Liberators still sharing memories of WWII
South Florida’s oldest veterans this spring are marking the climactic events that, 70 years ago, led to the end of World War II.
Some fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Some crossed the Rhine River and rejoiced when Germany surrendered. Some experienced the horror of stumbling upon Nazi concentration camps filled with the dead and dying.
The U.S. Army soldiers who first walked through the gates of these compounds in April and May 1945 became known as liberators. And their stories, which some of them refused to tell for decades, are among what soon will be the last eyewitness accounts to one of history’s most infamous genocides.
Albin Irzyk, then a major commanding the Third Army’s 8th Tank Battalion, had been in vicious, almost nonstop fighting through the winter and spring of 1945 when his unit rolled into Ohrdruf, in central Germany, in early April. He had no idea, he said, that a small subcamp of Buchenwald was secluded in the woods outside the pretty and prosperous town.
“I had seen men in my tanks burn to death. I
“Every time one of them dies, my heart breaks a little.” Rosanna Gatens, director of the Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education at Florida Atlantic University
had seen the medics come in with casualties. But killing in combat is part of war,” said Irzyk, 98, of West Palm Beach, who retired as a brigadier general. “To see this, and recognize humans did it to other humans. ... It was extermination.”
He remembers being anxious as he headed out of Ohrdruf in an open jeep on April 5, after hearing radio chatter the previous night about “finding bodies.” Driving through the woods, he came upon an open area with buildings nearby.
“I saw what looked like bundles of ragged clothing ... in an elliptical circle,” he said. “But when I got closer, I saw it wasn’t bundles. It was human beings.”
Each of the 75 or 80 bodies had a single bullet wound in the head or throat, he said. He then walked toward an outhouse-like shed, noticing the smell, and opened the door. It was filled with naked bodies, sprinkled with lime, some appearing to have been beaten.
Camp liberations by the U.S Army began April 3 and ended May 7, according to the U.S. Army and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Buchenwald, Dachau and Mauthausen were the largest compounds freed by American soldiers.
Organizations involved in Holocaust education, as well as those dedicated to preserving World War II history, are interested in liberators. Testimony from more than 200 of them are on file, along with those of survivors, at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Hollywood.
Histories of liberating Army divisions and their soldiers are on display and in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Liberators often are invited to speak at Yom HaShoah ceremonies in mid-April to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day. Educators say it has become increasingly diffi- cult to find liberators in recent years. Unlike Holocaust survivors, some of whom were children at the time, the youngest World War II veterans were 18 when they entered combat.
Rosanna Gatens, director of the Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, keeps track of liberators living in South Florida.
“So many of them aren’t here anymore,” she said with a sigh. “I am grateful that we were able to know their stories. Every time one of them dies, my heart breaks a little.”
While each liberator’s story is unique, Gatens has noticed some similarities. Most were with divisions that were moving quickly along country roads, capturing one town and moving to the next.
“Invariably, they will be able to describe the moment when they suddenly became aware something was wrong. They talk about noticing the smell,” she said. “They hadn’t expected to find concentration camps.”
George Katzman, who as an Army private first class was asked to go to Dachau as a translator, often gets requests to make presentations in April and May.
An Army photographer as well as rifleman, Katzman took disturbing blackand-white photos of the stacked piles of half-naked bodies and the unwashed, shrunken survivors his battalion found on April 29. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, touring Ohrdruf in early April, had encouraged photographs and first-hand reports so no one could later deny what the soldiers had seen.
After filing his photos with the Army, Katzman put his own copies in a box that he buried in his closet. He didn’t take it out until years later, when he read that a university professor was denying the Holocaust had taken place.
“I had to speak out,” he said. “There are too many deniers out there. I was one of thousands who saw what happened. But now there are few of us, and that bothers me.”
He tries to speak at events when he can, although, at age 95, “it takes a big chunk out of me,” said Katzman, a retired international relations professor from Aventura. “It makes me go back and revisit something I didn’t want to speak about, even to my family, for 30 years.”
Julius Eisenstein, 95, of Hallandale Beach, remembers the day the first Americans arrived at Dachau “like my second birthday.” A soldier handed him a pair of pants, as Eisenstein’s were almost rags and filled with lice. “It was a miracle for us,” he said.
In the years since, Eisenstein has met three former soldiers, including Katzman, who were at Dachau that morning.
“I felt like I was finding someone from my family,” said Eisenstein, who lost his parents and other relatives in the Holocaust. “They feel like my brothers.” dlade@tribpub.com or 954-356-4295