinating.
    They would discuss them with me.
    And it was so unreal in terms of what had to be done there.
    But they are to be, from my point of view,
    are charged with gross stupidity or negligence, or just
    incompetence, in spite of who they were or what they were.
    And I think it's all documented now in terms of--
    they argue and they try to cover up that they were there
    when they weren't there.
    And when they were there, they did these things.
    But they didn't do them, and so forth.
    The fact remains--
    May, June, July, August, no JDC.
    August they start coming in, three people.
    August, September, October, November, December--
    what were they doing?
    Setting up an office and so forth and so on.
    And we were at the same time operating in terms
    of a major organization.
    And they never came to us at the time and said,
    OK, we'll work with you and so forth.
    No, they wouldn't even allow themselves to do that.
    So the Central Committee was continuing
    to meet the needs of the survivors--
    the food, medical.
    Well, the Central Committee was in operation.
    We did many things.
    First of all, the big thing that we did under the name,
    they had no resources, it's whatever I got for them.
    For example, we put out a newspaper, [NON-ENGLISH]..
    Well, that became an important instrument.
    It was the first newspaper that people could read in Yiddish,
    and know what's going on from a point of view
    of their own problems.
    The paper I got out of Dachau.
    Dachau had a paper mill.
    And my connections in Dachau were such
    that I could get the paper.
    The very interesting question is, where do we
    get the type, the Yiddish type?
    Well that too was strange.
    When I came into Feldafing one day,
    a tall figure who turned out to be a man by the name of Levi
    Shalit, or [NON-ENGLISH] then, a tall gaunt,
    wearing clothes that were didn't fit his body.
    People were asking for everything.
    And he shouted above everybody.
    He said, chaplain, we need a newspaper.
    And I said to him, you'll have a newspaper.
    Of course, I didn't know where you can get a newspaper.
    Then I wrote to the Joint, asking them for type, typeset,
    and so forth.
    Oh, no it wasn't available, and so forth.
    But he had heard that someplace in Frankfurt
    there was some type to be had, Yiddish type.
    How he heard it?
    So he came to me, and now we had to get him to Frankfurt.
    Well, how do you get a person to Frankfurt?
    The people must understand that these are non people.
    They have no identity.
    You can't buy a ticket on a train.
    You can't do anything.
    You can't get a car and drive.
    And so I managed to get him on a military train
    with a military pass to Frankfurt.
    And he found a type.
    He brought it back.
    It was just a handful.
    But we could set one page at a time,
    and eventually we got a print shop,
    and the paper was supplied.
    And it was not legal to publish the paper.
    But nobody interfered with us.
    I assumed the responsibility of putting
    my name as the publisher.
    And we started a newspaper.
    It came out every Friday.
    It was distributed.
    Later on, other newspapers were published and so forth.
    But this one continued from the beginning
    to the end of the whole period.
    So the committee meant that the Jewish community
    had a presence.
    They had a face, so to speak.
    They weren't capable of producing anything.
    We produced things in the name of the committee.
    And then Joint, little by little, began to bring--
    when we get back into '46 a little bit.
    But by '47, they are operating on a large basis.
    And even then, they didn't consult with the people
    as to what they would bring in and what they would do.
    But the committee remained in operation, and at one point
    it was recognized as a legal entity,
    and then continued to operate after that as an entity.
    Tell me about--
    Oh, wait.
    A tape change.

    There is no transcript available for this track

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Klausner, Rabbi Abraham J.
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 videocassettes (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material. Museum staff are currently unable to copy, digitize, and/or photograph collection materials on behalf of researchers. Researchers are encouraged to plan a research visit to consult collection materials themselves.
    Conditions on Use
    No restrictions on use

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Klausner, Abraham J.

    Administrative Notes

    Holder of Originals
    Simon Wiesenthal Center
    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    H. Heller donated this collection to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on February 28, 1993 (per deed of gift). A collections release form was signed by the Media Projects Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center on March 8, 1995.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:09:25
    This page:
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