|
Can you tell us about your liberation?
I'm
in Ebensee, after we’d marched from Linz all the way to Ebensee,
three days, three nights. It’s the middle of April '45. All the
body strength that I had gained being in the Packetstelle is
gone. Now I'm skin over bones. I work in the tunnels. The Germans were
building tunnels in the mountains where they had factories. I was one
of the peons, one of the laborers. Slave laborers.
On Friday,
the fourth of May - last Monday was my liberation day, the 6th of May
- on Friday, all of the prisoners in that camp were ordered to the
Roll Call Square, as it's called, an Appellplatz. And all
of the SS are there, and the soldiers have machine guns around their
shoulders. The camp commander is there, and he starts a speech in German
to us, saying that the Americans are coming this direction, and for
our own protection he wants us to go into one of the tunnels because
the SS is going to fight to the death and he doesn't want us to be
in the crossfire.
Those
of us who understood German, all began to shout, “No, we won't
go! No, we won't go!” So then he had it translated in all the
languages of people that were in that camp, which was French, Italian,
Yugoslav, all the other languages, and each time, when the guy came
to the end where he said, “We want you to go into the tunnel,” you
could hear, "Niet! Niet! Non! Nee!." No! No!” All
of these different “no’s” were shouting up, and the
SS stood there absolutely baffled. No body had ever done that to them.
No shooting took place and we didn't have to go to work that day. Later
on we found out that the underground in the camp had heard from one
of the officers that the idea had been to fill a locomotive full of
dynamite, put it in front of the tunnel and blow it to pieces, and
hopefully the blast would kill all of us inside. Later on they did
find that locomotive totally loaded with TNT.
Saturday
we wake up and the SS who were going to fight till the end against
the Americans, they all had disappeared. And Saturday we were there,
all by ourselves. The two guards out front, people who were my age
now, in their late 70's. Everybody went crazy! “Hey, we're out!
They're gone! They're gone!” And on Sunday, flags of all the
nations, began to appear on the fence that overlooked the valley of
that camp, of all the prisoners, all these national flags appeared.
And I don't know where they came from so fast. But they had gone into
the SS barrack and took all the linens, and dyed them or sewed them
together.And so on Sunday, it was late afternoon, we heard noise that
I could not identify. And outside the camp, the roads were all cobblestones,
and you could hear"rrrr..r.r.rrrr...rrrrr..rrrrrrr..." coming
up the hill. All of a sudden two tanks appear in front of the gate
and they open the gate. Two tanks and a jeep came in, and that was
my liberation.
ALTERNATIVE SECTION - Some repetition but
the following section from 4/9/03 contains more detail:
Can you describe the events of your liberation
and your feelings at the time?
On
Friday morning, the word was passed through all the blocks in the camp
in Ebensee, we are to precede to the Appelplatz, which is
the role call square. We did not have to follow and stand in the counting
number, which was by fives or by tens. And the camp commander was going
to address us. The camp commander, then in German, told us that the
Americans were on their way, and they, the SS, were going to defend
themselves to the last man fighting the Americans. They wanted us,
the prisoners, to go into one of the tunnels – that I have been
talking about – so that we would be out of the line of fire and
we would be "protected." When he had finished speaking, those
who could understand German had began to shout "Nein, Nein,Wirwerden
nicht gehn."
Because the underground of the prisoners had been told that that's
exactly one of the things that the commander was going to offer us,
but what he wasn't telling us was that he had a locomotive that was
laden down with TNT that was going to be in front of the tunnel that
we were in, they were going to burst it and hopefully all the prisoners
with the concussion on the inside would die on the spot.
