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January 21, 2005/Shevat 11 5765, Vol. 57, No. 21
'It was skin and bones': Soldiers remember camps
HEATHER ROBINSON
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
When they were young, they fought the Nazis, and then bore witness to the extreme depravity of which human beings are capable.
Now in or nearing their 80s and 90s, the Allied soldiers who liberated the concentration camps of Europe are recounting their memories of the horrors. Approaching the Jan. 27 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, many of those still living feel urgency to testify about what they encountered.
Anatoly Shapiro, 92, has never forgotten what he saw at Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. That was the day Shapiro, who says he was the first Russian officer to enter the infamous concentration camp, led his battalion to liberate it.
In an interview Jan. 15 in his apartment in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, his tall, thin form is upright and his eyes are clear as he describes, through a translator, the things he says he still sees in nightmares 60 years later.
"We saw German soldiers, and when we opened the gate, we saw one barrack, then the next, on and on for a hundred barracks," he recalled. "When I saw the people, it was skin and bones. They had no shoes, and it was freezing. They couldn't even turn their heads, they stood like dead people."
"I told them, 'The Russian army liberates you!' They couldn't understand. Some few who could touched our arms and said, 'Is it true? Is it real?'"
As a commanding officer, his task was to direct his men. Half his battalion - originally 900 men - had died in battle. But nothing they had endured had prepared them for what they found inside Auschwitz. His men pleaded with him to let them leave.
"The general told me, 'Have the soldiers go from barrack to barrack. Let them see what happened to the people,'" he recalled.
He ordered them to accompany him, and they went from barrack to barrack. He remembers, "In German, it said ... women. When I opened the barrack, I saw blood, dead people, and in between them, women still alive and naked.
"It stank; you couldn't stay a second. No one took the dead to a grave. It was unbelievable. The soldiers from my battalion asked me, 'Let us go. We can't stay. This is unbelievable.'
"We went to the barracks for men; it was the same as the barracks for the women.
"People in the barracks were naked, or (had) just thin clothes, no shoes, in the freezing cold; it was January. Only a few people could talk; they didn't have energy. But a few people were able to talk, so slowly. (They told us) once a day they got a little water, no bread, no anything. If someone died, they took the clothes, to get a little warmth, anywhere. They died from hunger and cold."
Shapiro remembers two barracks for children.
"Outside it said, 'kinder.' Inside one, there were only two children alive; all the others had been killed in gas chambers, or were in the 'hospital' where the Nazis performed medical experiments on them. When we went in, the children were screaming, 'We are not Jews!'"
It turned out that they really were Jewish children and were afraid they were about to be taken to the gas chambers.
Shapiro has been asked to speak after the president of Poland at the Jan. 27 ceremony in Krakow commemorating the liberation. As it turns out, he cannot be at the ceremony, but he feels it is crucial to speak about what he saw so that future generations will remember.
"If I had spoken of what I saw, I would have been sent to jail," he said. "Today, I never forget what happened in Auschwitz and in the war to our 6 million, and to all (those who died at the hands of the Nazis)."
Auschwitz was one of the first camps that the Allies reached, so the anniversary of its liberation prompts reflection by the liberators of other camps as well.
Marvin Josephs, 81, of Phoenix, helped liberate Ohrdruf and Buchenwald in Germany. As a master sergeant with Ace Corps headquarters, 3rd Army, Josephs' unit entered Buchenwald on April 12, 1945, with a military chaplain, Rabbi Herschel Schachter. "Rabbi Schachter announced with a bullhorn, 'You're free,'" and the survivors "came and tried to kiss his boots," Josephs said. "They were emaciated, starving."
Shortly after Josephs' unit arrived, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower ordered the entire U.S. 4th Armored Division to tour Buchenwald so they could see the Nazis' brutality.
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