Page 85 of Hell to Pay
Dear Dad,
I have something to tell you that I wish I didn’t know myself. It’s taken me a couple days even to want to write it down. I’m not kidding myself that I can let it go, but … well, I’ll just tell you. Maybe don’t share this letter with Mom right away, though.
We were headed toward Munich a couple days ago, like I said, when we were ordered to take a detour, because there was a Nazi prison camp named Dachau north of town, and they wanted us to liberate it.
We smelled the place long before we saw it. Anybody who lived anywhere near would have smelled it, too, and there’s no mistaking that smell. You remember I told you that I couldn’t quite believethose rumors we were hearing about the things the Nazis have done? I believe them now. We’ve all seen a lot, but every man in the bunch was silent and sick within minutes.
I’m going to stay as calm as I can, though, and just put it down the way a reporter would.
I went in with the first group, the officers and men escorting General Linden, because I speak German and also some Yiddish, as you know. A fellow from the Swiss Red Cross and an SS officer sent for the purpose turned the camp over to the General, sort of a formal deal, and then we went on in. The SS guards were still there, and I can tell you, however much I hated the SS before, it wasn’t enough.
There were tens of thousands of prisoners standing around, men and women both, though you could hardly tell them apart, their heads shaved, dressed in filthy, ragged uniforms like striped pajamas. When they realized who we were and what we were here for, they turned on the SS men like the Furies from Hell, battering and beating them with fists and feet, throwing them into the moat and holding them underwater, even shooting them with their own weapons. Poor specimens all, and shockingly thin, but in enough numbers, there’s no saying what people can do. They rushed those guards in such a mob that the prisoners in front were pushed into the electrified fence and killed. Minutes from freedom, they were gone.
We had some work to do to restore order, and only managed it by firing over the heads of the crowd. Once we did, though, and things calmed down a little, the prisoners threw their arms around us in a sort of hysteria of relief. Crying, and saying, “Danke. Danke.” I don’t think they’d had much hope of surviving, and I guess it was hard to believe they had.
The condition of those prisoners was shocking enough, but there was much worse. About fifty boxcars were drawn up on the tracks near the camp, and from the smell, we realized pretty quickly what was inside them: men who’d died of hunger, thirst, and cold on the journey from “The East.” (What must the Russians be seeing?) Most were naked—“The others will have stripped the dead to try to stay warm,” I was told. The cars came from a place called Birkenau, in Poland, and they shipped those men all that way without food or water.
And when they arrived here, the guards, knowing we were coming,left them in the sealed cars to die.
We found one man still alive. One man, out of maybe 1,500.
Those were far from the only bodies we found. The guards, not having tortured their prisoners enough, had turned their machine guns on them at the end. For sport or for malice, who knows? We found thousands like that. The prisoners who survived had been forced to stack the bodies like so much cordwood.
Around this point, most of us were probably regretting having saved the guards from the prisoners’ revenge. And we didn’t even know how the place worked yet.
I guess I don’t have to tell you, Dad, how much I wished I didn’t have to translate what I heard yesterday. The Nazis had a system, you see. They starved and worked these people nearly to death, and when their usefulness was gone, they herded them into killing chambers, turned on poison gas, and waited until the screaming stopped. That’s what I was told. “You knew they were dead when the screaming stopped.” Then other prisoners hauled the bodies out and took them to the crematoria, which were set up on an industrial scale—the mass production of death. Even when they ran out of coalfor cremation, they kept up the gassing, and we found the bodies piled high, faces like skulls and limbs like sticks. The guards knew the war was lost—absolutely, they knew—and still they kept on! Like it was a job they had to finish.
And Dad—there are no kids here. Babies and children can’t work.
Those people we saw at the beginning? Those were the strong ones, because the barracks were filled with the starving and dying. The medical corps has come now and will do what they can, but I’m afraid some of them are beyond all hope.
I held myself together OK—it helps to have a job to do—until I heard Yiddish and spoke in return. The man stared at me, tears in his eyes, raised a shaking hand to touch my sleeve, and asked, “Are you a Jew?”
“Yes,” I said, and around me, grown men cried and touched me as if they were trying to convince themselves I was real. I don’t mind telling you that I could have cried then myself, except that this thing seems to run too deep for tears to help. Ever since, I’ve been almost numb, and I think lots of the guys feel the same way. Some things, a person isn’t meant to experience.
Dad. That man told me, “This is where the Jews went. To the camps. To the”—another word I didn’t understand, but have now learned—“to the gas chambers. The Jews of Europe—they all went to the camps. And then to the ovens.”
“The slave laborers, though,” I tried to say. “In the cities. In the munitions factories. Surely they?—”
“Toyt,”he said. “Dead. All dead.”
I could have shot every one of those guards myself right then. I really believe I could’ve done it.
But the question I can’t shake, the one I turn over in my brain morning and night—How does a country come to this? How does their humanity fall away? I’m German-American. So are you, only a generation removed from this place. How does the country of Bach and Brahms and Goethe turn to this? And how can I stand to be among people who allowed it to happen?
“Nicht Nazi,” those civilians kept insisting in every town, even as the swastika flags and armbands piled up. “Nicht Nazi.” Where do they think their neighbors went? On vacation?
Every man here understands now why we’re fighting. Nobody who’s seen this place or the others like it will ever forget. Some things are worth fighting for. Some are even worth dying for.
I’ve written this letter off and on since we made camp. They’re showing a movie tonight, some comedy with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. I guess they figure we need it. But I don’t think there’s been a movie made that can touch the soul-sickness that’s on me now.
You don’t have to answer all this if it’s too much to handle. But I hope you do. I’d sure like to hear from you.
Your son,
Joe
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