The
first ones had said, "Nein, Nein, Wirwerden nicht
gehn." Now
mind you, around the whole Appelplatz there were SS with machine
guns, like burp guns. He then called for the translator, the interpreter,
to mount the little table that was brought out, and he stood on the
table and would talk in the different Slavic languages that were spoken
in the camp, which were Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian, any Slavic type
language, and he would then pronounce it. You could hear all these, "Nyet,
Nyet, Nyet, Nyet, Nyet – No, No, No," that
sort of thing. And the French by now – somebody had translated
for them and they were saying, "Non, Non, Non." And
by the time this guy was done translating what the commadant had said,
this whole prisoner group in front of him was shouting, "No, no,
we will not go!" That was the first time this SS commander – he
stood there, and then turned around to his fellow officers, and they
were talking – and that's the first time that prisoners had ever
told him to go screw himself, in all practical words. And they called
in all the SS guards around us and they left the camp. We didn't have
to go to work that day.
They just walked out?
Well,
they closed the gates behind them. They didn't start shooting. I mean,
they were dumbfounded, lets face it. The rations were even less that
day than we had before. The next day they were practically non-existent.
Saturday morning when I woke up and went to the roll call square and
overlooked the river and the valley bellow, on that fence, I saw a
number of the flags of the nations that had prisoners in the camp.
I could not understand where they had come form overnight. And I asked
around, and they said well the SS had disappeared during the night
they had left. And all they had left was two guards in front of gate
who were at that time, my age, in their 60's or 70's, and they had
a little rifle each and let it be known, there was no ammunition in
there. They were basically there for decoration. That Saturday more
flags arrived to be put on that fence. I said, "Where do they
come from?" What they did is they went to the SS barracks and
got the sheets and dyed them and made flags out of them. All day Saturday
we stood there at the fence overlooking the valley because that was
where the only road was. And you could see the traffic going left and
right, trucks moving to the east or to the west rather.
We
went back to sleep Saturday night, nothing had happened. And on Sunday
morning, again the same thing, we went to the fence and looked down
and traffic was heavier but not much else.
The
road that I mentioned when we climbed when we marched all the way from
Linz and I said we were now on the last stretch, we had to climb up
the hill, they were all cobble stones. And if you had wooden clogs
on cobble stones, and the road is slightly wet, you do a lot of sliding
and holding on for dear life.
On
that Sunday, in the early afternoon hours, two-thirty, a quarter-to-three,
we heard this idiotic noise coming up the road. Grrr, grrr, grrr. These
were two tanks clattering with their tracks over these cobble stones
up the hill. They came to the main gate and the sergeant in the front
tank, standing in his turret, as did the sergeant behind him in the
second tank, he looked to his right and took the rifle out of the guys
hand and broke it over his gun's turret and hung it over the
gate. He could not remember that action, never did. I stood there right
next it at the gate and I could see the whole thing and I told him, "do
you remember?" And he said, "I have no idea of this whatsoever." "That’s
what you did.” And he said, "Amazing."
The
gates were open and the tanks rolled in. There were two tanks and a
jeep. Everybody tried to climb onto those tanks. And we stank, we hadn't
had showers since Melk. That was like the beginning of the year. I
think the last time we had a shower was in the quarantine when we were
deloused in Mauthausen. Bob Persinger was the sergeant in the first
tank and to this day, he says, "I can still smell that stink that
you guys emanated from that camp." He said, "Nobody climb
up, no, no, no, down, down." And so, he took out a pack of cigarettes,
and he took out a cigarette and lit it. I stood next to the tank and
in English I shouted up at him, "It's been a long time since I
had a Lucky Strike." And he, "Who said that?", and I
said, "I did." And he said, "You get up here." So
the other fellow prisoners kept hoisting me up because I was pretty
damn weak to climb all that. So he sat my down and gave me a cigarette
and he lit it and I took a drag and the whole world spun. I mean, I
just kept rotating.
And
in my little vocabulary that I had in English – which was piss-poor,
this small – we talked back and forth. He had gotten on the radio
and called headquarters and said, "I found someone who speaks
English." And they said, "Don't let him out of your sight,
were sending a jeep for him right away." So, I said, "Let
me show you the camp." So he talked to the sergeant in the second
tank and they went with me and walked through the camp.
The
first place I took him to was the kitchen and the kitchen was sparkling
clean. Absolutely. You could eat off the floor. We walked in there
and I showed the thing . Of course by now, I was a big Macher,
I was really a very important person with these two Americans there.
We walked in and so the cooks then put a little gruel in a plate for
each of the two sergeants and a spoon and the first one asked, "What
do we do with this?" I said, "you take your spoon, taste
it, tell them how good it is and then give it to me." So, they
did, and they each gave me their portion and I slurped up two full
portions of food, which was a tremendous feat of organisierung as
it was called. And then I took them around and I remember this so clearly.
We would see an arm lying here, and a leg and a head on the ground.
And he said, "What's going on?" And I told him that more
than likely these were fellow prisoners who had been very brutal to
the others and they had been torn apart body by body, leg by leg, arm
by arm, without the benefit of knifes. It just goes to show you how
strong people can be even though there bodies are weak when they have
the will and they want to work together. And he says, "I have
never seen anything like that", he said, "Been in the war
since August the year before, I've been into a lot of battles but we
have never seen anything like this. Take me back to the tanks. I've
had enough."
And
so I took him back. The reporter came in, "A jeep is on its way
to pick up the prisoner who speaks English." And pretty soon-
within an hour after I was liberated, when the tanks had rolled in
within one hour I was down in headquarters in the hotel, in Ebensee.
And that's my liberation
What
they had done then, across the street from the hotel there was an apartment,
and the captain – who died last year – he had ordered the
people – they had fifteen minutes to grab their things and get
the hell out. "You can't do that to us," they said. "Don't
tell me what we can do, the war's still going on. Out out out." And
so when I came, I was the first prisoner to arrive. After these people
had been forced to move out, they took me upstairs and said, "Here's
where you're going to live. And any clothes that you find hanging around
is yours."
By
the time the early evening came about – remember, we're in the
mountains, its the Austrian section of the Alps, basically, where you're
in, so you're several thousand feet up in the air, so when the sun
goes over the mountains, it gets dark very quickly – by that
time that early evening rolled about and dusk began to set in, there
were two teens, small boys in their early teens, and I remember a person
who had reported himself as having been a minister in one of the countries – either
Hungary or Romania or something – and by the time we were done
there were five people living in that apartment.
Then
some soldiers came and each of them carried a ten-in-one ration. A
ten-in-one was a cardboard box about this big/long, this wide, about
that deep, and they had metal strips around them to hold them in. They
were usually carried on top of tanks. And what ten-in-ones meant there
were ten rations in a box – either ten rations for one person,
or ten people having each one ration. So they brought five of those
boxes up, and each of us got a box like that.
Now
we went looking for tools to open the damn thing because we couldn't
open these things, there was all this food we couldn't get to it. So
finally somebody located either a screwdriver or something, and after
much prying, we found the trick in how to open these things.
Mind
you, these people – myself included – were all hungry and
starving. Sure, I had these two things from the kitchen, these two
soup tureens or whatever you call them, plates. So we finally open
these things, and in there, each of these packages is in wax paper,
you have to slice through it again. And there were cans in there of
pork and all kinds of, from a prisoner's point of view, delectable
items. And this guy wouldn't eat this and this guy wouldn't eat that.
All of a sudden they became selective! It was weird, myself included.
Cigarettes,
chewing gum. And we began to start trading among each other. Then we
realized we had a bath tub there, now the idea was cleaning because
we could take all of the garments that were there we could use. And
so lots were drawn as to who was first, second, third, fourth and fifth.
And by the time that I came around, and I went into the bathtub, that
water just turned black, I mean pure black. There was soap and towels
were there and cloth. I don't know how many times we had to go into – each
of us had to go into the tub in the ensuing days – to clean and
scrub out all those pores of dirt. And it was quite an exercise. And
we looked like idiots in all these clothes that were way too big for
us.
The
next day, on Monday, I was called to the headquarters and the captain
and the officers talked to me and I said to them, "I look silly
in these outfits, I mean there's no garments up there that fit me." And
so a call went out on the radio to all the G.I.'s that were there,
the smaller guys, "Bring your shirts, underwear, whatever you
have, shoes, because we gotta fit these guys into some proper clothes."
By
Monday evening I looked like a G.I., except a very skinny G.I. And
then I was told to sit in the front garden of the hotel and my job
would be to be as an interpreter between German or other languages,
and English. That was my liberation.
Are you still in contact with the American soldiers?
Yes.
We have become very good friends. In fact, I'm a member of their veterans
association now. I pay my annual dues, I go to their reunions. When
Pat was alive we used to go every year to their reunions, wherever
they were held. We had people come over here to spend time with us,
we would go to visit them. It took a long time to find them but we
did. And we became very good friends, yes indeed.
To this
day I am friends with the guys that liberated me. I go, whenever I
can, to the reunions every year. I am a member of the unit now, and
on Monday I called the sergeant who was in charge of the first tank,
who is still alive - the Sergeant of the second tank died a few years
ago - and I called him up on Monday and I said, “Bob, thank you
again.” Every year I call him and say thank you, and every time
we see each other. And they've been with me on tours to Europe that
I've organized. In 1990 I took two bus loads of the men of the Third
Cavalry, with their wives, to Europe. I organized the whole trip. We
took them to Ebensee, and to all the other places, and to this day
they keep saying that was the best thing that ever happened to us,
what you did.
After your liberation, how did you end up in the US?
One
of the colonels, whom I’d met after the liberation, got interested
in me. And on the night that he left Germany to come home to Buffalo,
NY, they had given him a farewell party at the Officers Club. I was
taking him to the railway station with one of his orderlies, and he
said, “I'm going to get you to the United States." I said, “Thank
you, Colonel, that's very nice of you.” The next day I saw another
officer, and I said, “Jesse, guess what Arthur told me last night?
He was so drunk he must not remember what he told me.” He said, “Why?” “He
said he told me he was going to get me into the United States.” He
said, “Max, sit down,” and I said, “What’s
the matter?” and he said, “Sit down.” And this was
a Captain. “Arthur and I have talked about this. Arthur wants
me to keep my eye on you. He's going to send you an affidavit to come
to the United States, and I am to be your guardian until you go.” I
said, “You are putting me on.”(Nobody used that phrase
in those days). He said, “No, Max.” Dead serious. And I
said, “But he was drunk.” And he said, “He may have
been drunk then, but when he was talking to me, he was dead sober.”
Sure
enough I got an affidavit later on. President Truman, I don't know
if you have studied that, but there were a lot of DP camps, displaced
persons camps, all over Germany and Austria, and in 1946, I believe
it was in January, President Truman gave a presidential order, an executive
order, that allowed 45,000 or 35,000 displaced persons to come to the
United States without having to go through the formality of immigration
procedures. And I am one of the lucky ones.
That's
how I got here. And I got here on the 30th of September, 1946, and
I retired from my architectural practice on the 30th of September 1986,
40 years after my arrival, having become a fully licensed architect,
in California, who has built his own practice, my wife and I, and still
going strong on 2nd street with about 20 employees.
What was the trip like coming to the US?
Horrible!
I was on a Liberty Ship and the last four or five days we were in the
middle of a storm. I stood there on the railing, puking, puking, puking,
thinking to myself, I'm going to drown in the middle of this ocean;
after all I've been through, I'm going to go down the drain here! And
it was horrible. But I arrived, and when I saw the Statue of Liberty
that morning after arriving, sitting in the harbor overnight, the Empire
State came out of a fog bank, that was hanging, that had descended
over New York City, and you could only see the tall buildings, and
it was like coming into a dream world. It was unbelievable! Whatever
we had left in our bottles of Cognac, we passed around and said, “Good
luck to us all!"
|
